He did not understand. He flattened himself against the boards by the door. And from the dark behind him, from the third stall, Albin Kasper whistled.
It was a whistle Arne had heard a thousand times and never once listened to. Two notes, high and then falling, sharp at the end. He had heard it across the hay meadow on summer evenings, coming up from the creek. He had heard it from the kitchen window, under the noise of the radio, and the sound of the sheep moving. It was Ilse's whistle. It was the whistle she had used to send Fly away to the right, around the back of the flock. Away to me, she had called it. He had not heard it since the spring of 1983, and it went through him now in the dark like a nail.
Fly was gone from his side.
He heard her go. He heard her nails scrabble once on the floor of the alley and then nothing, because a working dog goes silent, and then he heard the heifers begin to move. A shuffle. A grunt. The heavy knock of a hip against a board. Albin whistled again, a different whistle, a long flat note that rose at the end, and the sound of the heifers came toward him, and he pressed himself into the wall and felt them go by, one, two, a rush of heat and hide and breath a foot from his face, the floor shaking with them, three, four, out the door into the gray seething dark of the pen, five, six, and one balked, he heard her turn and snort, and Fly was there, a quick sharp bark like a snapped stick, and the heifer went, seven, eight, nine, ten. And then Fly came back and sat down on his boot.
Arne put his hand on her head. He could not say anything.
"Is that all of them?" said Albin, out of the dark.
"Ten." His voice did not work properly. "That's ten."
"Then come here. And bring the bar off that post. I heard you find it."
He took the bar down and found the gate of the third stall with his hand, and went in, and knelt in the straw.