Initially things go reasonably well for them and there is a great sense of achievement in making their escape and starting to build a home for themselves: domesticating part of the wilderness which sustains them. Gradually their new life begins to seem more real than the life they had left behind, which now seems ‘trivial’, and the otherwise desolate country becomes for them a place of sanctuary; a ‘sanctuary of the mind’ as Hugh puts it at one point. The hard work takes their minds off the fears and anxieties which lie always at the back of their minds.

[Terry] began to laugh like a happy child and dance amongst the peats, waving her bare peat-smeared arms over her head.

We bathed in Loch Coulter; we lay at the mouth of our cave to attend night’s summer shade; we saw the rough hills climb up against the sky and it grew dark enough for stars to shine. There are moments when misery departs that require no voice; we waited in silence until night reached its deepest, though it was only the twilight still.

Despite passages like this which celebrate a new-found awareness of the beauty and mystery of life, the guilt and anxiety caused by feeling they are safe at the expense of others lies just below the surface. It comes out in the care with which they try to keep their cave camouflaged against prying eyes by making sure that the stones used to block one entrance have their weathered side outward. It comes out, too, in the way Hugh stalks different areas for game so as not to frighten away the wildlife from their immediate vicinity. It is also there in the way Hugh and Terry constantly monitor the weather and the changing seasons. As the journal goes on it becomes clear that the approach of winter is a powerful metaphor for the end; the coldness and darkness of death.

Perhaps most tellingly their anxieties have a destructive effect on their feelings for each other, so that the relationship they are so desperate to protect becomes strained almost to breaking point. Hugh in particular seems unable to live up to his early idealism, and often treats Terry with a ‘defensive roughness’ that he cannot control, though it is obviously hurtful to her. In a sense this was bound to happen for all along Hugh has had doubts about their position. Time and again Terry has had to coax him out of depression or out of rages about the hopelessness of it all. All along Terry has had a simple but unshakeable faith that they are doing the right thing.