We have done no work to-day. Our peats are cut and stacked, in spite of the clegs, and we are content to rest.

We went down to Loch Coulter in the breathless morning to bathe before the heat of the day arrived. I had the .22 with me. I carry it habitually whenever I leave the cave. We heard black cock drumming on a green lawn amongst the birches. I slipped away to stalk the birds, leaving Terry splattering in the shallows of a sandy cove. I got near enough to my quarry to see how they danced; with their fan tails spread out like a turkey cock’s and their wings trailing the ground they advanced and retreated, head to head; they danced and drummed; sometimes a pair would face each other with their heads lowered to the ground and their eyes a couple of inches apart, until one of the birds gave way, and their see-saw backwards and forwards dance recommenced.

They heard me in the brushwood and flew away. I was not deeply vexed. We had meat enough in the cave.

We are growing familiar with the habits of our neighbours. We know where the black cock dance. I have seen the eagles make homewards for their eyrie in the Little Durc, and followed them until I came to the head of that canyon and saw the nest, and smelled the stench of rotting game. I know the solitary hill-side trees where hoodies nest, and have nested perhaps for a century; the ravens make their home in the rock above our cave. We never walk barefoot in the birch wood since I killed an adder, slender and vicious and as full of fat as a pike, beside an ant-heap there.

‘It gives me a shudder to look at it,’ Terry declared when I brought it for her to see. ‘What possessed you to bring it here, Hugh?’

‘Don’t you like it?’ I teased her. ‘I think it’s pretty. And full of fat.’

‘Why should pike and snakes and wicked brutes like them be so well lined?’ she wanted to know.

‘The wicked grow fat,’ I said, and laughed.

‘You’re not very fat yourself, Hugh,’ she declared, looking at me with a critical eye. ‘But you’re looking well, I never saw you looking so healthy. You’re as brown as a berry—’

When the sun went down to-day we made a fire of sticks outside the cave and ate a little.

‘If this hot weather continues we’ll save our stores,’ Terry declared.

‘It’s almost a fortnight since we came back,’ I said slowly.

‘Yes,’ she returned, ‘a long fortnight, long in passing. Looking back, our journey’s like the bad weather in June,’ she said a little later, ‘dark and miserable—and past.’

‘It’s past then?’ I inquired, looking intently at her quiet face.