It hadn’t looked far away on the map. Two kilometres at most but in the dark among fallen trees and concealed rock 225cracks two kilometres becomes a long way. I stumbled on a half buried branch and fell. My hands broke the fall but my arms sunk into icecold moorland water and my shirt got wet up to the elbows. The subzero chill made my arms ache. Then I fell again and crawled for a few metres to get past the densest shrubs.

Moonlight began to reach me through the branches as the pines thinned out. The burn should be nearby but in the dark I wouldn’t be able to pick the best crossing points. I’d have to try my luck. And swim if the worst came to the worst.

I sat down on the bank of the burn to rest and check out what I could see in the light from the torch in my mobile. The battery was low. Without the map I had no goal.

I had two options. One was to walk along the burn to find a crossing. The other was to follow the course I was on but it meant I might not find foothold in the water.

The nighttime forest was soundless. It had no voice. Not a murmur even from the trees. I used a few seconds of torchlight to find a stout branch. When I prodded with it the bottom of the burn seemed just about a metre deep. With luck there wouldn’t be a deeper channel in the middle.

God you must help me now I said. I can’t walk on water or see in the dark.

Step by step I crossed. The water reached my waist but no higher. I lost sensation in the lower part of my body. I mustered all my strength and climbed up on the other side. Rested briefly and then continued the trek.

A woodpigeon rose from a tree. The peat moor was bouncy underfoot. The last feathery tufts on the cotton grass glowed like pingpong balls on the drooping stalks. 226

I was thinking of mother. I could visualise her out picking and how the berrybucket would slowly fill. She had taught us about the plants of the moor. Strings of names almost like a nursery rhyme. Wild rosemary bog rosemary bogbean cottongrass bottlesedge sundew. Purple marshlock marshgrass marshviolet.

Where did she come from this mother of mine. I didn’t even know where she had played as a child. Whom she had called mother. Perhaps she had hatched from an egg out on the longmoor.

The wet corroded my legs. By now I felt so bitterly cold it was hard to keep walking.

I stepped more slowly with greater care. Only thought of how to put one foot in front of the other.