Pencil-drawn knotwork swirl design

The snow came off the top of the pass on Tuesday, all at once, the way it does when the wind turns round. I walked up to the cairn at the Spike to see whether the old guide rope had survived the winter. It had, mostly. Your knot is still on the tall stone where the path doubles back, the one you showed me the summer you left, with its long tapering tail that you said would shed rain like a heron's neck.

The centre is still tight. Two lines go through one another there and come out on the wrong side of each other, and I spent a good half hour with my glove off trying to find where the first one began. You always said that was the point. Nothing in it starts or stops. The bottom curl, the one that hangs over the drop like a question nobody wants to answer, has frayed a little but it is holding, which is more than I can say for the mule-driver's cousin who tried to copy it last spring and lost a whole pack of salt.

A woman came up the path on Thursday with a folded sheet of paper in her coat. It was a pencil drawing, grey and soft at the edges, and she asked me if I knew what it meant. Her grandfather had drawn it from memory the year he came over the pass, she said, and nobody in the valley could tell her what the knot was called. I told her it had no name, only a shape, and that the shape was the thing you could trust. She folded the paper again and went down without buying anything.

I have left a fresh coil at the cairn, tied to your knot the way you taught me, so that whoever comes up next will find the line still running. The light is going, and the first flakes are coming down past the Spike. I will be at the inn by dark. Come up when the road opens and tell me yourself how it is done.

Yours through the knot, Anna