Geometric mountain and laurel on upper back

Every spring the island folk argued about the peak, Ben Dorran, because from the harbour it had three shoulders and from the ferry it had only one. Nobody could agree on its shape. So old Iain Tulloch, who mended nets and claimed he could fold a sheet of paper into anything, said he would make the mountain true. He cut a square from the back of a ledger, creased it corner to corner, and folded until the peak stood up as sharp as a gutting knife.

Morag, his neighbour's girl, laughed at him. She said a fold was a lie if you could not walk it. So she carried the paper up the hill in the rain, and every time the wind pulled a corner loose she pinned it with a stone, and by evening she had walked every plane of it on her own two feet. The laurel she brought down was the only green thing on the slope, pinched from the sheltered wall below the cairn, and she tied it round the base of the paper like a prize for the walking.

Iain looked at the wet paper for a long time. "It's right," he said. "Every ridge of it is where the ground is." She hung it above the range, and the next winter the whole island learned to read the weather from its lines. Where the light crossed the middle plane, the herring would come. Where the shadow sat on the left shoulder, the boats stayed in. Morag took the paper with her when she left for the mainland, folded small in her coat, and I'm told it is still in a drawer in Glasgow, creased soft as cloth, the leaves gone pale at the tips from being held.