about just before 11 o’clock in the morning.
And the night before I had killed Robert and locked Maw in her room.
I could feel the start of the glow of the sun through the trees but it was still dark and Peppa was fast asleep. It was really cold and there was frost on the burned ends of the sticks in the fire and the whole length of it was dusty ash but I could see some smoke coming from the middle where there were lumps like charcoal. The stone we cooked the rabbit on was split into three flat ovals that looked like roof slates, like we’d sliced it. I thought they’d make good plates.
We had two head torches and a solar charger but I was trying to get used to the dark and seeing and the more you sit in the dark the easier it gets to see. Even in pitch black you can sense things like animals do. And I am not scared of the dark and neither is Peppa. At night here it is so black and there is so little light pollution from towns and cars you can see the Milky Way and the stars give you a bit of light to see by even if there is no moon. It’s only glow and not proper light and it starts to go down before the sun comes up and that is one way you can tell when dawn will be if the sky is clear.
The wind was picking up now and it was a cold one. I slid out of the sleeping bag and found my trainers and joggers and pulled them on. I zipped my fleece up and then blew the embers back to glowing and started a little fire with three half burned twigs. I crumbled some dry birch bark on and it fizzed and cracked and gave me more flame, then I started building a pyramid fire with ends of burned sticks and some of the sticks from the dry pile and waited for it all to take and a nice yellow flame to come out. The wind was catching the smoke and sending it straight away from me so the wind was a northwesterly and it was starting to blow.
I got the kettle and ran down to the burn to get water. In the SAS Survival Handbook it tells you to always filter water even if it comes from a running burn, but I read in other places that so long as you boil it, it’s safe because boiling kills bacteria like Weil’s disease which comes from infected rodent urine, and also kills parasites and flukes.
The burn was bubbling and rushing and there was a stone where you came out of the woods where you could kneel and fill the kettle in a fast-moving bit that ran over smooth rock and as I knelt to fill the kettle I looked up and there was a deer. There was enough light to make it out standing still as stone and staring straight at me from only about six metres away on the other bank. It was a young doe and I froze as still as it.
And we stayed like that. Paused like a DVD and staring, and I tried to become aware of my breathing so I didn’t think and move and so I wouldn’t feel the cold stone under my knees. And my breathing slowed so it was soon so slow I didn’t know it. Then I felt a sensation like someone very gently tapping the top of my spine, slowly just tapping. And I saw things starting to drop down around the deer like little pricks of light, and they dropped with each slow tap. I stopped feeling the stones under my knees and hearing the burn bubble and the leaves moving. The air stopped going in and out of my lungs and I felt light and then not there and just looking out again at the deer and the lights that dropped in lines like rain coming down dead straight. The deer just moved out of my vision like someone leaving a picture. It moved slow and calm and made no noise.
Then the sun was up and a slice of it was pushing over the top of the mountain above the forest and I stood up and walked back to the shelter with the kettle full.
Peppa was awake and squatting by the fire and she was eating the Dundee cake and she said ‘I want tea Sal.’
She fed sticks into the fire and I put the kettle on the frame to boil and got the enamel cups and put teabags in them. We had loads of teabags.
I said ‘We’re not gonna hunt deer.’
And Peppa said ‘Alright.’ Then she said ‘How long have we been here?’
And I thought for a minute and said ‘I can’t remember.’ And I couldn’t.
I knew it was days and nights but I couldn’t remember how many and in my mind I went through all the last day cooking the rabbit and doing the skin on the hoop of alder and Peppa doing slingshot and snaring the rabbit and the big Trout and the worm in Peppa’s fingers and seeing the warren and Peppa calling Bear a wanker and coming down the slope in the sun and going through the wood and eating belVitas for breakfast and waking up and feeling Peppa to see if she was cold and then being asleep and then there was a day before and I might’ve built the shelter that day or I might have built it the day before that or before that and dug the latrine and the long walk over from Glentrool with the rucksack and sweating in the sun and I didn’t know when that was or if it was yesterday.
Peppa said ‘You alright Sal?’
I think I started to panic then because my breathing got fast and I felt butterflies in my chest. I only panic if I can’t remember things I need to or if I don’t know where I am or if we lose the map or the compass. When I tried to go into my memory for the days just past it felt like a big mush and I didn’t get the pictures and things in order, I got a big rush and a mush.The number never just came into my head like it had.
Then I got the tapping on my spine again and started to see the little light pricks dropping slowly and I started to get more calm.And I tried to become aware of my breathing and felt calmer and the little lights dropped down in the wood behind Peppa’s head and then I went warm and wanted to smile.
I said ‘I couldn’t remember.’
And Peppa said ‘Never mind. It doesnae matter.’
And she was right, it didn’t. I tried for things that did matter. And I got that the size 10 and 12 hooks and the split shot were zipped into the inner pocket of the top part of the rucksack with the wire traces and the plastic pack of spinners and I had the rabbit liver and heart and kidney on a stone for bait and the rod was 2.3 metres fully extended.
Further back I got the way to tie a blood knot for the hook onto the line and how to tie in the trace with a dropper to take three split shot to make a little ledger rig for bottom fishing, and I got taught all that by Ian Leckie, Mhari’s papa, who had been in the army and been on the fishing boats and once took me and Mhari fishing off the wall and we got a Cod and a Saithe.
I said to Peppa ‘Let’s go fishing.’
At the loch the wind was up and there was a big ripple on the water. The fish would be down and not on top like yesterday. And the wind was cold and stratus cloud covered all the blue sky. Stratus cloud means rain or snow and with the wind hammering up the loch from the northwest it felt like it would be snow.
I showed Peppa how to cast a spinner and we got two Trout and a small Perch. Then she dug for worms and I tried ledgering the rabbit liver on a size 10 as far out as I could cast. But I didn’t get a bite. We used the three worms Peppa found and we got another Trout and a big Perch with black stripes and a spikey dorsal fin like a sail.
But the wind was getting too strong and cold for us and it started to spit sleet and went dark. We went back to the shelter and had Dundee cake and belVitas and tea. And then we collected as much wood as we could and made a really big stack and I built a long fire again. Then I went over to the bracken and dug up a big bunch of bracken roots and cleaned and washed them in the burn. They were fat and long and pure white. You can eat them roasted and they contain carbohydrates but you can’t eat too many because they can give you cancer but you have to eat a lot. The poison in bracken is called ptaquiloside and it is destroyed by heat.
The snow started as it was getting dark with the wind driving it into the back of the shelter and it made it all white and the tarp sagged a bit on top of the paracord.
I roasted the fish and the roots on a flat stone with salt on them all.We used the split stone for plates and the roasted roots tasted like chips and Peppa ate loads of them. The fish was nice but the Perch skin was jaggy and you couldn’t eat it but the flesh was white and sweet. Then we had tea with UHT milk and sugar.
It was lovely snuggling in the shelter in the sleeping bag with both blankets and watching