The Moor by Laurie R. King

Author:Laurie R. King [King, Laurie R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780553579529
Publisher: Bantam Books

THIRTEEN

…The reader is tripping over uncertain ground, not knowing what is to be accepted and what rejected.

—A Book of Dartmoor

« ^ »

When I took my leave from Elizabeth Chase, the good witch of Mary Tavy, my mind, to borrow a phrase from Baring-Gould’s memoirs, was in a ferment. It was still only midday, and Lew House little more than two hours away; I decided to take a look at the place where she had found the injured Tiggy.

I found it without difficulty—there are not so many stone circles on the moor to make for a confusion—but I was not quite sure what to make of it. The site was typical of its kind, upright hunks of granite arranged in a rough circle on a piece of relatively flat ground and surrounded by the moor’s low turf, broken here and there by stones and bracken. A double row of stones (one of Randolph Pethering’s “Druid ceremonial passages”) lay in the near distance, and a moorland track (the Abbot’s Way?) ran alongside.

As Elizabeth Chase had indicated, the most curious part of the hedgehog affair was why the animal should have been out here in the first place. The more I thought about it, the more I had to agree: The little beasts are lovers of woods and the resultant soft leaf mould under which to take cover, a far cry from this blasted heath, which even a badger would have been hard put to carve into a home.

I pulled from Red’s saddlebag the cheese and pickle sandwich and bottle of ale that I had asked for that morning at the Mary Tavy inn, and carried them over to a stone that had once, by the looks of the hollow in the ground at one end, been upright. I laid out my sandwich and opened the bottle with the bottle-opening blade of my pocket knife, and ate my lunch, enjoying the sun and my prehistoric surroundings, and most especially the delightful image of a hitchhiking hedgehog.

An almost lighthearted air of holiday had set in. After all, I had more or less completed my assignment, with an unlikely but glittering gem to carry back to Lew Trenchard and a mere handful of houses between here and the edge of the moor at which to carry out the formalities of my enquiries. My sense of taste had returned, I could very nearly breathe the air, and the sun was actually shining. I stretched out with my head on one stone and my boots on another, and rested for ten minutes before gathering my luncheon débris and swinging back up into the saddle.

“Home, Red,” I said to him, and endured a few hundred yards of his trot before pulling him back to his usual amble.

This time when he shied, I was ready for him. Unfortunately.

Given a negative stimulus of sufficient strength, one can train even the most stubborn animal to avoid a given activity. Red had trained me quite effectively: No sooner did my mind begin to drift away into its own world than it snapped back to apprehensive attention.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.