Free The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace

that the wind took flight, took fright, and sought the refuge of the shore. The land was mute – no birds, no human cries, no sheep, no sign of welcome or of safety to my father walking on the beach.
    If we’d been him we would have turned around and gone back home. Too cold for expeditions. Too wet. Too dark. Too treacherous and full of wolves; too pitiless with wind and whispers. Too void. We’d seek the bracken path again and creep into the village, replace the nuts, the knife, the grain and candles we had stolen, and lay out with our cousins by the fire. But my father is not us. We do not share his bludgeoned vanity, his moodiness, his resolution. We do not share his ardour. He did not turn or run. He walked along the shore as if his home was close ahead and not behind. He whistled, hummed. He sang. His voice was whisked away and shredded by the wind. If we had seen him there upon the beach that night (he said), if we had watched him striding on the tidal ridge, we’d trust his word that, more than fear, he felt, for once, exultant.
    Of course, his triumph could not last. The landscape and the tide conspired to chase him off the beach. He rejoined the cliff path at that point where a valley joined the coast. Its stream spread out (remember?) amongst rocks and tumbled boulders. When he had passed this way before – at the frontier where chick-weed turned to wrack, where skylark became tern, where earth gave way to sand – the river water had been warm and shallow. He’d waded it and hardly got his ankles wet. But now, at the finish of the winter rains, the stream was deep and strong. It was too dark to follow inland on the bank until a crossing place was found. Besides, my father was in no mind for deviations or delays. He stripped and put his clothes into the goatskin wrap. He held it, high and dry, in his good hand and stepped into the water. He didn’t fall. Or drop the wrap. Or lose his footing in the stream and end up – moments later – dumped and bruised like flotsam on the beach. Dimly he could see the dry bank on the other side. He fixed his eye on that, kept his legs well spread, and crossed.
    By now his teeth were chattering like a conference of knappers’ stones. His skin was barnacled with cold. His hand was stiff. He dressed – but all the dampness of the stream was soaked up by his clothes. The wind passed through him: it played his ribs. He was wattle without daub. He took the woman’s gifts out from the skin and placed them on the bank. He wrapped the skin around his shoulders and sat amongst his gifts, hunched up, a boulder, with his head upon his knees and his arm around his shins. Now the boulder trembled. He was a logan-stone, shaking on the spot. The noises that he made were icy, animal, dank; they were the rhythmic, shivering inhalations of people making love, or cowering, or cold. His stump – a loather of the cold – was numb. He knew he had to light a fire.
    He stood no chance of finding any kindling or dry moss in that light. He took the flint knife that he’d stolen – the sharp and perfect product of his eldest cousin – and tried to cut some kindling from his head. (In his retelling father made it comic, miming with his severed arm and a head that now was old and dry and bald.) But on that night his hair was long enough and coarse and hardly damp. The wind had kept it dry. At first he tried to trap a hank behind his head with his numb stump and to cut the hair free at the roots. He could not hold it firm enough. The hair sprang loose. (He mimed that, too, to laughter that was cautious, thin.) Then he used one hand and tried to slice the thick hair at his forehead. It simply flattened on his skull. Here was a task that required two hands. A one-armed man could only crop his own hair with a knife if he could find the reckless courage to hack the skull, to mutilate his head.
    My father put aside the knife. So much for flint and stone! He held a thin hank of hair – forty, fifty