Moor 1 And what survives? Only the voracious: gorse with its dark green prickles its seeds that pop like a greedy baby's lips bracken whose spores in fall cause cancer heather, tough, clumping in gangs that turn bruised in August-- tiny purple blossoms that blend with distance as if a thumb had smudged the page. And each of these tries to choke the rest. I am the only one, says the heather, the gorse. I will kill you if I can, says the bracken. Or, nothing grows but the barest grass, stretched to near transparency, like the features of a dancer over bone, full of the desperate beauty of young men in concentration camps. There are no cattle here, with their soft eyes. Only the primitive-headed, the slope-muzzled, their blatting the sound of words before there was language: Herdwicks and Jacobs and Lonks, bred to heaf to their home-grounds if they stray too far. Summer winds blow hard over the moor. In winter snow frenzies, swirls until all track's lost, like a crofter who clenches a fist at his door, as something he does not understand pours from his mouth. When the snow stops, the farmers go prospecting, prod at the drifts with sticks. Once, Moon dug out eight ewes and a wether. The storm had lasted ten days. One had died, but the rest had eaten each other's wool. What can dig, does. You can walk for hours and see only evidence: the dark clustered droppings like full-stops gone wild. But then, suddenly, the ground will crawl--as tens of brown scuts zigzag into heather or between rocks. More often, you stumble over them first, scribbles of fur and bone--blinded, starved. 2 Fresh from Australia, Megan went hiking, the ordinance survey for Yorkshire, West (her uncle's) in its see-through case on a cord around her neck, the way little girls have their names pinned to their first-day-of school dresses, thought Megan, who'd done the outback, the Rockies, and, last year, Nepal, but said only: I'll call you when I get to Grassington before she set out, cigarette dangling from one red-nailed hand, along paths never more than ten miles, she knew, from a pub. But the moor can change, like a woman with a knife in her handbag, who makes eyes across the room. And no map, no piece of paper at all, no page from the psalms, no verse from the Quran, not even James Joyce can hold back the mist. And the moor turned suddenly white. And four times Megan stopped. And four times she'd have stepped off a cliff. 3 A moor's a wrong turn a blank wall days spent staring when I've been nowhere for months But I come back again and again I can't stay gone Because once the mist lifted and I realized why I was out of breath I was at the top-- and from this top I could see other tops purple, dark green, dark brown and the far profiles of old women -- mountains in the distance -- and in that moment I understood what three hundred sixty degrees meant to my soul and I believed I could climb the other peaks as well though there were valleys between with their cities glittering like grass and their smug Wednesday church bells though there were A-roads between with their worms of smoke though there were walled pastures between where brown-and-whites grazed, false maps on their sides And in that moment this was my religion: if only I could keep courage in my knees the days of walking, with nothing to show but miles the long afternoons of up the slash-eyed wind the rocks to navigate by rain the mud even the redux mist even the unstarred night would not matter And when breath came hard as breath does I would know I was not dying but ascending another scale, like the curlew for whom flight is not enough but she must sing too.