The Gift of Stones

9

‘IN FACT, it might have been a dream. I fell asleep, my head upon my hand. The walking and the wind had tired me out. When I awoke I couldn’t see the sea, I couldn’t tell the colour of the rocks. There was a mist and it was dusk and all that mattered was the distance from our village and the fear of being stranded in the night. You’d all be just as fearful, that’s for sure. The beach is fine by daylight, but at night it is too open and too cold. There might be wolves. There might be worse. And yet to walk back along the cliffs could not be done. I’d fall. I’d shred myself on thorns. I’d drown in rain and blackness and in leaves. I stood and looked inland across the heath. I filled my lungs with damp and heavy air. “Who’s there?” I said. And then I raised my voice and called, “Who’s there?”

I was answered by a dog. Its bark was wolflike for an instant. My stomach and my bowels made soup. My legs gave way. I’d never known such fear, not even when young leather-purse, the bowman, had come blundering through the bracken to retrieve his arrow, his stave circling in the air, my right arm lost. That was in the day, and I was close to home. Now I stood as still as stone, breathing through an open mouth and planning what I would do when the pack had sniffed me out. I’d run into the sea. Would that have done the trick? Can wolves swim? I wouldn’t know. There were no wolves. There was another bark, high-pitched and servile. It was a single dog. And there behind its call, just lit and barely visible, the grey on grey, was a streaming plume of smoke.

Now you see me running on the saltland heath, sending rabbits to their burrows, putting up the roosting birds. I didn’t care. There was a smudge of safety in the air. If there were fires and dogs then people were close by. I’d pass the night with them. They wouldn’t harm a one-armed man, a youth, a boy. I’d eat, sleep, go home in light. I’d take an elderberry stone’.