Teal and Pilgrim discussed that. The language of bears before their fall, and the language of bears now. What it might reveal about them, if it could be understood. Whether any person could understand what it was like to be a bear. On other visits, Teal interrogated Gentle about the folk tales of his tribe and told Pilgrim about finding common threads and themes in tales from different tribes, her use of recordings to show how lines and verses in sagas sung by balladeers changed from performance to performance, and her theory that sagas and stories had developed and elaborated from a few basic forms. She took Pilgrim to see the cave where the famous burial site of the woman of the First People had been discovered, too. It wasn’t far from Stonehaven and the Hearth, high on one side of a deep narrow river valley and much visited by the local people. The snowy apron in front of its mouth was trampled by fresh footprints; the branches of a birch tree rooted in a crevice were hung with dolls twisted from plaited grass, parcels of food and pebbles inscribed with names; and the floor of the pit left by the excavation was covered by a quilt of withered flowers. Although the body of the woman had been exhumed more than two hundred years ago, the local people believed that the cave was still haunted by her spirit. They called her the Lady of the Flowers, and Teal had collected a number of stories about how she had answered prayers and petitions.

‘We try to make sense of the world by telling stories about it,’ Teal said. ‘But those stories also reveal much about our ingrained habits of thought. Our tendency to reduce the wonderful complexity of the world and the people in it to simple fables and morality tales. The stories about miraculous visitors that your master collected may spring from the same root as stories about intercessions by the spirits of our long-dead ancestors. Stories that suggest we would rather appeal to imaginary beings, believing them capable of acting outside ordinary constraints, than accept that the world will not bend to our will.’

Pilgrim told Gentle that Teal favoured the idea that sightings of visitors were a kind of folk tale because of her professional interest in stories. ‘The truth is, we don’t yet have enough evidence to decide one way or another. And while she might be right when she says that we make stories to try to understand the world, that doesn’t mean that everything in the world has to be part of a story.’

Gentle said that there was some sense in her argument that stories made things seem simpler than they were. ‘It helps you see the world more clearly, as in the stories women tell pups.’

‘What kind of stories did the women of your hearth tell you?’ Pilgrim said.