At the watershed, the contract expired.
Kapiton took out the official paper, spread it on the plane-table case and, as regulations required, offered to extend the contract: the same pay and provisions, the new term lasting until the eastern register was complete.
Aiga heard him out. Then she said:
"No."
Frol grunted: the pay was generous.
"Are you leaving for good?" Kapiton asked.
"I stay," Aiga said. "Not hired. No need feed me, no need pay me. I walk beside you and watch what goes onto your sheet. Want to say word, I say it. Want to leave, I leave."
"That is not permitted. What will you be with the party?"
"A witness," Aiga said.
The word came from the regulations: Kapiton himself had read it by the warehouse. A marker without a local witness is blind. He gave Aiga the long look of a man caught by his own rule and waved a hand. Then he told Zotik to record it: local witness attached to the party, without provisions.
Zotik wrote it down.
The next morning Aiga woke Prokop before first light.
"We go. I told Kapiton we check the ice fields. We come back by night."
"Where?"
"A day's journey."
They went without a sheet, compass or chain. Without the familiar case, Prokop did not know what to do with his hands. But without the plane table, for the first time he looked around him instead of at the line they meant to follow.
Aiga led the way and named the places.
"Hill Where-We-Waited-for-the-Wind. Below it crust holds until sun is high, after that you fall through. Rotten Water Stream: cannot drink, reindeer will not drink, watch the reindeer. Seven Smokes Pinewood: reindeer moss, old camps, firewood for seven fires."
Every name told them something essential: where to find water and fodder, what to beware of. This way of remembering the land felt familiar to Prokop. In another life he had seen terrain from above, divided into precise lines and coordinates. Here a distance might be given only approximately, but the name told you without fail where the people and reindeer could drink.
At midday, on the ridge, Aiga stopped.
"Now you," she said. "Lead us back. By the names."
Prokop looked around. The snow, the hills and the pinewood all seemed alike, white and blue. He closed his eyes and reconstructed the sequence of names: Seven Smokes, Rotten Water, Where-We-Waited-for-the-Wind. Each name brought back the signs of the place and the direction he needed.
He went wrong once, at Rotten Water.
The stream made a loop, and Prokop decided to shorten the way across the saddle, as he would have done when working from an ordinary map. After twenty paces he noticed that Aiga had not followed. She had stayed in silence where the stream turned.
He went back and followed her gaze. Below the saddle, the snow had sagged visibly: there was emptiness beneath it.
"Stream's name is Rotten Water," Aiga said. "Not water rotten. Bank. Name remembers for you. But your straight line remembers nothing. It has no memory, only length."
After that he led by the names and took no more shortcuts.
At the last hill, with dusk already falling, she said:
"Now you understand what I give away when I tell you a name?"
"A day belonging to your clan."
"A day's journey. We have nothing more precious."
A fire was burning in camp, and Zotik, as he did every evening, was making a fair copy of the day's notes. Prokop sat down beside him to warm himself and glanced involuntarily at the copy: even lines, clean margins, careful letters.
He found the correction made after the blind marker, not out of pride, but to check the reference point.
The correction was there. The old line had been struck through and the new one entered, exactly as it had been in the field.
There was no name beneath the correction.
Prokop remembered clearly that the draft had said: porter P. Vershinin. In the fair copy the correction was anonymous, as though no one had discovered the error and no one was responsible for the new entry.
"Zotik. Where is the name?"
Zotik raised his head from the journal. His face was tired and composed.
"Name is in draft. Fair copy is written in register form: corrections are entered in total count. Register office orders it, that is how I was taught."
He even took out a printed specimen of the register form. There, too, a corrected line was left without a name. A note at the bottom said: specimen prepared by the register office, the same office that supplied the surveyors with ready-made wording.
Prokop read it and said nothing. That was how Zotik had been taught, and there was nothing to blame him for.
Prokop looked at the smooth line and could not explain exactly what troubled him. Everything was correct: the same reference point, the same figures. Only the name had vanished, and a name was not a figure; its absence caused no discrepancy.
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