For, you see, such a fish is tired and is about to shed his skin.

He appeared about to moult, said Aengus, now that I mind it.

Far better, nodded the stranger, that you find a salmon setting out on its journey so that your quest may concur with his.

Aye.

Then, instead of the fish, it is you turns out of the mouth of the river into the sea.

Oh wonders.

The Atlantic lies ahead of you.

I see it.

And the sure knowledge that the journey through the unknown leads to the known.

Good night! Aengus exclaimed.

So the sojourn in the familiar leads back to the strange.

It does. Certainly, Aengus extolled joyfully.

The journeying is the quest.

Aha! Well, now! And Fionn?

He shall never know human shape again. He may turn into what he is not. That, the knowledge will allow. He can be a girl today, a bird tomorrow. A fir tree the day after. He can exhaust all possible shapes but can never return to be a man again.

Aengus whistled. Poor Fionn, he said, thinking how easily it might have been him.

But Fionn, contrary to what was being said of him, discovered that his journey, in fact, was an attempt to find the size and the range of his consciousness.

Then came the day that he understood what language was – a bridge between the flesh and the spirit.

At the beginning, he’d thought the range of meaning extended to the supple body of the woman he’d been given to escape Aengus’ wrath. Then in turn, he found it only covered the little black-nosed shape of the bird he’d taken to escape Aengus’ fumbling in the dark and the burden of his love. Now, having on successive days become a doe, a fir and a blackguardly dog, he found that the memory of others contributed to what he now was, a horse quietly steeped in a manmade field on Aran. Around him goats were singing. Each mouthful of grass he knew meant a day’s work by someone in the past. The very earth his hooves stood on would have come here by boat from the mainland. The seeds of the grass he now ate would have been carefully fed into the new seaweed-nourished soil one at a time. This, the man he had once been knew. Not only that but all he looked on he considered first as Fionn would, then as the woman did, as the bird, the tree, the doe, the dog and lastly the horse. It was the horse ate the grass but it was Fionn himself had sown it. His consciousness now extended through all he had seen. But there was loneliness in this condition. And that was when Fionn considered Fionn.