The afternoon had begun fading away in pink-tinged sunlight when Matthias and his friends arrived at the tree. It was a giant pine, standing alone.

Orlando stood and stretched to his full height against it. “By the stripes! It’s so big it makes me feel like a pebble against a mountain. I’ll bet it’d take a lot of otters tail to tip to go round a trunk this size, eh, Cheek?”

The young otter patted the immense girth of the bole. “I’ll say it would. Have you ever seen one like this before, Jess?”

The squirrel shook her tail in admiration. “Never. It’s a wonderful sight. Pity it stands alone, because you can only climb up it or down, you couldn’t leap to another tree. The nearest ones are over there. See? Where Matthias is heading. Hey, Warrior, where are you off to? I thought you wanted to see this tree.”

Matthias walked in a straight line with a measured pace, keeping his eyes to the ground.

“It’s not the tree I wanted to see, only its shadow.”

Basil caught up with him. “What d’you want with a bally shadow, old lad?”

Matthias kept walking deliberately. “Remember the rhyme, ‘face the lord who points the way, after noon on summer’s day.’ Right, the tree is the lord who points the way, and it’s gone noon, nearly evening. The shadows are at their longest now. Look at our shadows, they’re much longer than we are. So, if the tree is the biggest thing around, it has the longest shadow. I have an idea that where this shadow ends we’ll find what we’re looking for.”

The rest of the searchers rushed to join him. Like creatures in some solemn procession, they walked along with heads bowed, following the path of the giant pine’s shadow.

It ended upon a humped rock sticking from the heath a short way from a copse. They gathered around the rock.

“So, here it is.”

“Well, what now?”

Matthias banged upon it with his sword hilt. It sounded quite solid. Log-a-Log scratched it, Jess jumped upon it, Orlando tried to push it. In various ways they all tried to make the rock yield up its secret, to no avail. Basil lay flat on his back on top of it, staring up at the rapidly fading day.

“Don’t think much of your idea, old chap. Bit of a damp squib, wot? A rock’s a rock and that’s all this one is.”

Matthias stubbed his paw against the stone. “Ouch! Listen, I’m convinced that this is it; this is where the poem says that death will open up its grave.”

“Just as well we never found it,” Cheek gulped.