At a certain point on her journey she would hear the sea. A murmur only, a soft susurrus against the rattle of the bracken and the squodge of her footsteps. The whisper would grow louder, though never really loud, until she reached the edge where the world fell away in rooty edges above cliffs of gnarl, where the seabirds made screaming dizzy clouds beneath her as they wheeled wildly out, spiraling from their precipice perches over the hammered surface of the sea.
Then panic came, always. Even if she wasn’t closely pursued in the dream, even if she had lots of time to walk slowly along the sheer drop, noticing the sparkle of the waters and the whirling gyre of the birds, panic always overcame her. She wouldn’t find the right place! It would be better to jump now, jump before they caught up with her. Otherwise they might catch her, and that would be worse. Every time she came here she had to fight down the urge to jump, shut it out, stop thinking about it. She had to turn to her left to walk as close to the edge as possible, eyes hunting for landmarks, putting her feet carefully onto stone and pebbly places, leaving no track to be seen, knowing all the time that her smell remained, floating on the air, hanging there for the hunters to find!
Eventually, long after she’d become convinced she had missed it, she came to the curiously twisted rock looming at the edge of the cliff. It was always there, alongside a shrubby tree with an outflung trunk.
Then she had to be agile and quick. Once, long ago, someone had carried her. Then, she’d locked her arms around someone’s neck and that someone had made the jump. Now she was old enough to jump by herself, out from the edge of the cliff, catching the protruding trunk, holding on tightly as it sagged below the level of the rim, and then … then she had to grasp the rooty growth that extended from the cliff face and pull herself in!
In was through the narrow entry of a cave, a little sandy-floored crevice not much bigger than two or three Snarks, where the floor was softened with dried bracken and flat stones lay piled near the opening. The stones were for stacking in the entrance until only tiny airholes remained. Soft animal skins waited to be pulled around her. Someone … someone had given her the skins, but she could not remember who. It didn’t matter. When she was curled there, wrapped there, she was warm and completely safe. No one, not even the trackers, could find her there.
From her position of warm safety, she sometimes heard them coming, their voices keening over the sound of the waters, louder and louder until they were wailing into the ocean wind from just above the place where she lay. They had smelled her as far as the edge, but they smelled her no more. She had flown away like a sea-bird. She had vanished. Her hole was not visible from above. When the stones were stacked in the opening, it was not visible from the sea below or from the gulf of air. So far as the flying things knew, she was gone.
The spray blew gently into her face. The sound of the seabirds came softly to her ears. At night she could see the stars through the hole in the stone. Sometimes it was enough merely to be there, merely to be safe, and it was tempting to lie there, not eating, not drinking, letting life go away somewhere else, letting herself wither into nothing, quietly, contentedly, safe. Being dead was safer yet, she knew that, but life still pulled at her. Besides, the cave supported life. At the back of the crevice, water leaked down onto a hollowed stone beside a tight chest full of hard bread and dried fruit and strips of smoked meat. She could stay in safety for days and days at a time, without dying. It was a good place.
Later, after she was … found, picked up by … whoever it had been; later, after she was somewhere else, after she was at the stone house with the wall; later, when she burrowed into the shrubbery to be safe, to be hidden, it was the moor she dreamed of. Rather than go back to the stone house, sometimes she stayed in the dream for a very long time. It didn’t matter how long she stayed. When she came back eventually, they still had to feed her, even if they didn’t want to. Any child who was sent to the stone house, they had to take care of. They had to feed her. They weren’t allowed to kill her.