[caption id="attachment_748" align="alignleft" width="300"] c. Ivan Wilson[/caption]

By Elen Sentier

Snow dusted the high hills. It pulled me. I grabbed my staff, boots and a parker and went out. It was the first snow of the winter, crackling, sparkling, shimmering in the sunlight, it crunched under my feet. The track led straight out from the cottage door, straight out across the moor, straight to the tor. In this light it looked a mere half a mile away, it wasn’t and I knew I would be out all day.

It felt like no time at all until I was at the twin humps. They stood up out of the hilltop half way to the tor like the breasts of the goddess, between them was a cyst or rather the remains of one. I stopped and sucked some snow in lieu of water – of course I’d come out without anything! I fumbled in pockets and found the tinder box, yes it held the beginnings of a fire but finding dry wood in the snow would be worse than looking for hen’s teeth. The snow froze my lips and tongue, made my teeth ache, but it did good, the thirst was gone. I stuffed frozen fingers into the pockets of my coat, the gloves would go back on when my hands were dry.

Walking … walking … putting one foot in front of the other, going somewhere, going nowhere, walking. It felt as if I was standing still. A voice in my head told me, ‘It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.’ I stopped. The snow moved and I froze. Out of the snow materialised a white hare, snow coloured except for the whiskers and the little dark lines of the Y of his nose. His eyes were deep dark pools.

His nose wrinkled, he snuffled at me, ears back flat against his neck then he stretched up, sitting and then standing up on his long back legs. He wuffled my fingers.

‘Not walk!’

I shook my head wondering if the cold had given me tinnitus but the words came again.

‘Not walk!’

I stared, somehow the hare was talking inside my head. The dark pools of his eyes held mine and a picture began forming in my mind’s eye, Arthur Rackham’s drawing of the old fable with the hare asleep by the road while the tortoise walked steadily on. I frowned. The hare’s white paw touched me. ‘You mean I should go to sleep by the road?’

I curled around the soft white furry body of the hare and we lay backed into the cyst. It was cold, cold, cold. My eyelids drooped …

Blackness … deep velvet blackness sprinkled with diamonds. I was floating in the midst of the blackness and beside me was the hare. I was warm, happy, we floated together.

The stars began to shimmer and twinkle, everything went out of focus and I found myself coming awake. The hare was beside me still and we were both lying down, my arms around the hare. I shivered, blinked, it was cold and everything around me was white.

The hare wriggled and sat up. His fur was so, so soft as it tickled my chin. He crawled out of my arms and lolloped out into the open. I sat up and banged my head, discovered we were under an overhang, an almost-cave in the bottom of a tor. I crawled out and stood up. We were at the tor.

And yet we were not.

I knew the tor, oh so well. It was my regular view, I had seen it every day of my life and walked to it five days out of every seven. And this was the tor of my life … and yet it wasn’t. I stood staring round. The sky was dark purple-grey, a snow-sky but with a sparkle to it. It flickered like lightning in the corner of my eye but when I turned to look at it was gone. The snow too was different, crisper, brighter, but it was when I looked back to my home that it hit me. There was no home. My home was no longer where I knew it had been when I left the house. In its place was a huge mountain, a mile high or so it seemed and shaped like a huge lump of stone, like the plug of a volcano. Somehow we were somewhere else.

I felt something light standing on my foot, it was the hare. He looked back up at me and patted my foot with his paw.

‘How do I get home again?’ I whispered.

‘Sleep,’ I heard in my head.

‘Do I just dream my life away?’

‘What is dream? What is wakefulness?’

I couldn’t answer him. This was real, as real as anything I’d ever known. Was I asleep now or was I awake?

‘Does it matter?’

Did it? All my life I’d thought it did.

The hare snuffled and nudged my leg then loped away. I followed and he led me round the tor rock, going widdershins. And suddenly we were no longer there. The snow shimmered and flickered, strobing white-black-white. I felt dizzy, my knees buckled and I slid to the ground.

Blackness … deep velvet blackness sprinkled with diamonds. I was floating in the midst of the blackness and beside me was the hare. I was warm, happy, we floated together.

The stars began to shimmer and twinkle, everything went out of focus and I found myself coming awake with the hare in my arms. I struggled upright to find myself back at the cyst. The light was fading, streaks of crimson painted the western sky. The hare loped a couple of paces, turned and looked at me.

‘I’m coming,’ I said, grinning now.

Together we loped home in the dimpsy as the weather came in.

 

The dympsy is the gloaming, the twilight time of the Faer folk to us from Devon …

 

Elen Sentier's novel Moon Song releases on February the 27th 2015 and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.  AMAZON US  AMAZON UK

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