Death in the dusk

by Virgil Markham

I explored the hill and all about, but unfortunately it was creased and gorged by channels, tiny valleys. Trees and rank underbrush grew in these troughs, increasing in thickness down the declivity, and the banners of mist were tangled in the trees. The trunks were clammy, the fallen leaves dank, the earth too soft for good footing. My shoes sank over the ankles in leaves and loam. Bereft of my halo, I had little joy. And after an hour of climbing up and down, groping and grasping, of peering for traces of foundered or buried walls, I realized, with a shock that sickened me, that I was out of my reckoning in the lower fog again, and that I could not trace my way back. I could not even tell in which direction Mynydd Tarw lay.

I was almost frantic. It was now past mid-afternoon, less than two hours before sunset, and had I known the bee-line to my hostel in the difficultly-pronounced village, I could not have reached it before darkness had long covered Wales.

The valleys, immersed in mist below me, were a wilderness, and broad of expanse; once on the uplands again, however, I believed I could find Mynydd Tarw, and thence strike on the true way home. As for exploring the Vale of Aidenn Water itself, I had no reason to believe that man had ever built a habitation there. To regain the uplands was my anxious wish; but not even this was an easy feat. I was weary already, from physical exertion and strain of mind, but it should have been easy to keep my course upward, however slow my progress. Yet the yellow grass and the heather was flat and long, and whether still dry or drenched with fog, slippery and maddening to ascend upon. Moreover, I would find myself in channels torn and scarred by water, now streamless in summer season, but choked with thorny creepers and thick spear-like stalks in malign barriers.

But I persevered, although I found the mist had grown thicker above as day declined. Presently I recognized the sweet smell of new-cut hay in fields above me, and soon afterward kneeing myself to the sharp edge of a parapet of rock, I rejoiced to see the smoky round of the sun. There was a line of wild apple-trees along the rim of the uplands at this point. The crooked branches and straggling shoots of them made them all like black hats of witches wreathed with tattered ribbons, save for the one directly before me, through whose limbs half-despoiled of leaves the sun sent a wicked leering shine that made me singularly uneasy.

I had come into a region thickly populated with cattle. There were a score on the hillock to my right, and when I had gone thence over a bristling wire fence I found a hundred more filling the twilight plain with their shadows. There was not a sound from the widespread throng, but I had a feeling that each dispassionate bovine head was turned toward me, and I advanced with something of the shyness of a child crossing a drawing-room where he feels every eye cold and critical. A little the uncanny sense gripped me that I had happened upon some land undiscovered by Gulliver, where cows were people, and very superior people. There had been so few of them visible all day, now so many; I could not rid myself of the notion that I was an intruder. (Just then the reasonable explanation did not occur to me that atmospheric conditions had much to do with the migrations of the beasts from place to place on the horseshoe.)

Across an unkempt stone wall which I whipped up laggard muscles to leap—I was going rapidly—sweet-fleshed sheep, of orthodox tan, the cross of Welsh mountain breed with black-faced “Shrops,” were nudging one another in an anxious mass. I looked toward the sinking sun and discerned a black rift perhaps a mile distant: the Vale of Aidenn Water, with the prominences of the western arm of the horseshoe, Great Rhos, Esgair Nantau, and Vron Hill, nosing up to the sky even another mile beyond.

Then down on me came dark ruin with a rush.

I was aware appallingly of some vaster shadow blotting out the gorgeous disc which lay on the western hills, a shadow blatant, militant, perilous. A sting of fear in my breast goaded me to instant flight; I was plunging away all in an instant, every part of me in panic, without realization of what it was from which I fled.

Ten seconds of rushing flight, a frantic glance behind me, and my returning faculties told me what that fell form was, horned and pawed, with cavorting death-like head and eyes evilly a-gleam, the shape rampaging, the feet tremendous on the shaken ground. I knew too well those signs of the Hereford breed, the twining horns and the white face so startlingly suggestive of the skull beneath. It was a bull, the hugest bull on earth, insane with murderous passion.

Terror winged me in that course for life. Once I stumbled and rolled down a slope littered with small stones, but my speed was scarcely lessened. I must have regained my feet, for I drove myself through a patch of merciless nettles and awful thorns, yet was hardly sensible of being torn and stabbed. Not until long afterward did I feel the heavy bruise, like the mark of an iron palm, which my hard and firmly fastened pack had printed between my shoulder-blades, saving me a worse blow. Now my due training for the mile at the University, not so very long ago, and the desire for strict regimen then instilled in me, and my frequent jaunts on foot through broad countrysides, were in good stead. In the beginning of this breathless chase, I had had a wide margin of advantage, and now I was all but holding my own, when ahead of me I saw deliverance. For I had turned westward in flight across the leveller hilltop, and the brink of the Vale of Aidenn Water, with its slope looking a precipice all around and its hollow now a mammoth bowl of impenetrable fog, was less than a furlong away ahead.