‘Och, winter won’t be so deathly bad,’ I told her. ‘There’ll be fine days. I don’t mind a storm really, Terry. It’s fun to hear the wind battering at a door you know it can’t break down—when you’ve good food and plenty of firewood.’

‘Many a one won’t have that,’ she said gravely. ‘What will winter bring for the rest of the world?’

‘I’ve stopped grieving myself for others’ woe,’ I answered slowly. ‘We require all our time to take thought for ourselves, Terry.’

‘You know you don’t mean that,’ she said. ‘The worse our own lot, the more we think of others.’

‘Then let them do as we did,’ I cried impatiently, ‘let them fend for themselves. I’m not going to waste the last fine days of the year pondering about the hypothetical woes of the world.’

‘You never told me all that happened on the journey you made to Gallovie,’ she accused.

‘What!’ I cried, startled; ‘yes, I did, Terry, I told you every single thing.’

Her eyes showed her incredulity but she did not say more.

We spent a good deal of time carrying home fir roots from the head of Loch Coulter. The waves and floods of many years had fretted away the moss by the water-side. When the loch subsided in summer a jumble of roots was laid bare and quickly dried. We often marvelled at these roots. They grew so thickly that their branches were interlocked and we had to cut them adrift from each other with the axe. In the days when the forest grew of which these roots were a token no one could possibly have traversed this country, for the trees must have grown so close together that to pass between them was impossible. But not only were the roots close together and interwoven, they ranked three layers deep, as if three successive forests had grown and died in the moss. Yet no modern trees will thrive in moss, far less flourish and grow to the size that the roots of those old trees indicated. We found roots, weathered and broken, but still three or four feet in diameter, and what we found was not the whole root but only the heart, the resinous pith, of ancient giants.

The fir was too resinous to be used freely on our fire. We lighted the fire, when the peat was slow to burn up from its ashes in the morning, with slivers of fir; once Terry threw on a sizable piece; it exploded into flame with a yellow blaze that filled the chimney and ascended clear of the chimney can into the open air, a beacon that would attract attention from miles away.

It was easy to gather the fir, but fetching it uphill to the cave proved a slow monotonous labour. We hid our store of kindling near the cave under slabs of stone.