Testimonies: A Novel by Patrick O'Brian Read Free Book Online

fields down in the bottom of the valley and comparing their extent with the prodigious sweep of untouched mountain; the night was touching on the barren land, making it vaster and more powerful, while the little fields dwindled and vanished.
    There was no longer that great buffer of civilization between a man and his remote origins: I felt it strongly; and in an attempt to convey something of what I mean I have written the two following pieces, although they break the run of my narrative.
    I was walking along the road in the morning of a beautiful gentle day when I met Emyr Vaughan going the round of his sheep. We were well acquainted and friendly by this time and he often used to take me part of the way with him to show me things and explain them. It was still the lambing season, and twice every day he went clean round the lower mountain. He was having trouble this year with weak ewes who could not feed their lambs, and with foxes. As we walked he showed me here and there a patch of skin with the close-curled wool of a new lamb on it, and once the hoof, or the foot, of a lamb with the shank still uneaten. He slackened his pace for me, but it was still an effort to keep up, and I did not always hear or understand what he said; however, I remember being struck again by the extraordinary way he recognized individual sheep. “That ewe there, she is the daughter of the one by the wall. She had twins, but she could not feed both of them, and I put one to that ewe we passed by the road, the one I said had the maggot very bad last year—her lamb had the brait.” It was obvious that he was not talking for effect: he had hundreds of sheep there, and he knew each one, with its maternal ancestry. I do not think that any of them had names except those few who had been hand-reared at the farm, brought up with a bottle, and I meant to ask him how he identified each, whether he said inwardly, “There is that sheep with the drooping ears and brown legs, the daughter of the one who got caught in the trap the autumn before the bad winter.”
    We were coming down again to the road a little way above my cottage when we found the body of a lamb, dragged between two rocks. Its head was eaten off.
    “Diwch annwyl!” he said. It was a fine well-grown lamb. He said that he thought he had seen the mother earlier in the day, much farther up. It was a fox of course, he said, and when he had thought for some time he said, “I will put some poison to it tonight.” He spoke with an air of caution—a hushed cunning, as if it were something illegal. He said he was sure I would not tell anybody. It was when he spoke like this that he lost his amiability entirely; all the idiot sharpness of the peasant came into his face; it was as if his eyes diminished and went red round the edges.
    I left him shortly after this and went home to make myself a pot of coffee and to cut some sandwiches for my lunch; the day was so fine that I decided to explore the Diffwys, the land that lay up above the end of the valley on the northern side.
    If I have managed to give a clear impression of Cwm Bugail it will be remembered that on the left-hand side is a green path that runs across the face of the Saeth and up toward a high cleft at the junction of the mountain’s shoulder and the hemicycle of rock that closes the top of the valley. A stream comes down from this cleft in a series of falls—a magnificent spectacle after a few days of rain—and the cleft itself is the beginning of the country that I wanted to explore. The green path—it soon stopped being green and turned to shale, but all that I saw from my window was green, and I always thought of it as the green path—took me longer than I had expected, with the sun on my back and my heavy coat too hot. With pauses I do not suppose that I spent less than two hours reaching the top. It was worth pausing often; every time I turned there was more of the world spread below under me, and more visible over the Penmawr