We waited on our hill-top, as if struck to stone by expectation, and the golden day came up and gilded our peak, and every peak, but we had eyes for nothing save the trains that fled north before our gaze. Three of them followed the first, thundering down the slope, leaping into our view with a light that always took us by surprise though we were always waiting for it, vanishing from sound and sight into the emboskened valley of the Spey.

‘God knows what that means,’ I muttered.

‘Easy to know what it means,’ Terry said bitterly. ‘War’s no slugabed.’

We got up heavily to stalk a deer. A lucky chance saved us from much exertion. We killed a young beast all alone a mile beneath the peak whence we had viewed the trains. Terry hid in a rough hollow while I killed the deer and bled it.

‘I wished we hadn’t to kill it to-day,’ she said.

I shrugged.

‘We have to live,’ I said.

She shouldered the rifle with an air of distaste.

The dawn was red and grey behind the eastern hills. Dawn, lief exorcist of care, lightened our hearts. As we went home we stumbled on a deer-calf in its couch.

‘The lovely, lovely creature!’ Terry cried, stooping over it.

‘Don’t lay a hand on it!’ I warned her.

She looked up at me; her cheeks were wet.

‘Would its mother forsake it?’ she asked. ‘Good morning, calfie, I’m glad I saw you.’

We spent the remainder of the morning in preparations for our journey. We boiled venison to carry with us, as well as a piece to eat when we arrived home again. We rolled blankets in our ground-sheet and fetched a slab of stone to cover the mouth of our cave. We talk, and say many things to hide what our minds are always saying. Our tongues ran like rivers as we worked, and all the while those trains were in our ears.

‘I suppose lots of people would fancy that this sort of life was full of adventures, Hugh,’ Terry remarked.

‘I’m sure they would,’ I agreed.

‘They say folk in caves and wildernesses and desert islands escape all the trivialities of life.’

‘I’ve heard so,’ I agreed.

‘What fools people are!’ she cried. ‘Folk in caves and desert islands must be far more commonplace and matter of fact than any one ever needs to be in a town. In a town you run to the shop at the corner—oh, my God, what is happening in towns?’ she burst out.

‘People take their notions of strange ways of life from books,’ I suggested in an effort to save myself as well as her from thinking of the horror that would not be gainsaid.

‘I wonder if there are still books being sold, Hugh?’

‘Not mine, I’ll be bound,’ I returned.