I took the broken turf iron and went outside to draw a rabbit in the sod. I called the Frenchman. He would not leave the cottage. I was close to tears, worried the outlaws would descend again. I came to drag him out to see my drawing but he was busy collecting peat and thatch and I saw I would have to wait until a fire was going.

He had lost all faith in me, as well he should. He made me hold a rock while he chipped at it and formed a sort of axe, then ground it. The fire was so hot it burned my legs. The sky was gray and wet above my head.

When he had his axe ready he was loudly pleased about it. I expected we would starve to death in the midst of all this food.

When at last he saw my drawing of the rabbit, he clearly did not understand. I huddled by the fire and wondered should I run away and would my daddy find his son's dead body on some lonely path, skin turned to leather, insides eaten long before. My one true comfort was the peat, which did not flame but glowed, exuding an aroma that filled my lungs with balm. I breathed it in as a richer boy might snuffle a stuffed toy, and in all my misery and intoxication, I fell asleep.

When I woke I smelled food. There was a black and battered cauldron on the fire and from it rose the most delicious smell, but Monsieur kept me at arm's length, grinning, singing to the pot, pursing his lips.

"'Oppity-'oppity," said he.

I sat and watched him stir his rabbit stew. Soon I burned my mouth and filled my stomach. Then I slept, curled up like a dead caterpillar beside his smelly feet.

NEXT MORNING Monsieur unearthed a warrener's net and began unpicking it, a completely useless occupation which required his long white toes and bristly mouth and single hand. He hunched over his labor like a naughty monkey, holding down a single thread with his bent toe, pulling apart a knot between tooth and pincered fingers.

By day's end I was freezing cold and near starvation. My protector had destroyed a useful snare and produced instead one hundred feet of undone netting which he wound into a ball. I removed my sodden boots and wondered at my white and wrinkly feet. I wondered where my father was. Not even sleep would save me from my misery.

It rained and rained again. There was a tall black rock upon the saddle which sometimes gave the eerie impression of a man. I tried to catch it moving. As the night approached the Frenchman produced a second net and swept out onto the moor, the net dragging like his wedding train.

I must follow him it seemed.

In different circumstances it would have been a lovely evening on the moor, very soft and kindly, the light mellow and the gin-clear stream whispering around the edges of the bright green turf. The rabbits, having left the safety of their warren, had settled in their gentle multitudes, laying their long shadows on the sweet grasses between their front porch and the stream. How I envied them and feared their death and yearned for it.

We stretched the net taut between our growling stomachs, thus walling the rabbits' bedroom from their dinner table. Monsieur then lobbed a stone among the feeding families who lifted their heads, stood stock-still, noses twitching. One stone later they had become a stampede, a tangling jumping swarm of them, writhing in our net, and the sheer force of their collective panic near stopped my heart. We made a parcel of their writhing lives, so we thought, but in all the tangled squeaking the rabbits fell or swarmed toward a hole, and if Monsieur had not caught one by the leg we might have starved to death in spite of all our murderous intent. It was a big plump fellow, the condemned, and most unlucky to be swung through the air and have its skull slammed hard against the moor. It is a wonder he did not fly apart.

We ate the bunny, not enough, never was, that night or next. I was a scabby snotty nosey boy always tasting grass and weeds, looking out for molds, scraps of abandoned food, and thus, next day, I discovered, high in a disused chimney, the warrener's secret hoard of pelts which he had hung like washing on a line. The skins had dried just perfectly, crinkly and crunchy on the skin side, soft and furry on the pelt.

I indicated to Monsieur that they might make a layer for our roof. In his great aristocratic ignorance he ignored me, and he was soon busy devastating them, cutting two-inch-wide spirals from one rabbit skin and then another. These ruined pelts he threw into a heap beside him.

We caught another rabbit and cooked it on the glowing peat.

I woke at dawn, shivering. I found Monsieur out on the wet grass with the strips of pelt, which he was twisting together to make a long furry tapeworm winding around his madness. He raised his eyebrows and showed his teeth as he bit a pelt. I felt my hair prickle on my neck.

Imagining all that revolting fur inside my own mouth, I ran. I did not know what I had seen or what it meant, only having some notion of a beast devouring that which should not be eaten. Our little crystal stream had turned a brooding tannic red. I leaped across it and dashed up the ridge until I lost my breath, and then I walked toward the distant tor. Then I ran once more, got a stitch, gave up, continued stooped over, my hand dug hard against the hurt. The tor remained at its great distance, but once I reached it, I expected it would be my daddy, his long loping shadow moving on the moor, the light gray signal from his pipe.

For a long time the tor would not come close, and then-at last-I was upon it, a monolith with gray-lichened skin like cankers. I tore my knees and hands to gain its ancient back. There I squatted, bleeding and hungry, but I could see all around for many miles, right down to the smoky coast at Plymouth, but in all that huge empty space I could not see a single soul, unless a sea hawk has a soul-it rode the empty air, high and lonely and unknowable.

On this tor, a long way from any stream, I found a smooth round gray river pebble which must have been a kind of slate for I could mark it with a chip of granite. Here, with a calculation that admits no pretty explanation, I set to make a drawing of my frightening benefactor. I was not wise enough to know what I was doing, but I was dumb with fear and cunning and I made his likeness like an emperor on a coin.

In my absence the madman had constructed a wooden frame whose corners he had bound with skin. This rack he had set up like a loom and threaded with the fur rope. He began to whistle and raise his eyebrows like a fool and I understood he had nearly finished making himself a rug. Then he pinched my cheek, and then he grasped my hand, and forced me to touch the rug and he himself brushed his big whiskery cheek against it, and kissed it as if it was his wife.

I hated him. I would not give him anything. I watched him take his bone knife and cut his blanket free and when he threw it in my direction, I took it as a taunt and I pushed it angrily away. He then took me with all his mighty one-armed force and held me while I bit and kicked and so it took an awful long time, with us both exhausted from our struggle, to understand that he had made the rug for me.

Thus in a great snotty outburst I surrendered, and he sat me on his lap and wrapped me tight and, there on the dirt floor, in the midst of all the devastation, stroked my head with his remaining hand. Then I wept, Lord God I wept for hours. I kept my stone, not knowing what the future held.