On the shore the people were calling encouragement, though more, he thought, to the cow than to him. When she touched the ground she lost her footing a moment, staggered, and seemed she would tip him between her horns, but she recovered herself and step by step lifted them both clear of the water. The collie was delirious. A group of men came down to meet them. Shy, stern, leather-faced men dressed in homespun. They would not look at him directly. He slithered from the animal’s back and stood on trembling legs while they led her away. He waited for instructions, for someone to tell him where he should go, where he could go, but no one did. He was too strange perhaps, too unexpected. He thought they might not be able to see him in the way they could see the cows, that they would have to go away for a while and imagine him.

He trudged up the landing place on to the track at the top of the bank, turned to wave to the boat (had he paid them anything? He did not think he had), then sat on a patch of yellowish grass looking at his wet legs, his bare toes. He wrung out the tails of his coat, examined the bottles and found them undamaged. He shook some laudanum on to his tongue, took a swallow of whisky. Everything tasted of salt.

The party on the shore were dispersing now. He opened his bag. The leather was damp but the contents dry enough. He wanted something dry for his legs and after a little digging found, rolled tight like a loaf of bread, his nankeen trousers. This was good; he had not been quite sure they were there. He held them, thinking of home, of Nell, the comforts of home, then stood, stiffly, and carried the trousers away looking for somewhere private to change, somewhere out of view of the cottages. One thing to come ashore on the back of a cow, another entirely to make a show of his bruised legs to people he suspected did not, for reasons both moral and practical, do much undressing.

He followed the track. No trees, no convenient rock, the low places all boggy. He kept going. The track handed him forward, curved sinuously to follow the line of the water. The sun was sometimes in his face, sometimes at his left shoulder. He saw no one, no solitary reaper, and the only house he came across was a ruin, its stones scattered, and marks of burning on the timber above the empty doorway. The sight of it disturbed him. He picked up his pace to leave it behind, was relieved when a turning of the track hid it from him.