‘I wish I had eggs,’ Terry sighed. ‘I’m sure I could bake hundreds of fine things on our fire. I could make a cake in the iron pan, using it for an oven, with a peat smouldering on the lid.’

‘Why do you want eggs?’ I asked. ‘Can’t you bake without them?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed doubtfully. ‘But how fine it would be on an occasion if we had pancakes, Hugh, with raspberry jam—’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ I besought her, and interrupted myself to cry, ‘We can get eggs!’

‘Where’s your hen?’ Terry mocked.

‘We’ve got better than a hen—gulls—scores of them—in the little loch with the islands beyond Loch Coulter—you know, Loch Glas Choire where we caught bait for the pike.’

‘But can we get them?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘Are the islands easy to reach? When will we go?’

‘We can get them easily,’ I assured her.

‘What a pity we didn’t bring waterglass,’ she sighed, ‘but we aren’t really to blame. Who’d have imagined—even if we had lime—’

‘What do you want lime for?’ I demanded.

‘To preserve the eggs, Hugh. You boil salt and quicklime together—’

‘But we can get lime, tons of it! Don’t you remember the lime-kiln by the roadside at Kinlochlaggan? They burnt lime there forty or fifty years ago. They quarried the lime from an outcrop beside the Pattock. The vein of limestone runs from Loch Laggan to Loch Ericht.’

‘Oh, Hugh!’

‘The vein is bound to pass near here. We’ll find an outcrop somewhere handy, I’m sure of it.’

‘If we do find lime we could make mortar for our gable,’ she added with rising excitement.

‘Yes, and take the hair from deer-skins if we wanted leather,’ I continued, as excited as herself.

We went off in the utmost haste to search for limestone. I carried the little rifle with me in case we chanced on game. We found an outcrop of limestone so quickly that I had no opportunity to use the rifle. But on the way home Terry stumbled across a curlew’s nest. I tried the eggs in a pool; they sank, and I stowed them in the snout of my cap.

‘Must we really take them?’ Terry asked with a stricken glance at the nest.

‘We can’t afford to be squeamish,’ I replied. ‘We are going to do the same thing to scores of gulls—’

‘Gulls are different somehow—’

I burned a lump of limestone in our new grate and boiled the quicklime with an equal quantity of salt. While the brew cooled I hacked out one end of the car’s petrol-tank with an axe. We had forgotten a tin-opener.

I hammered down the jagged edges of the tank and washed it and poured in our mixture. Terry put the curlew’s eggs in the pickle.

‘That’s a beginning to our cure,’ she said with satisfaction.