It gets dark in the mountains above Chimyon at about eight in September, and it gets dark quickly. At ten past eight the teacher counted twenty-one heads and found twenty.
Jasur was fourteen and he had been at the back of the line an hour before.
"Nobody moves alone. You must stay in threes," the teacher said, and then, quietly, to the two drivers: "He must be tired by now. He must be cold."
The guesses started, and every one of them had a different weight.
"He could be up on the top road."
"He can't be up there — his rucksack is here, on this stone."
"He might be at the bus. Or he may be asleep somewhere under the trees."
"He should be at the bus. That is where we told everybody to wait."
The drivers shouted his name into the dark for twenty minutes and the mountain gave it back to them. Somebody said the sentence that everybody was thinking: "He should have told one of us."
Then Dilnoza, who is twelve and his sister, pulled the teacher's sleeve.
"He can't have gone up," she said. "He is afraid of the ridge — he wouldn't walk along it even in the daytime. And he must be near water. He gave his bottle to Sherbek at four o'clock, so he has no water. He can't go two hours without water."
Nobody had thought about the bottle.
They found him at the spring below the second bend, sitting with his shoes off and one swollen ankle, forty minutes later. He had twisted it, and he had come down to the water on purpose, because water goes down and down leads to a road.
Twenty people guessed that evening. The best deduction in the group came from the smallest person in it, and it was not luck: she was the only one who knew about the bottle.