Botir was seventy years old. He had no watch, no phone and no television. He had four hundred sheep and the sky.
On a Tuesday in April he walked down to the village and knocked on the first door.
"Take your animals up the hill," he said. "It is going to rain for three days. The stream is going to come into these houses."
The sky was blue. People laughed at him in their doorways.
"How do you know, old man? Are you going to read the clouds for us?"
"The ants left the low ground yesterday," Botir said. "The birds are building their nests high. My sheep didn't drink this morning. And my knee hurts."
Two families listened to him. His own, and a woman with three children.
The rain started that night. It rained on Wednesday. It rained on Thursday. On Friday morning the stream behind the school was a brown river, and it was inside the low houses.
Nobody died. But sixteen families slept in the school for a month, and the village lost two hundred animals.
Botir's grandson was eleven that April. He is twenty-six now, and he works at the weather station in the city, with three computers and a wall of maps.
People often ask him why he chose this work.
"My grandfather read the sky with his knee," he says. "I am going to read it with numbers. And next time, somebody in that village is going to believe the warning."