I GOT lost in the middle of a wood once. It was night, I was on the tail of a runaway terrier and the torch gave out. It was winter, rain-clouded, moon-less—as close to laboratory black-out as anyone could hope to avoid in real life.
How to get back to the house, in such blindness? I looked back at that December midnight and wondered if, by some strange energy, some subconscious tampering with fate and time, I caused the bulb to blow. Previously, I had spent hours in the wood, where we kept pigs and sheep, learning to identify trees by touch. The braille of bark. That night I had my test.
After some initial stumbling, I found, in sequence: The Old Oaks (deeply, vertically fissured bark, fingernail deep, in mosaic ‘tiles’); The Beech Sorority (smooth, eel-skin, seal-skin, but as cold as stone); The Birch
