How bitterly our jests reproach us when the thing we mocked comes to pass. I answered myself eleven years later, in 1943, when war was in all our mouths, and daily rumours shook the world. We had never revisited the cave. We had spoken about it only once, to one man, a stalker who lived near our house and came often on a winter night to play draughts and recall the war in France where he had fought for four years. But wherever the conversation began, it always ended with Duncan telling us that we were degenerate compared with our ancestors.

‘You don’t require to talk to me, Hugh,’ he declared dogmatically one evening in the summer of 1943; we were sitting before our house smoking and watching dusk hide the village of Newtonmore.

‘You know as well as I do that folk to-day couldn’t live on what made their fathers as strong as giants,’ he went on vehemently. ‘Take any man in a town and put him out here in the hills to live by himself and he wouldn’t last a week. A week! not two days.’

‘That’s not fair,’ Terry argued. ‘You can’t take a man in a town and compare him with country folk of old.’

‘Take a man in the country, then,’ Duncan persisted. ‘Take myself, take Hugh. If we were forced to live by our own efforts, how’d we thrive? It stands to reason we couldn’t do it. Our senses are blunted. We depend on a multitude of people to make our clothes and food and tools for us. We have noses that can’t smell, ears that are deaf—’

‘Nevertheless we have intelligence,’ I stated.

‘Brains don’t keep you warm,’ he declared.

‘But they do,’ I went on. ‘And though we haven’t the noses of deer nor the eyes of eagles, we hunt deer and capture eagles. All the same, you’re asking too much, Duncan. Why, your very wild beasts, your deer for instance, can scarcely survive a winter, a bad winter, amongst these hills without artificial feeding. You give them bruised oats and Indian corn, don’t you?’

‘They’re degenerate too,’ he retorted.

‘It’s comparatively simple for men to live the savage life or like Robinson Crusoe in tropical fertile countries, Duncan,’ I continued. ‘Speed and strength and alert senses wouldn’t avail a man much if he were flung out into the Grampians to live by what he could kill and grow. He’d die, pretty soon, however savage and undegenerate he was.’

We drifted into discussing how long one could survive the climate, the cold and hunger, of the mountainous north, if one were left entirely to one’s own devices for food and shelter, clothing and fire. We agreed that without a great many tools and stores of clothing and such things as salt, one would die soon.