As dawn came, the moon glowed pale yellow in the morning light, surrendering to the sun. They walked through dew with the pink feathery tips of sedge and ribwort brushing wet and cold against their legs. Droplets hung from the stems like gems and spider webs were downy puffs between the blades of grass. The rising sun shone so low and bright that the shapes and colours ahead of them lost their clarity and it was like walking into mist. He showed Wilf the flattened path their feet had made on the verge. “That’s us,” he said.

Wilf’s new trainers continued to trouble him and the lack of sleep slowed Harold. In the course of the following two days they made it only as far as Wakefield, but he felt unable to leave the young man behind. The panic attacks, or nightmares, continued. Wilf insisted he had been bad in the past, and that the Lord would save him.

Harold was less sure. The boy was painfully underweight, and prone to mood swings. One minute he was running ahead, racing the dog to find its stone; the next he could barely speak. Harold distracted Wilf by telling him all that he had taught himself about hedgerow plants, and the sky. He pointed out the difference between the low-combed stratus clouds and the tall cirrus clouds that moved high above like boulders. He showed Wilf how, by observing shadows and textures around him, he could deduce his direction. A plant, for instance, that showed a thicker growth on one side was obviously receiving more sunlight there. They could tell from this that the plant was south-facing, and that they must head in the opposite direction. Wilf appeared to learn greedily, although sometimes he would ask a question that suggested he had not been concentrating at all. They sat beneath the poplar and listened to its leaves rattling in the wind.

“The trembling tree,” said Harold. “You can spot it easily. It shakes so hard that from a distance it looks as if it’s covered in little lights.”

He told Wilf about the people he had met at the beginning, and others who had more recently crossed his path. There was a woman living in a straw house, and a couple who drove a goat in their car, and a retired dentist who travelled six miles a day to fetch fresh water from a natural spring. “He told me about it. He said we all should accept what the earth gives freely. It is an act of grace, he said. Since then I always make a point of stopping to drink from a spring.”