End of summer/early fall, a group is at their hunting camp. They have just finished dinner when one of the boys approaches and says he fell on the ground and is now all wet, despite it not having rained in days. The men laugh, but the narrator explains they are “the tears of a young woman who could not marry the man she loved.” The story had been told to the narrator by his grandfather: a young, beautiful girl, with whom all the young men were smitten, showed no interest in them. People in the village berated her, suggesting perhaps she prefered girls. But her heart belonged to someone else; but since he was of the same clan as her, they would not be allowed to wed. Having no one else to speak with, she tells her mother, who gets angry. The young woman flees and cries until she has no tears left; isolating herself, the village gossips even more about her. One day she overhears her secret love propose to another girl and runs away to the forest. The next morning a search party finds her dead, her body surrounded by tiny drops of water glistening in the morning sun – there had never been morning dew before that.
