Can a man be blamed for having treasured Elwyn, or Ned—or even Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Highlanders, their bluebird-coloured hats pinned with white roses? It broke my heart back in ’45, to see how those Highlanders would gladly draw their swords and beat their drums and skirl their demented pipes to defend that place. We formed our mute English line as those fellows straggled onto the field, starved after their night march and noisy as hell. Easy prey.

But once we slaughtered them, who had won?

A soldier is only a visitor.

Emptied, Culloden heath: crows, distant hills full of birches. Dettingen: mud, rubble, my lifelong horror’s tender shoot. Ghundy Ghar: from our new trenches fell bones from old wars over the very same land.

Land, wind and clouds were present before our carnage, and after it they continue to lie, blow, hover.

“Sophie!”

Every year I become seasick trekking over this terrain: it falls away in great troughs then swells against my face in sudden crests, as if a demon ocean has been turned to swamp and stone—always with treacherous rivulets and pockets where the leg of horse or man might break…

No, not horse, not these days—and now here’s the perilous Spout, heaven help me. Each September as I pass its ledge I feel its fantastic tug—sixty feet down to the rocks. But sparkles plash up its hollow. Now a whoosh of barm, a column of brine rising toward me at the precipice, a silver fountain inviting a man to dive on its breast and plunge as it falls, plummet to fucking oblivion below, with the seals, and the herring, and the blessed sway of silent weeds…

Irresistible.

“Not now,” I tell the Spout again this year, like I’ve told laudanum, heroin, cocaine. “I’ve one more chance with Sophie, in the city…”

Can this really be the eleventh time I’ve made this trek? Eleven autumns walking this stretch of coast from Manche-d’Épée to L’Anse Pleureuse, trying to escape seagulls, stones and seaweed? Leaving behind a root cellar full of seed potatoes whose stolons have grown long and white and threaten to strangle me? Sophie’s right: I must escape this cycle.

“Come on,” the Spout sings, as all the opiates sing. “Come to me, baby—does your Sophie even need to know?”

Sophie certainly would know, or would at least suspect, if I dived, but then—I think—on to another soldier she’d move, there being no shortage.

“No,” I answer the Spout once more. “Not yet.” I remind myself that these barrens, with their chasms and blood-sucking pitcher plants, mustn’t swallow me now. Their curtain of fog is my foyer to a better world, where Glory waits to rejoin me as it did on the Plains of Abraham…if only I can find my way to those plains again…

Glory, do you hear me?