From the fortress gates, the forest track ran down the valley through a thick break of trees. Drusher followed it for a while, then left the path and followed the slope of the valley deeper into the forest.

He began to relax. The air was clear and cool, and the scent of pine resin gave it a menthol tang. Sunlight shone through the tall, close-packed evergreens. The rolling forest bed was flax weed, deep green halibor, thistle, eye-wort and banks of antopies that brushed around his shins. Climbing tracedy hung in gauze mantles around lower branches. He saw the meaty combs of blaxiform fungi sprouting from rotting bark, the white cushions of bellecap toadstools in the weeds, processions of senate ants marching vertically up tree trunks, leaves and fat white grubs carried aloft in their jaws like trophies and banners. The air smelled of wet loam, camphor and flower scent. Fat pollinator insects buzzed past. Invisible beetles clicked and chirred in the undergrowth. He heard the cooing warble of the wood dove, Astra verdus, and watched tiny brown seed finches dart and snap through the lower branches.

By the time he reached the stream, the fortress long since out of sight behind him, he had his notebook out and his old spotting magnoculars around his neck. He’d seen and noted redbeaks, four different types of arboreal warbler, two root-hens, still dowdy in the last of their winter plumage as they stalked nervously through the ground cover, and a mountain hawk. The hawk had been quite distant. He’d glimpsed it in a patch of sky, framed through the emerald canopy, turning silently on the thermals over the lower valley. Destrus aquilus gershomi, the little hill-hawk. He’d noted another sixteen avian species just from call and song.

The gurgling stream was a meltwater rill that followed the contour of the slope, breaking and sharply plunging over clefts and mossy boulders. He followed its course, and the deeper sound of splashing as it fast-fed a pool somewhere ahead. He watched for tracks in the mud, for ursid spore, but the heavy rain had been too recent.

He reached the pool. It was overhung on the rising side by huge blocks of tumbledown stone, swathed in moss. Three different streams fed the pool, the sparkling rush of their flow producing constant, intersecting ripple patterns across its surface. The skin of the water was also wiggling with hookfly larvae. Drusher climbed onto the overlooking stones and sat down to watch tiny, fawn darters skim and hunt the larvae.

There was a decent view. He could look out across the forest banks below, the dense stands of evergreens, and see the dark, sharp mass of the Karanine peaks that formed the opposite side of the high valley, forty kilometres away through the early afternoon haze.