The Second Hut on Chkhutnieri

About

For twenty-two days in August and September, Nino Maisuradze moves 9,400 sheep down off the high pasture at Ushguli, across the Chkhutnieri pass at 2,840 metres, into four valleys, and her word on that movement is the only word there is. She is thirty-eight, an animal health technician, and she has two certificates in her bag: one for the Ushguli communal flock and one for eleven hundred head belonging to a family the land commission erased from the register in 1991. The second certificate is why this year's drive exists. She has known that since the second of August and the reader does not. Around her: Gia Beridze, forty-one, a guide who can hold a route in his head and who has wanted her for two years, and whose own father is the man who taught him to read a pass off a map and got three flocks onto a road for it; Rusudan Maisuradze, sixty-six, her mother, who kept the count in a school exercise book for twenty-two years before Nino did; Tamaz Gelashvili, forty-five, the district veterinary surgeon out of Mestia who signed Nino's certificate because her hands shook and he knew they would; Irakli Chkhaidze, fifty-two, chairman of the community council, who has to certify a count and has not slept; and Tamuna Gurieli, twenty-four, who has been learning the routes since she could walk so that she can leave. Desire runs on logistics. Gia can route the flock over the Chkhutnieri and nobody else can. Nino can sign the certificate and nobody else can. If she writes one name, he is finished; if he writes one name, she is. They say the terms out loud in a drying hut before either of them touches anything, because they are thirty-eight and forty-one and have been circling this for two years and neither of them is going to pretend afterwards. The first night ends at 01:40 because she is listening for a count of nine thousand and hearing nine thousand. The second night she uses the word they agreed on, once, and he stops in the middle of a sentence and does not ask her why. The count is the plot, and it is wrong twice. Eleven hundred animals are on no record at all, and counting them would make them real. And there is a second count - Rusudan's, kept in an exercise book, four hundred lower than Nino's - because in 1994 the valley quietly agreed to stop counting its own animals so the pasture would not be over-grazed. It was not fraud. It was the only thing that kept Chkhutnieri alive for thirty years, and it is why the pasture is dying now. On the fourth morning at 06:12 a fourteen-year-old ewe called Belda steps over a six-inch lip on wet slate and is gone before the noise arrives. Nino reads the three hundred and forty-nine animals still on the shoulder out loud, in order, so that they are on a record instead of in her head, to a shepherd of twenty-four who has asked all her life to be the one who says a number. Five endings differ in which number ends up in whose hand: the true count, eleven hundred, her mother's number, the road in November, or nine thousand. None of them gives back the animal that went off the rock at 06:12, which comes down before any of them, on a road nobody below is counting.

Cast

• N Nino Maisuradze protagonist; animal health technician, Upper Svaneti no portrait yet
• G Gia Beridze guide; the only man licensed to read the Chkhutnieri no portrait yet
• R Rusudan Maisuradze Nino's mother; technician for twenty-two years before her no portrait yet
• T Tamaz Gelashvili district veterinary surgeon, Mestia no portrait yet
• I Irakli Chkhaidze chairman of the community council no portrait yet
• T Tamuna Gurieli shepherd, four seasons; counts by ear no portrait yet
• B Bidzina Gurieli Tamuna's uncle; a holding deregistered in 1991 no portrait yet
• S Sofiko Tsereteli clerk of Holy Trinity, Mestia; reads the count no portrait yet
• E Erekle Iashvili chairman of the pasture committee; kept a count of his own since 2004 no portrait yet
• B Beka Dzidzaria Nino's neighbour in Mestia no portrait yet
• T Tapir clerk at the tax office above the works yard no portrait yet
• G Giorgi Kapanadze officer of the district veterinary service no portrait yet
• T The archivist keeps the district archive in a building with a blue door no portrait yet
• N Nino's council clerk clerk of the community council office in Mestia no portrait yet