‘We were lucky,’ she said. ‘A great many couldn’t have lived here, even if they had the opportunity. If you hadn’t learned to poach—’

‘If we hadn’t been poor—’ I went on. ‘It’s queer to be lucky by force of hard circumstances. If we hadn’t been forced to poach, and dig bog-fir, and make shifts because we hadn’t money to buy meat and coal and comforts we couldn’t have lasted a week here.’

‘You’d imagine things were shaped for a purpose,’ she agreed. ‘It was complete chance that made us find this cave. A thunderstorm—’

‘And bad temper,’ I said, and laughed.

‘I remember finding it; I remember as if it was yesterday,’ she said in a ruminative voice. ‘Oh my, we were wet and cross and miserable! The midges almost ate us alive. When was it, nineteen-thirty-two, twelve years ago.’

We had gone fishing for pike on Loch Coulter, a tarn which lies a mile off the road between Dalwhinnie and Laggan Bridge and now shines beneath us to the east of our home. In the afternoon a thunderstorm came over. We hauled our boat ashore and walked up a gorge westwards in the direction of Ardverikie Forest and the high hills, looking for shelter and a place where we could kindle a fire and boil our kettle. Each boulder that tempted us to halt had another more tempting shelter-stone a few yards above it. We were at that stage between dry clothes and sopping when the pelting open seems preferable to a refuge which merely slows down the rate at which one grows wet and we clambered dismally from one inadequate covert to another up the steep north side of the ravine. I think there is iron in the cliffs which overhang that slope. Flashes of lightning dazzled us, so near we heard them crack like whips, and thunder reverberated amongst the peaks with scarcely a pause. Under that great sound the rising streams grumbled and rain beat on the earth.