Anyway. Once I reached Dover, there was a train to London, and from there, another train to Edinburgh. I spent one night in Edinburgh – a very old and regal and windy city overlooked by a castle at its central point, a castle built of hulking dark stone that has been scored by weather and rain for hundreds of years – and in the morning I boarded yet another train to a small town called Inverness. But still, Bear, I was not within walking distance of this mountain.

The further north I went, the closer I felt to home. Yet I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going, really. In England, my cobbled English had been sufficient to get what I needed, but in Scotland, people spoke with accents that were as strong and thick as the smoke from the peat they burned in their fireplaces, and much of the time I only half understood what I was being told. Friendly men warned me about the mountains, said the weather was moody and capricious. Warned me of cliffs hidden in cloud, evaporating trails and cold winds that could freeze the hairs in your nose, even in summer. But, I silently protested, I am from Norway. Norway! Where the mountains are bigger and the winters colder.

From Inverness, I travelled by foot or car or horse-powered tractor, often all three in the matter of a few hours. The boots I had borrowed from my friend? Too small. My feet burned, blisters weeping golden sap into my socks. Socks crusted to the blisters. It was hell, until it wasn’t. You can get used to anything, Bear.

As I travelled, the land around me buckled into steeper and steeper mountains, snow-peaked and bare of trees but laden with violet and yellow and silver heather, spotted with sleepy white sheep and languid cows. The roads were narrow and potholed. They rose and fell and twisted on a hair, or cut long, sweeping incisions into the steep walls of valleys.

When I finally arrived at the mouth of the glen that would lead me to the mountain, I had already been travelling for two weeks. I greatly underestimated how long the trip would take me, and knew I would be returning late to my apprenticeship. But I carried on, moving forward as slowly and stubbornly as the ferry that had carried me across the English Channel.

The Highlands are a melancholic place. The mountains are almost always hidden in mist and the tongues of blue that lick the sky are watery and fleeting, but there is a ballad to the landscape that exists in everything. In the wind, you can hear battle. The bog that sucks keenly at your boots has memory. You climb an outcrop and look out over the valley to an endless horizon of overlapping peaks and it’s like looking back in time, because you know that nothing about this view has changed for hundreds of years. Perhaps only the random placement of sheep on the opposite slope. That’s the only thing that changes.