Ornate elephant with yin yang on upper back

The elephant came back to the forest this week, though nobody saw it come. Mr Abbott's boy found its prints in the mud below the sluice, four broad rounds pressed deep, and every one of them was patterned, as though someone had stamped the ground with a carved seal. Mother says it is only the rain working on the soft bank. I have stopped arguing with her about rain.

I went down with the lantern on Thursday. The beeches at the forest edge are old enough that their roots lift the path into knuckles, and between them the moss grows in rings and zigzags, lines so tight and regular I could have sworn a hand had drawn them. Past the third bend there is a clearing where the old mill-pond has gone to reeds. On the far bank, half in the water, sits a great grey stone shaped like an animal, and on its brow someone has scratched a circle split into two curls, one white quartz, one black slate, fitted together like the halves of an apple.

I sat with it a long while. The beast is not carved so much as woven, every panel of its skin dotted and chevroned, its ears spread like fans, and I thought of what Father said about the travelling men who painted their bullocks for the autumn fair. Nobody in the village can tell me what the two halves mean. Old Hannah says they keep the balance. Mr Abbott says they are the sun and the water. I think the elephant simply holds them so they do not roll off into the reeds.

I left the lantern on its back, where the light falls on the curls. Come home at Christmas and we will go down together, and you can tell me whether I am being foolish. Your loving sister, Margaret.