During the summer vacation, when many of the scholars went home to help get in the harvest, the Professor of History travelled about in search of Pictish remains—the likeliest sites for them being the so-called Fairy Knowes, which proved conclusively that fairies were imperfectly remembered Picts. The Lecturer in Rhetoric also travelled about for his own purposes, and was not above examining Pictish remains, in case they afforded a small footprint or a strain of harp music. If, as sometimes happened, the two men met, they conversed on blameless subjects, such as the prevalence of horse-flies or the clear atmosphere which presages rain; and parted. But in his forty-ninth summer James Sutherland had Foxcastle to himself. One might say it came to him as a reward of faith. A visiting Lecturer in Jurisprudence had remarked that, whether or no fairies existed, they influenced leaseholds: the legendary teind196 to hell which bound fairies to offer a living sacrifice every seven years making many tenants unwilling to begin a seven-year lease, or a lease of multiple sevens. On the offchance of finding a fairy legally recorded, James Sutherland used to buy bundles of old law papers off the scrivener’s197 stall in the market. Nothing came of it till the day he saw the name Foxcastle in a disputed ownership of a sheep walk198 in Peeblesshire. Foxcastle. Folks Castle. The meaning jumped to the eye. It was a long journey to make on foot, but if it had been as far as the Indies he would have made it.

Foxcastle was a hill among other hills, steep-sided, flattened at the top. If it had been a sheep walk that must be long since, for the heather had taken over, covering the summit and lapping down the sides. It was heather of long-established growth, standing over knee-high on thickened stems. As he was forcing his way through it he thought that the Professor of History would be hard put to it to trace any Pictish remains. He was still relishing the thought when he fell into a pit. He had got into a formation of peat hags199, which started up from the heather like foes from an ambush. The stagnant water streaking between them reflected the sky with a savage blue. He scrambled out, none the worse except for wet feet and a twisted ankle, and with a sharpened appreciation of the nature of moorland peat: dry as a bone above, wet as corruption below. Walking more cautiously, he skirted the peat hags, and sat down on the western slope to shake the water out of his shoes and rub his ankle. He had never felt so imperially alone. In all the wide expanse around him there was no sign of man. Nothing moved except a few sheep on the opposite hillside and the burn flickering and rattling down the valley between. He watched a hawk flying in wide surveying circles overhead, saw it gather its flight into a poise and strike down on its kill. It was as though this imposed an edict of silence; not a small bird uttered. After a while he saw it lift nonchalantly away.