Sixty-seven year old Jack McFarland  has been a farmer all his life, on the same patch of land his father and his grandfather worked before him.  But things are changing.  People need more housing, more landfill sites, more of everything, and the landlord isn't renewing the lease.  He's sold the farm off to be split up and destroyed.

Thinking that the changes are taking a heavier toll on his mind, Jack at first ignores the warnings that come off the land, the manifestations of things long dead or extinct in this small alcove of Scotland.  He ignores these things until a violent fury batters the land and threatenes to rip it into the sea.  There can be only one thing to appease the land; a sacrifice, as in the days before the land was broken up, when wolves once roamed the plains and forests and painted people carved symbols into stone.

                                             THREE

                               SHEPHERD'S WARNING

Jack had been walking for over two hours, and even though his legs were tired, crying out from the thighs and calves as though someone had swung a heavy rubber mallet in their general direction, there was still more walking to be done before the evening was through.  He wasn’t used to so much free time during the day, and when Bess was working her part-time job, there was nothing to do but walk.  He could no more become idle than grow horns on his head. 

He walked up the slope towards the bank of trees that made up the largest tract of land for which he had never had any use.  The chill of the early evening seemed to breathe out from between the mature trunks, as though the mythical creatures that had once inhabited the needle-littered floor still roamed about its nooks and crannies.  Diamond stopped abruptly at his feet, peering up at him, smiling, with her tongue lolling out the side of her mouth like a fat, pink slug, and he wondered what he was doing up here.  Subconsciously, deep down where all manner of unknown actions and thoughts occurred, driving the rest of the body onwards without its knowledge, he knew that he had come to say a final goodbye to some of the trees that had grown as he had grown.  It had been decades since he had ventured into the thicket of the woodland, and longer still since he had considered them part of his land.  The woods were a derelict, natural monument to a time before intensive farming and cultivation had massacred their number, but they did serve a small, modern purpose; it was a natural barrier to the grounds of the landowner’s house in the valley on the other side of them.  It kept the snobbery of another way of life away, and that was just how he liked it.

There was no fencing here; deer had long since departed these areas and were only spotted further inland, and the trees - pine and mixed broad-leafed, interspersed with smaller, shining silver birches which had dug their deep roots in after the thaw of the last ice age - were packed so tightly together at the fringes that their lower branches, dead and barren as the canopy above blocked out the sun, created an uneven enclosure.  As he stepped into the gloom, pushing the branches aside, instantly remembering the times he had fair skipped and ran through these woods, boisterous and loud as any young lad should be, he felt the chill of the evening as he had never felt it before.  It felt at least ten degrees cooler in the shade of the trees and he pulled his drab coat about him, pulling down the woollen bonnet on his bald head as Diamond skipped into the forest with her tail wagging.  The smell instantly reminded him of childhood games when chores had been completed.  It was musty, a stench of decay and, billowing up from the carpet of decomposition below his feet, it hung almost visible on the air like a throng of midges.  But it was a natural fragrance and not altogether unpleasant.

The thorns of bramble bushes just inside the tree line scratched at his clothing and his hands, and he stared at them for a moment, remembering they had been there even when he was a boy, almost as ancient and wild as the woodland itself.  Finding an area which had always been a natural corridor through the willowy branches, he beat back the limbs, which had crept in and suffocated the empty space, with his walking stick, trampling the lower ones into the ground and emerging, stinging on the backs of the hands and gleaming with ruby-port droplets, into a clearing that was round in shape and soft with a carpet of soft, rotting wood and thick moss.  Without even thinking about it, he reached into the bramble bush and picked a handful of the black, hairy berries, popping them into his mouth as though it was the most natural thing in the world.  It had been a long time since he had tasted such organic tartness and his cheeks drew in, lips smacking, as the berries fired up his taste buds.  He would have avoided eating from any other bramble bush as if it carried the plague within its roots, but this one, untouched by human hands for the most part, was pure natural goodness, and no matter how dirty the world had become, he knew this bush was untainted by chemical and artificial poison.

In the clearing – he had a hard time working out whether it had always been here – he allowed Diamond to skip around until she bounded out of sight.  He breathed deeply of the air and let the natural aroma of the place seep into him.  Being an ex-smoker – although Bess would be dismayed to know that he occasionally partook of a soothing puff on a well-hidden pipe - scents and fragrances came stronger and more pungent to him, and the mossy undertone of the forest air tickled his nostrils.  There was a wet, meatier smell here too, of resolute fungi clinging on in places all other plant life feared to tread.  Most people would find such a smell difficult to bear after a while, but Jack was more than used to it, and it brought back memories, evoking times gone by, much like the fragrant aroma of a fine perfume adored by a half-forgotten lover. 

Images flitted through his head, there and gone before he could concentrate on them, leaving him sad and melancholy, but he got the gist of what they were about.  They were snapshots of he and his father, hunting rabbits in these dense woods when the farm was running itself and the workload was lifted slightly from their shoulders.  He could almost hear the bracken snapping furiously under heavy footsteps as they tracked their prey, air rifles at the ready, birds screeching in annoyance at the disturbance.  And now that he listened, he could hear the distant cries of blackbirds and wrens, petty in their arguments.  Leaves rustled and chattered from dying limbs as a larger bird took flight somewhere and disturbed the upper canopy, raining a colourful array of leaves down on his head.  He looked upwards, expecting to see the branches steady after a vibrating shiver, but not a thing stirred. 

Even his heart seemed to have stopped beating.

For the strangest reason, one he could not fathom, he was unexpectedly afraid of the darkened corridors created by the trees.  And the distance from the house, not more than a ten minute leisurely stroll, suddenly seemed like a monumental expanse, dangerous, as though the way led over scalding hot coals with spitting volcanoes raining fire and damnation down on his head.  The very idea that the murkiness of the woods and the sudden lack of human company had scared him seemed stupid and irrational.  He had spent many hours here, as boy and young man, and the alleyways of the woods were as familiar as the deep groves of his palms.

A sensation of being watched and of being in danger stole in and wouldn’t leave, and the more he thought about the short tract of land he would need to cover before reaching the safety of home, the more frightened he became.

Something chattered behind him and he spun around, raising his walking stick and holding it out like a blunt, heavy sword.  Shadows danced between the trees and down the leafy halls built by their branches, but it was only the natural movement of the woods, caused by shafts of evening light through the gaps in the canopy.  A bird called out from further away, and something rustled through the underbrush in reply.  Just behind him a branch cracked, and again he whipped around, stick held out for protection.  The tree nearest him shook some unwanted leaves from its arms and then became still as if the chore had tired it out.

The feeling of fear remained, intensified, no matter how much he told himself he was being a silly old fool.  As if something was standing within feet of him, boring into the flesh at the back of his neck with cool, sharp eyes, studying him for signs of weakness and folly, the feeling of being watched rose, like stifling heat turned up on a coal burner.  He turned this way and that, knowing he was on the verge of irrational hysteria but unable to stop it overwhelming him, suffocating him.  And the more he searched for the thing that was frightening him so badly, the more he frightened himself.

“Diamond, here girl,” he called out shakily, needing the comfort of his faithful companion by his side. 

They were the first words he had spoken out loud, and as though in deference to the unexpected voice of man, the woods suddenly burst into a cacophony of sounds as wildlife fled hither and thither.  The sudden flurry of feathered wings and the unexpected scattering of hairy bodies shook him into a fresh bout of panic and he fled with his arms over his face, fearful that the fauna would attack or that he would run aimlessly into a flock of terrified blackbirds.  It wasn’t until he was standing once again in the fallow field, outside the wall of tress, that he felt the pain of where the sharp claws of the bramble bush had scored him deeply in his haste, and he stood trembling to his very core, still unsure of what had scared him so profoundly.

He called out for Diamond again, and stepped back a few paces as the underbrush wobbled and shook.  He thought he had never been more relieved when the collie came bouncing out into the open and licked his hand in greeting. 

Once safely halfway down the field, panic subsided, occasionally throwing quick glances behind him to make sure that nothing was pursuing him, he stopped and surveyed the land ahead.  Either because of the sudden rush of emotions in the woods, or because he was a sentimental old fool at heart, he shed a solitary tear for what he beheld.  The farmouse, with its various outbuildings, huge barn and row of rickety wooden and stone stables, sat amongst the fields which, even in the fading light, could be acknowledged as growing wild.  Two of the farmhouse windows flickered with warm, amber light and the first wisps of smoke were billowing from the chimney pots on the roof and thinning out in the cool, autumn air.  The first and brightest stars were firing up their engines in the heavens above the sea in the distance, and even the fast moving but gratefully few-and-far-between headlights on the road cutting through the land like a black scar couldn’t detract from the peaceful image of rural tranquillity.

Pushing the image of what this land would look like in a few years time, he tried to imagine what could have frightened him so badly in the woods and decided that it was a conundrum best mulled over in the safety of his own home.  Even though the foolish bout of panic had receded, the incident was still fresh enough in his mind to put that extra bit of speed in his step.

Diamond skipped around his feet, not yet worn out by her long and arduous walk through the forest, eager to be home and fed.  They strode down the slope before Jack turned back and threw one last look at the red line of incandescent sunset above the trees, and then they made their way home for supper.