The past had no shape or form until now. But like slaves who toil without aim or end in view, we were rapt in trivial moments. I review the completed past; it glows in my memory. The jewelled summer shows itself again; I remember how we bathed and played at gathering berries in the bright hot weeks when every creature was young. Summer’s a lovely dream; hardships and fret remove themselves from knowledge. I’ll sleep to-night and forget summer. When I waken, it’ll be there, and Terry dancing by the loch.

Though we depart, leaving our cave to the fox or the wild cat or the cleanly badger, this place, this land, is ours, and we, tied to it as the wild creatures are, cannot escape from it by going. But we belong to it, we have given ourselves up to it; no other abode can ever break this strange allegiance. We make ourselves its servants by going. The fire blazes finely, we’ve no need to spare our sticks or hide our presence. The hill-world that encloses our hearts was good to us. We owe a duty to that which gave us fire and food and brings forth creatures like ourselves, human folk to help.

We have escaped from fear, from anger too, and grief, and horror. Nothing is left but pity. The man who lies dying in our bed makes a symbol of humanity for us. How can we fear or hate broken men like him, whose works, that grieved us when we saw our garden wasted, are done in anguish and despair. Dangerous like trapped beasts, destroying because they fear destruction, hunting fugitives to death because death halloos at their own heels, murdering and stealing in dread of murder at men’s hands or from the ravening rage of hunger, they are not things to fear and hate, but men to pity.

The past resolves itself out of broken events into a pattern. All the stages of our progress to this moment lose their separate selves in it; they take meaning and relevance from it, assuming the aspect of necessity. Necessity does not admit grief to rule. What we suffered seems now an apprenticeship merely. I remember our wasted garden, without grief, and the days of our flight, without dismay. I do not hate the men who hunted me nor suffer horror when I recall the man I killed. He came to the place of his death where I killed him, I but the instrument of that power which carries men out of fear and rage to pity.