The snow lingered late. April was round the corner, yet the air was as sharp as salt in a cut. Snow crusted bracken with a fleeting white fleece, and blurred the lines where worn grass turned to grey stone. Through the flurries, a small hunched figure trudged well-remembered pathways through the blanketed fields, a pair of collies circling her like satellites.

 

The woman reached up to adjust the patterned scarf tied about her head, tucking away a stray strand of steely hair that whipped in the wind, then clicked her tongue for the dogs. The older one moved like a thought given form. The young one danced beside her boots, eager for attention. The shepherdess set her teeth and pressed on through the snow.

 

She’d counted the lambs twice this evening, but one ewe paced the low field, unsettled. A little one was missing, no more than a day on its legs. Light was fading fast, but the shepherdess couldn’t rest. The night’s frost could gut a lamb as quick as a raven’s beak.

 

The dogs circled the rise now, the older one moving low and purposeful, the younger one snapping at flakes. She made for the gate slowly, stick in hand. Her late husband had carved it from a hazel switch, and she liked to think he was still keeping her steady. Her knees protested that she wasn’t thirty, or even sixty any more, but she knew the ruts and furrows of this hill by heart, her boots all but worn to the shape of it.

 

The path climbed through a copse of old birch trees, copper leaves trembling in the wind. The shepherdess smiled. As a child, she’d used that track to stay out of sight of the Laird’s men, red squirrels scattering like sparks as she scrambled down the hill.

 

Her brother had led the way then, scrumping apples and carving whistles, getting her into trouble. He was bigger, louder, and quick with a pea shooter. He’d enlisted when she was just fourteen, and died only three years later - but sometimes she swore she still heard his whistle, curling through the copse.

 

A bark broke her concentration: singular, low and urgent. The dogs had found something. Faint tracks, barely a waver through the powder, half-erased by a gust. She followed them to where the woods touched the slope, well-trained eyes scanning every dip and tussock.

 

There, under a half-fallen fence post, was the lamb. Curled like a question mark, sides rising slow, its black-smudged nose dusted with ice. The shepherdess didn’t speak, she just knelt. Knelt like she’d done every Sunday in the tiny whitewashed mission house, its aisle barely wide enough to walk two abreast.

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She loved the singing and the solace of it all, but she knew that her true place of worship was here - in the hostile hills, on the borders between life and death. As ready a place as any to make peace with the will of God.

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Her joints creaked as she crouched, but her hands were sure as she lifted the lamb. It was too weak to bleat, but its heart fluttered like a moth as she slid its limp body into her coat. She nestled it in the thick folds of her old grey jumper, knitted with fleece from her own flock. She hoped that the lamb would respond to the lingering lanolin scent, the soft and scratchy fibres, and know that it was home.

 

The dogs waited a short way off. The older one stood alert, tail still. The younger looked from lamb to woman, uncertain.

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“Come on, then,” she murmured, “we’ll take the shortcut, aye?”

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The young dog trotted ahead, tail high. The old dog stayed at its mistress’s heels, steady and quiet, as if it knew it was guarding precious cargo. The wind hissed through the birch trees above, and snow fell silent as ash. A raven called, deep and raw, and the shepherdess instinctively pulled the lamb closer.

 

She reached the byre just as the light began to shift. Her elbows were locked and stiff from holding the little creature so long. The ewe moaned from inside, stamping against the straw-strewn floor. The shepherdess set the lamb down, rubbed it hard with sackcloth, and blew into its nostrils. Life flickered there, thin, but stubborn.

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“Good,” she said softly. “There’s my wee girl.”

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She stayed until it suckled. Watched the ewe nudge it closer, sides still heaving with the day’s primal panic. The shepherdess’s body ached too. Her feet were cold and cramped in their boots. But the lamb suckled, and that was enough.

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Outside, the snow had thinned. Dusk was coming on, lilac and gold over the loch. Across the field smoke curled from her chimney, slow and certain above the corrugated roof. Supper would be ready soon, and her boys back from the far hills. She leaned on the byre door and watched her breath rise.

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She thought of the things she had kept alive here: so many sheep, so many stories. She breathed into her hands again. They smelled of wool and milk, the brassy tang of cold. Hands that had birthed lambs, brought up bairns, buried loved ones, stirred soup and split logs. She flexed her fingers and heard them crack, then pushed them deep into her pockets.

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The lamb would live. And tomorrow, the sun would rise over the loch, tinting the snow a startling pink. She’d be up long before then, of course. There was lambing to be done. And after that some other soul would need saving, or a fence would need fixing. The world didn’t ask much more. Just that you answered the cry when it came.

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The old dog settled, leaning warm against her leg. The young dog lay down, chin on her paws. They knew that the day’s work was done.

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“Let’s go home, shall we?” the shepherdess said.