Amaia Leaves a Stone in the Cave and Hears a Sign from the Forest

Amaia Leaves a Stone in the Cave and Hears a Sign from the Forest marks the point at which an unsettling investigation becomes a direct, bodily encounter with the folklore Amaia has studied. She makes a small offering at a remote cave, then witnesses the sheep respond to a sound she cannot explain. The episode leaves its cause uncertain, but not its effect: fear overwhelms her, and the forest seems to answer a ritual she had tried to treat as harmless.

The Stone and the Journey

After breakfast and a morning of play, Ibai grows sleepy, and James takes care of him. Amaia kisses them goodbye, takes leave of her aunt, and heads out. Already in the car, she suddenly remembers something, switches off the ignition, and returns to the house entrance. She studies the paving until she finds two or three loose pebbles at its edge, takes one, and puts it in her pocket. The pause makes the stone a deliberate link between home and the place she intends to visit.

As she drives out of Elizondo, the tension she has been holding becomes evident in her body. Her hands grip the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles whiten; despite the winter cold, her palms sweat, and she wipes them on her trousers. This is not the alertness she associates with the ordinary danger of police work. It is an older, intimate fear, one she had managed to keep at bay over the past year and now feels reclaiming its ground. The prospect that the opening she had made in her life is closing again saddens her, for herself and for the other girl. Anger follows: she refuses to remain a child governed by the forces that once held power over them.

The road takes her through the Baztán Valley, where she encounters a group of Pottoka horses and stops. Later, she reaches the clearing and stream where a mysterious young woman had approached her before. The watercourse is now occupied by a large flock of sheep. Their shepherd sits at a distance on a rock; Amaia raises a hand, and he returns the greeting. His presence reassures her as she crosses a small rise over the stream and climbs toward the hill on a rough natural stairway of old stones.

The Offering at La dama

Amaia first reaches the rough plateau where James and her sister had waited on an earlier visit. The path upward appears more open than before, as if someone has recently passed, though brambles and gorse still threaten to tear at her. As she continues, that impression grows stronger. The site itself is empty, to her slight surprise and relief: the cave opens low in the mountainside, while the striking rock formation known as La dama rises about three metres, its feminine shapes facing the valley. On the flat-topped rock nearby, more than a dozen small stones have been arranged in rows like a primitive checkerboard.

She recognizes that these are not stones collected from the path but offerings brought there for La dama. The discovery makes her notice that she, too, is participating. She remembers the instruction attached to the practice: the stone is to be brought from home, because La dama prefers it that way. Amaia wonders how many people throughout the valley may have received the emails, and whether the messages might be no more than a chain-letter promise of good fortune or protection from a curse. Her doubts remain intact, but they do not prevent her from acting.

Amaia has no intention of forwarding the emails. Still, she decides that leaving a stone cannot harm anyone. She looks around as though expecting hidden cameras or photographers ready to mock a supposedly credulous inspector. The pebble bears a remnant of cement from the place where it had been fixed in the doorway; she tries unsuccessfully to scrape it away with a fingernail. Then she places the stone in one of the rows, completing it. The act is modest, almost embarrassed, but it carries her from observing the custom to taking part in it.

She approaches the cave in a straight line, shines her flashlight inside, and finds no source for the sweet scent of flowers drifting out. The cave is otherwise empty except for a bowl of fresh apples and a few coins thrown inside. When she descends, the stones remain in their rows. Her private expectation that the offering might produce some visible response is met by nothing she can see; she continues down past the rock table and through the undergrowth to the stream. The pastoral scene, with its green rocks, ferns, white foam, and peacefully grazing flock, seems to dispel the possibility that the mysterious young woman will appear. Amaia looks once more toward Mari Hill, a little disappointed, though she cannot say what she had expected to find.

The Whistle and the Flock

The quiet breaks when the sheep simultaneously stop drinking and grazing and raise their heads. Amaia freezes to listen. The animals then tilt their heads together, and their bells make a single, unified sound, like an immense gong. A deep silence follows, cut through by a strong whistle that crosses the field. The sheep return to feeding and drinking, but the sound has already changed the meaning of the scene: the flock's coordinated response seems to precede or accompany something that Amaia herself can hear only after the silence.

A chill runs down her back. She is certain that she both heard the whistle and saw the animals' response. Her memory supplies the account of the basajaun by the anthropologist Barandiarán, whom she studied while investigating the basajaun case a year earlier. In that account, the forest being announces its presence to humans with whistles that carry across the valley, while animals recognize it without needing the sound and greet it by ringing their bells together once. The details she has just witnessed match the remembered description with unnerving precision. The scene does not establish what caused the whistle; instead, it makes the folklore impossible for Amaia to keep at a comfortable distance as mere study.

Flight and Aftermath

Amaia runs among the trees in panic, while an inner voice urges her to stop and she answers herself that she does not care. The movement recalls her childhood games in the cemetery, when running had been the only thing she could do. She crosses the forest path with her gun in her hand. At the far end, near a closed farmhouse, she looks back despite every instinct of caution; no one is there. She hears only her own gasping. Noticing the weapon, she opens her down jacket and hides her hand inside, though she has not yet decided to put it away.

As she crosses the field and bridge, fear gives way to monumental anger. When she reaches the car, the Pottoka horses she had seen earlier have disappeared, leaving steaming heaps of droppings on the road. The ordinary trace of their presence sharpens the scene's unexplained absence without clarifying it. Amaia drives off with her heart still racing and strikes the steering wheel, furious at the accumulation of strange events in a life already burdened by private problems and the demands of homicide work.

The episode therefore turns on a collision between skepticism and involuntary recognition. Amaia doubts the emails, resists the idea that she is credulous, and expects the stones to remain only stones; yet she has carried one from her doorstep to La dama and witnessed the very pattern described in her research. Her response is not calm belief but flight, self-reproach, and anger. The forest's signal leaves her with no proof she can explain, only a precise correspondence between folklore, the animals' behavior, and the sound that crossed the valley.