The footbridge over the beck went out in the September floods, and the flock stood on the wrong side of the water for an hour, and the ewe that took them across had not used the ford since she was a lamb. The beck is nothing most of the year. In spate it is a brown rope twenty feet across that would take a sheep to the lake. The bridge is two railway sleepers with a rail, and the farmer put it in five years ago to save the flock a wet crossing, and the flock has used it every day since and had forgotten there was any other way over. The flood took it on a Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning the water was down to a walk and the sleepers were in a field two miles away, and thirty ewes who needed to be on the far side for the fresh grass were stood on the near bank, looking at the place where the bridge used to be, with the particular blankness a sheep wears when the world has not done what it did yesterday. The farmer was below them on the quad and could not get up to them for the water. He watched. Doris walked out of the group. She went upstream. Two hundred yards, along the bank, past two places where the water looked shallower than it was, and she did not stop at either of them. She stopped where the beck goes wide over a shelf of flat rock, where you cannot see from the bank that it is shallow, and she walked in, and the water came to her knees and no higher, and she crossed, and stood on the far side, and turned round. The flock looked at her. Then they went upstream, and crossed where she had crossed, in a line, in the same place, one after another, with the water to their knees. The farmer sat on the quad. That shelf is the old ford. It is where his father crossed the flock before the bridge, and where his father's father did, and the farmer himself has not put a sheep over it in five years because he built a bridge and the bridge was easier. Doris was a lamb at foot the last spring the ford was used. She crossed it then, behind her mother, half a dozen times in a season, and then there was a bridge, and she did not go near it again for five years. She did not look for it on Wednesday. She went to it. The way you go to a light switch in a house you lived in as a child. A hefted ewe carries her ground in her head, and the map is not what she walked last week, it is what she has ever walked, and it does not fade. The young ewes stood at a broken bridge because the bridge was all they knew. The old one had been across that beck before there was a bridge, and had kept the crossing, unused, for five years, against the day it was needed. The farmer is not rebuilding the bridge. He says the ford is still there and it has a better foreman.