Fine line quote across upper back

The lamp in the hut has been smoking all week, so forgive the soot on this page. Father's map came back from the printer with the wrong lake drawn in, and I have spent two days over it with a pen, trying to make the Marrow Moss look like something a person could walk round. You would laugh. I have taken to ringing words in the margin of the survey book, and the one I keep returning to is wander.

Mr Pell came up the valley road on Tuesday asking after his boy, Tom, who went out after the strays in the fog and did not come down. Everyone says the moss took him. I told Mr Pell I would look at the chart. He stood in the doorway with his hat in both hands and said, "He always did wander," as though it were a fault in the boy, and I found I could not answer him kindly, because I had been thinking the same.

Then I did something foolish. I laid the survey beside the shepherd's notes and noticed that Tom's track folded back on itself twice near the old cairn. Walkers who go far, I have found, tend to double back and come home by a road they did not set out on. So I drew a faint pencil line from the cairn to the cottage at Haddon Brow, and in the morning I rode up there with a lantern. A girl had been keeping a fire banked behind the wall for three nights, and Tom was asleep beside it with his boots still laced.

He is home. I will tell you the rest when you are back at Easter.

Love, Mary