The Summer Farm on Bell Mountain a sleep story for adults

There is a mountain in the north with a shelf of green pasture halfway up it, a wide flat step in the slope, as though somebody had cut one out on purpose about a thousand years ago and then thought better of doing any more. Grass grows on it, and low juniper, and in July it is full of small flowers. A brook comes down off the snow above and crosses it, and goes over the edge at the far side, and falls a long way into the valley below.

On that shelf there are three small buildings, all of them low and grey and built of logs, with roofs of turf so thick that grass grows on them, and flowers too. There is the hut, which is one room with a hearth in it. There is the byre, where the cows are milked. And there is the little dairy, which is built out over the brook itself, so that the water runs underneath the floor all day and all night and keeps everything inside it cold.

The woman who keeps the place in summer is named Marit, and she is about sixty. She first came up here at nine years old with her grandmother, to fetch and carry, and she has come up every summer since, with eight cows, in the middle of June, and gone down again with the cheeses in September. This is the story of one evening in the middle of July, in the part of the summer when the light barely goes at all.

That far north, at that time of year, the sun does not really set. It goes down behind the shoulder of the mountain in the late evening and travels along just underneath the edge of things, and everything it leaves behind stays lit: the sky, the snow up on the tops, the long thin clouds, the whole valley. The light only changes colour. It goes from white to gold, and from gold to apricot, and from apricot to a soft rose that lies on the mountains for hours.

Her grandson Jonas was up with her that summer, as he had been for two summers before. He was fourteen. He carried water, and split kindling, and mended what he could, and spent whatever was left of the day sitting on the step with a knife and a piece of birch, making a spoon, very slowly, and it was going to be a good spoon eventually.

And there was Bram, an old black and white dog with a grey face, who had one job in the evening, which was to walk out and fetch the cows, and who did it so well that he mostly did not need to do anything, because the cows had known the way for years and were already coming. After that he lay down across the doorway of the hut with his chin on his paws and stayed there until morning.

The day had been warm and clear and entirely still, the kind of day that is rare up there and remembered all winter. In the afternoon the air over the pasture had been full of small insects going up and down in columns of light, and bees in the clover, and the cows had stood in the shade under the rock at the top of the shelf with their eyes half shut, flicking their ears, doing nothing whatever about anything.

By early evening the heat had softened and the air had begun to move, a light steady breath coming down off the snow above, cool and clean and smelling of rock and grass. It went over the pasture and the grass leaned all one way and came back, and the flowers on the roof of the hut nodded, and it went on down the mountain and out over the valley, where there was nothing to stop it for forty miles.

The valley itself lay a long way down, so far that the river in the bottom of it was a bright thread, and the farms along the river were small squares of green and dark green, and the roads between them were pale lines with nothing moving on them. From the edge of the shelf everything down there looked slow and orderly and finished for the day, the way a place does when it is seen from high above.

There were four things to do that evening, and they were the same four things as every evening. The cows brought in and milked. The milk carried over to the dairy. The kettle of whey set on the fire and stirred until it turned. And the bells taken off and hung on their nail. After that there was nothing to do until half past five in the morning, and the whole long light evening was hers to sit in.

The cows began to come in on their own, as they always did, before anybody called them. They had been up at the top of the shelf all afternoon and they came down in a loose line along the path they had worn into the hillside themselves over many summers, a narrow brown groove through the grass, single file, at the speed of animals who have somewhere to be and no interest in getting there quickly.

Each of them had a bell on a wide leather collar, and as they came down the hill the bells went with them, eight of them, all slightly different, clonking and tonking at the pace of eight sets of shoulders going up and down, never in time with each other, never quite out of time either. It is one of the oldest sounds in the mountains, and one of the most comfortable, and it means, more or less, that everything is where it should be.

Bram went out anyway, out of professional pride, and walked along beside them at the back with his tail going slowly, and looked up at them now and then. The cows took no notice of him at all. Cows and dogs who have worked together for years arrive at an understanding, and the understanding in this case was that Bram was in charge and the cows would do as they liked, and both parties were satisfied.