WE HAVE BEEN gathering blaeberries for jam this evening in the birch wood above Loch Coulter. Things ripen late here. We must be thirteen hundred feet above sea-level and the flush of ripe berries will not come for several days yet. Nevertheless we find bushes hung with swollen blue-dusted fruit in sheltered hollows exposed to the south and we have grown prudent enough to gather what fruit we can at the earliest moment of ripening. If rain comes unexpectedly the berries that are ripe will be spoiled for jam. Fruit is not so plentiful that we can afford to let any go to waste.
We were very imprudent lately. When we arrived home from our house, running to escape in broad daylight, we were past caring whether we were seen. And even after we arrived at the cave we continued to act as if nothing mattered except our unhappiness. We went out to cut peats in a rage of energy that proved no anodyne as if there were no other people in the world but ourselves. That first stage passed, yet we grew no more cautious, for we were filled with exaltation as blind as our despair.
I shudder now to think of the risks we ran. We cut our peats at midday. I scoured the country for game at noon. We spent every daylight hour in the open, as if we craved to be discovered.
Clegs were the instruments of caution, and halted our thoughtless bravado. They appeared in the first days of July, before we finished working in the peat-moss. They did not punish me so viciously as they hurt Terry. Their bites raised lumps on her and their poison, together with the aversion they created, made her sick, while I took no great ill-effect from their venom. In spite of my immunity I dreaded them fully as much as she did. They filled me with loathing and, ridiculous as it seems, with fear. A single cleg aiming itself at my arm was enough to make me fling down whatever I had in my hand to beat the insect away with crazy gestures.
The clegs made the moss untenable through the day. Each peat as it dried seemed to make a resting-place for multitudes of the brutes, and at our approach they rose in ravenous swarms. We retreated and ventured out only at dusk when midges made a lesser nuisance, or in the cool of daybreak.
We had been exalted, too highly exalted as we had been too deeply depressed, when we emerged from the misery induced by our journey. The clegs tempered our new delight in the country and in our freedom. When they had driven us to work by night it occurred to us that we should never have been abroad through the day. We had been reckless and foolish. One grey morning, as I was lowering peats in the basket, I bethought me of the risks we had been running, and I hurried down to speak to Terry.
‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked anxiously, coming to meet me.
‘Terry!’ I cried, ‘what in the world have we been thinking about, these past weeks? Some one must have seen us. It’s just dawned on me—I was thinking about the clegs forcing us to work at night—we ought to have been working by night.’
‘I had the very same thought,’ she returned. ‘But if we were seen we’d know by now—’
‘If we weren’t seen we’ve been lucky beyond our deserts,’ I declared.
Now everything we had done seemed conspicuous and rash. I insisted on thatching the peat-stack with turves, although anyone who came near enough to discern the stack must inevitably find our cave. We have laughed since these careful days at our excess of caution. We broke down the sides of our peat-moss to make my excavation look as much like the untidy work of nature as possible. We deferred bringing fir roots home until we found a secure hiding-place for them. Terry plotted a strict routine of hours, for meals and work and sleep.
We kept strictly to her arrangement for almost a week. We slept from midday to dusk. Then we ate a light meal of a fried pancake made with flour and a gull’s egg; we allowed ourselves one egg a day. We drank a cup of weak tea. When the blaeberries started to ripen we added a dish of fruit to this our first meal of the day.
The nights of early July were never so dark that we could not see to work out of doors; even when the valleys were dim a luminance in the sky made the peaks visible; one could have seen to read small print by the light of the sky shining on the hill-top where we cut our peats. The sun’s progress past north to its rising was marked by gaudy colours all round the northern horizon.
Sometimes we took a piece of boiled venison with us, in case we grew hungry, but most nights we worked without more food until dawn warned us to leave the moss. I remained for a while cutting peats by myself while Terry descended to cook. In the new spirit of caution that gripped us we cut a vast quantity of peats beyond what we were ever likely to use. But, we said, no one knew how soon winter might come on us, nor how long it would last.
We had an appetite for dinner. Game formed the staple of this meal. Sometimes Terry pot-roasted a bit of venison haunch and made a sort of Yorkshire pudding to accompany the meat; generally she stewed the venison; we had venison and grouse, blue hill hares and an occasional rabbit, black-cock, snipe, duck, plover and roe-deer. We had no lack of quantity and variety so far as meat was concerned. As soon as the blaeberries ripened we added them to our dinner. Terry often made soup of a bone; we hunted the country round for green stuff to put in the broth.
Our garden of nettles which grew over the ruins of an old house was quickly stripped. We cooked the nettles like cabbage and used the water in which they were boiled amongst our soups. The nettle-pottage tasted as sweet as cabbage, but it came to an end. We tried many queer messes thereafter, young grass in the soup, birch leaves cooked like cabbage. We attempted to eat the latter dish once only. But when we flung away the mess of boiled birch leaves I recalled a trick of my boyhood. I made slots in the bark of some birch trees and collected the spilling sap that flowed from these cuts in milk-tins nailed to the trunks of the trees. We supped the sap with a teaspoon as if it was medicine, and felt that it was doing us good.
‘Spring’s the time for the sap,’ I told Terry.
‘We’ll need it then,’ she said.
We dug up the small nuts that grow at the root of a white-flowered plant on grassy slopes, as I used to when I was a boy.
The arrival of ripe blaeberries saved us from worrying about scurvy.
‘And after them come crowberries.’ I said, ‘and cranberries then, and cloudberries. Terry, before we lack we’ll go down to the fields at Kinlochlaggan or Laggan Bridge and steal turnips, like our neighbours the deer.’
‘We’ll have to,’ she said simply.
When we had eaten dinner we bathed in Loch Coulter. If there was time to spare before bright day arrived we set a line for pike. We took food once again in mid-morning. We gave ourselves a precious bannock of oatcake spread thinly with jam or thickly with deer-fat, or we had scones that Terry baked on the griddle. We drank water.
We often say, in wonder-struck tones after a plain bare meal, that we never felt so well in all our lives before.
The strict routine lasted less than a week. We found, as we did months ago, that this life does not permit the unyielding governance of a time-table. We have gradually made our routine elastic again, though we keep generally to our framework of hours. We take no risks. The dread of discovery is very present in our minds though we scarcely know why we are afraid to be seen or what discovery entails. Our first instinct, when anything surprises us, is to hide.
‘We are like wild animals,’ I said when Terry marvelled at our continual alertness. ‘Always watching, always scared, always ready to run and hide. No one will surprise us now, Terry, we’ve got back old lost instincts for danger.’
‘We’ll be pretty objects if we go back amongst people,’ I went on. ‘We’ll be dodging and starting and turning our heads every minute of the day.’
‘We won’t like it, when we go back,’ she took me up.
‘How?’ I wanted to know.
‘You may hate solitude, Hugh, but it changes you. When we go back we’ll be like country folk in a city. We’ll be crowded, and overlooked, and choked for lack of room. We won’t take well to a house—’
‘Like the tinkers,’ I laughed.
‘Choking for lack of room to breathe,’ she went on seriously.
‘If we go back,’ I interrupted her. ‘And if we go back there may not be so many people round us to crowd us as there used to be.’
We stared at each other, and I could read in her eyes, as she read in mine, the fear and despair that we strove daily to hide even from ourselves. We could not cheat ourselves all the time, and even when we seemed to forget the reason for our escape, those guns we heard spoke to our secret minds, and the thought of war disturbed our inmost thoughts.
‘What are we slaving for?’ I cried. ‘What are we arranging and planning for? I tell you it’s to kill thought that we’re racing and hurrying, Terry—to kill thought!’
I gave up picking blaeberries this evening to watch her where she sat under a rock curtained with berry bushes. She sat there picking the fruit with an air of complete absorption. For every berry that went into her dish half a dozen found their way to her mouth. I grew suddenly afraid of losing her, and such an anguish of terror seized me that my strength went from me and my heart was turned to ice. I watched her and I could not speak nor move.
She turned her face towards me. Her startled look recalled my wits and I strove to smile. Her mouth and cheeks were blue with the blue dust of the blaeberries and when she opened her mouth to laugh she showed a tongue and teeth all black and red with the dye and juice of the fruit.
‘Why! what is it, Hugh?’ she asked, gazing steadily at me.
I smiled as best I could. Then I gave up pretending. I let my head fall on my hands and surrendered myself up to desolate thoughts. In an instant she was kneeling beside me.
‘Hugh! Hugh!’ she cried, ‘are you ill?’
‘I’m all right,’ I articulated, raising my head with an effort.
‘You’re as white as a ghost,’ she went on. ‘What’s the matter, Hugh?’
My tongue was loosened and I babbled like a child, crying, ‘Terry, don’t leave me, never leave me, Terry.’
‘There, there, don’t be afraid,’ she comforted me. ‘I’m here; Terry’s here beside you; what harm can come to us? What nonsense is this you’ve got into your poor foolish head? What, is this all you’ve gathered? Look what I’ve got!’
‘You haven’t such an awful lot,’ I muttered.
‘I have so, pounds more than you, anyway. Come on, hurry up, and we’ll fill our dishes and go home for supper. You’re hungry, I know what’s wrong with you. What’ll we have for supper, fried trout or baked pike? I wish you could see your face, Hugh. Were you eating berries by the handfuls?’
But when I glimpsed her face while she thought my eyes were turned the other way I saw there the same appalled look that I knew my own eyes betrayed.