How does she do it? Scratching out words and numbers and talking to him at the same time? 

Eliyahu bends down to examine the ewe; he holds her face still and looks at her eyes, then opens her mouth to examine her teeth. He frowns; it is as he thought. A slight froth foams around the mouth and is it the light, or are the ewe’s eyes dull?

He releases the sheep, and it wanders away. He watches. It pulls at a few stalks of grass, but does not graze fully as it should. Another animal approaches, and the ewe ducks her head and raises it again, warning: Do not come close. He does not know what is wrong, but there is something, he feels it in his bones.

He leaves the sheep with the boy who helps during the day, and returns to the town, where he walks down the narrow alleyway where the physician lives. The doctor is a man from Italy, with a nervous twitch and a stammer. No one uses him for big cases: the doctor from Damascus comes all the way once every month or two, paid for by rich Jews of Alexandria. But a doctor knows about blood and the body and muscles and the heart. Maybe he can advise him about the sheep.

He raps sharply at the front door, and the doctor’s wife answers, a paper in hand.

“Here are the day’s calls,” she tells him. “Memorize the first five, try out each address in turn, and then if you do not find him, come back for the continuation of the list.”

Eliyahu glances up at the sky. The sun is already high. “Surely he will be up to his third or fourth visit of the day, by now.”

The woman shakes her head. “He stays with each ailing soul as long as they need. There is no knowing where he might be.”

“But—”

“Health is life and life is above time.”

She sets her lips together. It is something she has surely said many times over. Eliyahu takes one more look at the list, committing the names and places to memory, then turns to leave.

Eliyahu finds the doctor not at the first patient, but at the second. Through the front door, he sees the doctor hold up a large stick.

“I made this myself,” he says to a little boy, who has a large bandage on his leg. The stick has a wide handle, which he wraps in a blanket. “If you do not have enough blankets, then send to my wife and she will give you another for we keep a supply at home.”

“For people who are ailing?”

“Ailing, yes. And also for people who are cold.”