At first he thought he was sick. Anel Čolaković, nineteen, a goatherd on Vlašić, would not even eat the kajmak his mother sent by bus from Jajce, and at night he lay in the shepherds' hut listening to the bells as if he were hearing them for the first time. He needed no doctor, he told himself, it just had to pass. His mother called every evening to ask if he was warm, and he said he was, though he did not know.
It began in June, at the spring below the ridge. A girl came there with sheep from a village on the other side of the mountain, because that year the drought had dried up every other stream. The flocks mixed at the trough, and the two of them separated them without a word. Once he handed her a stick she had dropped, and the touch lasted longer than the stick needed. He learned her name only in the third week, from a sheep farmer: Admira Zeković. That night he did not sleep an hour. The water at the spring was so cold it made his hands ache, and still he stayed in it a long time.
Below the hut Atif kept bees, a neighbor of seventy who had seen four times as many summers as Anel. Anel told him everything, red to the ears, as if confessing a theft. Atif laughed until he coughed. "You're not sick, son. Look at the beech. In spring it puts out a bud and doesn't know why. In summer it is heavy with its own leaves. In autumn it lets them go, and only then does it know what it had. You are in the bud now." Anel asked what to do, and the bees hummed around them as if listening. "Tell her your name. Start with that."
The next day he went down to the spring with a well rehearsed sentence and lost it the moment he saw her. Instead of his name, he heard himself ask: "Does something hurt you here too?" He pointed at his chest. Admira looked at him as if he had spoken an unknown language, and then her face closed. "You're making fun of me," she said, turned her sheep around and left for the other side of the ridge.
She was gone for two days. Anel sat by the trough, throwing pebbles into the water, while two of his goats wandered into someone else's meadow. Atif came with a jar of honey, heard him out and sighed. "You don't ask a woman if she's sick. You tell her you're glad when she comes. Nothing more, nothing less."
On the third day Admira stood on the far side of the trough, her sheep drinking, and did not look at him. Anel crossed the water, wet to the knees. "I'm Anel," he said. "I'm glad when you come." She was silent for a long time. "Admira," she said at last. Then, more quietly: "My aunt has been saying I'm sick since last week. I told her I'm not." She laughed first, and no one could say which lasted longer, the smile or the silence that followed.
They sat on a flat stone while the flocks drank beside them. There was no kiss and no promise, only a hand that Anel awkwardly placed next to hers, and hers, which found it. When the flocks started down in September, Admira stopped at the end of the gravel road. "We have two mountains and one bus left," she said. "Two buses," Anel corrected her. "But I'll take both."