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irrational and I believe he requires further close observation.’
    ‘I’ve warned them,’ thought the ranger, though he hadn’t. He was miles and hours away from the end of his task — the delivery of his report — and alone with crazy Hame.
    Hame finished his appeal to the gods. He put his hands down and stooped over his figure once more. He hesitated, one finger pointed at the figure’s face. Then he leant closer and wrote with a fingertip on its sandy forehead.
    The ranger could have sworn that the air became suddenly humid, as on certain sorts of summer days the sun uncovers itself and creates a heat sink from the water vapour in the air. But it wasn’t waterborne heat that thickened the parched air. It was something else. Something as stifling and invisible as humidity, but not made of water.
    The figure, the man made of sand, got up out of the excavation. It stood up before Hame — stood up to face its maker. It shimmered, its surface blurring, the sand there in motion like smoke rising.
    The ranger gasped and flung himself back through the tunnel in the gorse. He rolled free of the thicket, out into the open and ran. He heard Hame call out — an angry summons, or perhaps an order.
    The ranger was fit and fast, and there were times, as he fled, when he imagined he’d finally been able to outstrip what followed him — till he caught again its soft approach, the hissing, sifting sound of its walk.

Six
    The first thing Laura saw when she opened her eyes was a seabird, a shag, standing in the shelter of a big log at the high-tide line. It stood with one wing tucked into its side, and the other drooping, tip trailing in the sand. The bird was injured. Laura wriggled out of her bedroll and crawled towards it. She came closer, but it seemed not to see her, didn’t even turn its head until she was right beside it, and her human shadow was at its feet. Then it looked at her, dazed and exhausted, and shuffled a few feet away from her. It moved slowly, stumbling as it went.
    Laura shook her cousin awake. For the next quarter of an hour they discussed the bird, what to do about it, what might have happened to it. There had been a big blow four nights earlier — perhaps the bird had been hurt then. They were planning to catch it in a blanketand carry it up to the house, when Rose’s father appeared.
    The girls had lain awake talking and thinking until dewfall, then until the cool perfume of dew gave way to the smell of bread from the two bakeries along the seafront of the resort. They’d had only a few hours’ sleep, so it was easy for Rose’s father to talk them out of their plans of rescue. He asked which of them knew how to set a broken wing? And, if the wing was only wrenched, perhaps the bird might still gather its strength and fly away. He suggested that, if they wanted to go to bed till lunchtime, he could check on the bird now and then.
    Rose and Laura went up the beach yawning. Chorley bundled up their bedrolls and picked up their picnic basket. He doused the grey but still smoking coals of their fire.
    Once his daughter and niece were in bed, Chorley went back down to the beach to find the shag lying face down in the sand. Its head was turned and its smooth feathers and round shoulders made it look like a sleeping baby. Chorley picked it up and carried it down to the water. The tide was still going out, and if he threw the bird far enough the tide would carry its body away. He would tell the girls that it had been gone when he’d checked. He wouldn’t lie for Rose, who would think that the bird’s death was a shame, and might wonder whether or not it might have been better off if she had taken it up to the house — she’d wonder, but she wastough-minded, and the bird’s death wouldn’t trouble her. Chorley disposed of the small corpse for Laura’s sake. Laura had said, ‘How lonely it looks. How tired.’ Laura was sensitive, and her uncle had the habit of protecting her from upset whenever he