I stopped walking. I stood still in the middle of the track and I surveyed the landscape around me and I understood that the eyes which did this had lived a million times before. The way I scanned this horizon was the way the horizon had been scanned by my ancestors fifty thousand years ago as they walked the savannahs with spears between their toes. They had made me. I had learned it from them. Everything my body did the way I curled my fingers and bent my elbows the way I turned my head when I heard a sound. I had learned it from them and they had learned it from the apes before them and the apes had learned it from the fish and all of us had come through this together. Everything led up to me and everything I was would lead beyond me there was this great chain and I was a link in it. The past and the future they were nothing they came together and parted again and everything was rising and falling and swirling around everything else.
I felt like I had fallen down a hole into a thousand years ago. I looked around me and everything was much older than I was. I didn’t see anything so much as feel it. I felt I was in a wood and I could smell smoke and there were people around and maybe dancing. Carts were moving. Wooden carts. There was talk and I didn’t understand it though the words were familiar. There were buildings made of wood and straw. There was a wooden pole and a group of men sitting around a fire and one man standing before them raising his arms. It felt like a ceremony but everything was happening on the other side of a fine sheet of gauze or through a two-way mirror and here I was just standing as if I were apart from it and yet I could see it. I was there and I was here I was just passing through and I seemed so small in it that almost I could not bear it. I felt like I was fighting off some huge emptiness just beneath the surface of everything I had ever pretended was real. I felt like I was breaking apart and I wanted so much to break apart and yet I resisted it. I so wanted to be broken into pieces but a fear was rising within me.
Then suddenly the fear gave way to a great calmness which flattened out all of the emotions within me made them white like the white sky. A great indifference came over me. I thought: I don’t care about anything. I don’t care about anyone. I’m sure there are people I am supposed to care about but I do not. I don’t care about myself because I don’t believe in myself. I don’t care if I’m alive or dead or what happens in the world or what the world is or what comes next. None of it interests me. I don’t care about this lack of interest. I’m not happy or sad. I don’t despair I don’t feel joy. I just am. I don’t care about anything and because I don’t care I have become free.
I came back into myself then. I came back into my body and onto the moor and I kept walking along the track. Here I was again out on my search with my pack on my back and my map with the gridlines on it. Here I was with my plan. And yet everything had changed. All that day as I walked the lines the calmness stayed in me the great whiteness and everything I had seen. What I now knew about myself it stayed there and it would never leave me again. I walked the gridlines dutifully and saw nothing. No scat no hairs no marks no prints. I sat by the hut circles by the faint raised mounds of grass that marked where people had lived when this had been a town five thousand years ago. I heard nothing and saw nothing. I drank water. I walked my ten miles and then I headed home.
It came just when I had stopped looking. I was loping awkwardly along the thin black peaty path that wound its way through the heather. I was tired and I was thinking of my sleeping bag. On the way down back towards the track that led home I had to pass a wood high up on the shoulder of the moor. The wood had a wire fence around it. The edge of the wood with the fence was perhaps half a mile from me as I moved down off the moor towards home.
As I walked I caught a movement from the corner of my eye and I turned towards the wood and there it was. The thing that walks. It was long and low and dark and black and it was moving along the fence line. I couldn’t see it distinctly through the drizzle. Almost as soon as I saw it it disappeared from my sight. But I got a better view than before and I had been right I had been right all along. It was not a dog or a deer or a fox or a badger. It was a long low dark animal with a thin curling tail that it held above the ground as it walked. Its motion was smooth and cool. I didn’t see where it went. Into the woods I supposed. But it was real. I had been right. It was real. It was real and it walked and I had seen it again.
I was sure there would be no point in following it but I went anyway across to the edge of the wood where I had seen it. There was a scent in the air I was sure of it a sharp hard musky smell. I wasn’t frightened this time there was nothing to be frightened of. I walked all along the fence line peering through the trees looking for movement between the trunks. Every time I fancied I saw something it turned out to be nothing. I looked for footprints but there were no footprints. I was so tired and yet I was floating with this now flying with it. I had been right. It was here. Again I had seen it again it had come. I was closing in.
When I woke the next morning a white horse was staring at me through the window. It was all white with a white mane. The end of its nose was grey and pink. It was just standing there staring at me curious. The muscles in its flanks and legs twitched occasionally. I could see its veins and sinews under the skin. It just stood there and looked at me with its dark eyes. Of course it was beautiful. I jumped on the horse’s back and held tight to its mane and it ran it ran down the field it leapt over clover and buttercups. We jumped a hedge and then another we crossed more fields we saw no people there was nothing we just kept going until we entered a forest.
It was a deep dark tangled forest and we rode for days and days. We never stopped he kept running he was not tired and I held on and I shrieked for joy and the air ran across my ears and my hair. We ran and ran for days and weeks without stopping until we came to a great clearing of grass and bluebells and there I slid down off the horse’s back and I lay on the ground and I looked up at the sky and breathed. The horse came over and looked down at me as I lay and I saw that he was not a horse he was a deer a white stag a white stag with golden antlers. And then I remembered that there were no forests anymore that you could not ride for days anywhere that you would be stopped by fences roads shops cars people that no horse could take you to this clearing now that there were no horses anyway. I sank into the ground then and outside the window the only whiteness was the sky and there was no whiteness in me and I was heavy.
I wonder if every animal is a spirit. That rabbit you saw on the road the dog you live with the birds on the feeder in your garden the spider that hangs in the corner of your bathroom. What if they are all spirits sent to you and how you treat them is what you are. A thousand ant spirits in a nest and you pour boiling water onto them and what does that make you? Do you kick your dog or stroke him and give him a biscuit? Maybe your choice shapes the world and everything in it. Maybe that’s the secret. There has to be a secret.
I felt tired the next morning tired and dirty and old. I sat at the table drinking my morning mug of water and thinking about the creature and suddenly I felt an overwhelming need to be clean. How long had it been since I had washed? I couldn’t remember. Perhaps I had never washed. I needed to clean my body. I couldn’t let the creature see me like this. There had to be some dignity. If I was not clean it would never come. There was a yellow plastic tub in the corner of the room which had probably been used once for collecting something from somewhere. Now I took it outside into the yard. The drizzle was still coming down. I went back into the house and brought out the jerry can which was two thirds full of water and I poured all of the water into the plastic tub. I put the lid back on the jerry can and took it back inside. Then I stood by my bed and took off all of my clothes. I left them in a pile on the floor and walked outside and stood in the bucket.