Terry has hot water and dry clothes waiting for me at whatever time I come home. When I am cheerful, with half a young deer over my shoulder and the forequarters hidden safely on the hill, I step gently to take her by surprise. I never can use enough stealth for that though I would swear my footfall falls no louder than rain, or the hunting fox’s pad, amongst the rocks. She is out of the cave to greet me and while I hand her the rifle to wipe dry and the telescope to clean she bubbles over with questions, praise for my success, news of her own doings through the day. If the weather is warm we carry my change of clothes to the waterfall and I strip to bathe under its icy flood; she rinses out my dirty stockings as I dry myself. When I am out the livelong day (for if I get nothing between dawn and the strength of morning I hole up wherever day finds me, waiting for evening) I can never bear to rest in the cave. I choke for breath inside. Like one whose appetite is whetted by what it feeds on I grudge each moment of the day that passes without my seeing the open country. I remember one evening when we skinned a fat yeld hind. Terry made supper. I sat at the mouth of the cave, and evening grew to night beneath my gaze; the shadowed sun went down into its western sea beyond the hills and every valley was darkened until the mazy woods were one with the general dusk. Away to the north the Olympic peak of Craig Dhu glowed in azure light above its harboured straths. I heard Terry come out beside me.

‘I’d have died in prison, Terry,’ I said.

‘We have done for ourselves, finished ourselves, given ourselves up bound and captive,’ she whispered. ‘Never to escape, Hugh.’

‘Escape!’ I said, surprised by her tone, and turned to look at her. Her face was pale, her eyes, fixed on the islanded hills, seemed to grow large and take in the light which still shone over these proud peaks. Her face was like that of one transfigured.

She spread her hands over the gorge, the moor, and all our country under the dappled sky.

‘When we grafted ourselves to this wild stock,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Here’s no grafting,’ I told her sadly. ‘We’re bound to it, as if we were made of it, but what binds it to us?’ I made a puff of breath with my lips. ‘A little breath, some dust—and this place as if we never were.’

She shook her head.

‘A little dust makes it and us one,’ she said. ‘You must be dying with hunger, Hugh.’

‘I’m past being hungry,’ I confessed. ‘I could have eaten heather two hours ago.’