Small triangle tattoo on upper arm

The theodolite froze again this morning, so I spent the first hour breathing on its brass like a fool warming a bird's egg. Mr Corran says instruments do not care for weather and neither should I, but he is sixty and his hands have stopped shaking, which I take to mean he has stopped feeling the cold at all. We have three stations to fix before the snow shuts the tops. Two are cairns already built. The third is a small triangle of dots scratched into a slab of grit on Hob's Knott, one dot at each corner and one in the middle where the instrument sits. Mr Corran calls it the mark. I call it the only tidy thing I have seen since Carlisle.

We took the bearing to the spire at Alston, forty miles off in the haze, and the reading came back true to within two seconds of arc. He wrote it in the field book without a word, then looked at me over his spectacles as if I had passed an examination I had not known I was sitting. I did not tell him the dot in the middle had been fresher than the others when we arrived. Somebody had been up here before us with a nail and a steady hand.

This afternoon I went back alone to look. There was a sixth dot beside the mark, very small, pressed in with the point of a sheep's bone. A shepherd's boy from Garrigill must have climbed up to see what the men with the brass were doing. I stood there a long while, thinking of him counting the corners and wanting to be counted too.

I have left it where it is. The map can carry one kindness that does not appear on any sheet. Write soon, and tell the baby the hills are very big and very cold.

Your loving husband, Tom