Patrick O'Brian - Post captain

The tune that Stephen always played on his bear-​leader’s pipe began to run through his head, mingling with Stephen’s voice and half-​remembered instances of courage from Plutarch, Nicholas of Pisa and Boethius, a curious little air with archaic intervals, limited to what four fingers and overblowing could do, but subtle, complicated .

The roaring of a little girl in a white pinafore woke him; she and some unseen friend were looking for the summer mushrooms that were found in this wood, and she had come upon a fungoid growth.

‘Ramón,’ she bellowed, and the hollow echoed with the sound, ‘Ramón, Ramón, Ramón. Come and see what I have found. Come and see what I have found. Come and see. .

On and on and on. She was turned three-​quarters from him; but presently, since her companion did not answer, she pivoted, directing her strong voice to the different quarters of the wood.

Jack had already shrunk as far as he could, and now as the child’s face veered towards him he closed his eyes, in case she should sense their savage glare. His mind was now all alive; no trace of indifference now, but a passionate desire to succeed in this immediate step, to carry the whole undertaking through, come Hell or high water. ‘Frighten the little beast and you will have a band of armed peasants round the wood in five minutes - slip away and you lose Stephen - out of touch, and all our papers sewed inside the skin.’ The possibilities came racing one after another; and no solution.

‘Come, come, child,’ said Stephen. ‘You will spoil your voice if you call out so. What have you there? It is a satanic boletus; you must not eat the satanic boletus, my dear. See how it turns blue when I break it with a twig. That is the devil blushing. But here we have a parasol. You may certainly eat the parasol. Have you seen my bear? I left him in the wood when I went to see En Jaume; he was sadly fatigued. Bears cannot stand the sun.’

‘En Jaume is my godfather’s uncle,’ said the child. ‘My godfather is En Pere. What is the name of your bear?’

‘Flora,’ said Stephen; and called, ‘Flora!’

‘You said him just now,’ said the child with a frown, and began to roar ‘Flora, Flora, Flora, Floral Oh, Mother of God, what a huge great bear.’ She put her hand in Stephen’s and murmured, ‘Aie, my - in the face of God what a bear.’ But her courage returned, and she set to bellowing ‘Ramón, Ramón, Ramón! Come and see my bear.’

‘Good-​bye, poppets,’ said Stephen, in time. ‘May God go with you.’ And waving still to the little figures he said, ‘I have firm news at last; mixed news. Spain has not declared war: but the Mediterranean ports are closed to English ships. We must go down to Gibraltar.’

‘What about the frontier?’

Stephen pursed his lips. ‘The village is filled with police and soldiers: two intelligence men are in charge, searching everything. They have arrested one English agent.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The priest who confessed him told me. But sure I have never thought of the road itself. I know, I did know, another way. Stand over - stand over more this way. The pink roof, and behind it a peak? And to the right of that, beyond the forest, a bare mountain? That is the frontier, joy, and in the dip there is a pass, a path down to Recasens and Cantallops. We will slip across the road after dusk and be there at dawn.’

‘May I take off the skin?’

‘You may not. I regret it extremely, Jack; but I do not know the path well - there are patrols out, not only for the smugglers but for the fugitives, and we may blunder into one or even two. It is a smugglers’ path, a dangerous path indeed, for while the French may shoot you for walking upon it as a man, the smugglers may do the same for looking like a bear. But the second is the proper choice; your smuggler is open to reason, and your patrol is not.’

Half an hour in the bushes by the road, waiting for the long slow train of a battery to pass by - guns, waggons, camp-​followers - several coaches, one pulled by eight mules in crimson harness, some isolated horsemen; for now that they could see the frontier-​line their caution grew to superstitious lengths.

Half an hour, and then across to the cart-​track up to Saint-​Jean de l’Albère. Up and up, the moon clearing the forest ahead of them after the first hour; and with the coming of the moon the first breaths of a sirocco from the Spanish plains, a waft from an opened oven-​door.

Up and still up. After the last barn the track dwindled to a ribbon and they had to walk in single file; Jack saw Stephen’s monstrous bundle - a dark shape, no more -moving steadily a pace or two in front of them, and something like hatred glowed around his stomach. He reasoned: ‘The pack is heavy; it weighs fifty or sixty pounds - all our possessions; he too has been going on all these days, never a murmur; the straps wring his back and shoulders, a bloody welt on either side.’ But the unwavering determination of that dim form, moving steadily on and on, effortlessly, it seemed, always too fast and never pausing - the impossibility of keeping up, of forcing himself another hundred yards, and the equal impossibility of calling for a rest, drowned his reason, leaving only the dull fire of resentment.

The path meandered, branching and sometimes disappearing among huge ancient widespread beeches, their trunks silver in the moon, and at last Stephen stopped. Jack blundered into him, stood still, and felt a hand gripping him hard through the skin: Stephen guided him into the black velvet shadow of a fallen tree. Over the soughing of the wind he heard a repeated metallic sound, and as he recognized the regular beat - a patrol making too much noise - all notion of the unbreathable air and the intolerable state of his body left him. Low voices now and then, a cough, still the clink-​clink-​clink of someone’s musket against a buckle, and presently the soldiers passed within twenty yards of them, moving down the mountain-​side.

The same strong hand pulling him, and they were on the path again. Always this eternal climb, sometimes across the leaf-​filled bed of a stream, sometimes up an open slope so steep that it was hands and knees: and the sirocco. ‘Can this be real?’ he wondered. ‘Must it go on for ever?’

The beech-​trees gave way to pines: pine-​needles under foot, oh the pain. Endless pines on an endless mountain, their roaring tops bowing northwards in the wind.

The shape in front had stopped, muttering ‘It should be about here - the second fork - there was a charcoal burner’s lay - an uprooted larch, bees in the hollow trunk.’

Jack closed his eyes for a great swimming pause, a respite, and when he opened them again he saw that the sky ahead was lightening. Behind them the moon had sunk into a haze, far down in the deep veiled complicated valleys.

The pines. Then suddenly no more pines - a few stunted bushes, heather, and the open turf. They were on the upper edge of the forest, a forest ruled off sharp, as though by a line; and they stood, silently looking out. After two or three minutes, right up there in the eye of the wind, Jack saw a movement. Leaning to Stephen he said ‘Dog?’ Soldiers who had had the sense to bring a dog? Loss, dead failure after all this?

Stephen took his head, and whispering right into the hairy ear he said ‘Wolf. A young - a young female wolf.’

Still Stephen waited, searching the bushes, the bare rocks, from the far left to the far right, before he walked out, paced over the short grass to a stone set on the very top of the slope, a squared stone with a red-​painted cross cut into it.

‘Jack,’ said he, leading him beyond the boundary mark, ‘I bid you welcome to my land. We are in Spain. That is my house below - we are at home. Come, let me get your head off. Now you can breathe, my poor friend. There are two springs under the brow of the hill, by those chestnuts, where you can wash and take off the skin. How I rejoice at the sight of that wolf. Look, here is her dung, quite fresh. No doubt this is a wolf’s pissing-​post: like all the dogs, they have their regular . .