I am closed within a high and unused room, a silted backwater in the east tower's highest floor. Cluttered, it is, jumbled with all the froth of our living, like our fond remembered attic. The small windows are mostly smashed, their sills spattered with bird droppings. The fractured panes let in chill rain; I stuff some old curtains into the spaces. In the cold grate I light a fitful fire from bound, collected volumes of old and yellow paged magazines, some of them dealing with hunting and other rural matters; it seems appropriate.

This theme continues. I cannot believe the good lieutenant memorised the castle's every room on one tour round, so I conclude it is just luck that she has me confined here, with these old journal collections, and in glass cases trophies of previous hunts. Animals, birds and fish stare out, glassy eyed and stiffly posed, like awkward ancestors in paintings. The cases are locked; I look for keys in vain, so force a few of these glass sarcophagi, splintering the wood and fracturing the glass.

Regarding the stuffed fowl, the gutted fish, the glass eyed fox and hare, I tap their hard, dead eyes, sniff their dustless plumage and stroke their strange dry skins. Feathers and scales stay with my hand. I hold them up to the candelight, trying to see their link, the time slow change from sea to air, from scale to feather, tail to tail, iridescence to iridescence that these ends unravel back to, expressing evolution's glacial, erratic continuity. The scale, so small, stays too great, however, and remains unseen.

I throw open a narrow window over the moat and launch the birds; they fall. I heave the fish out to the waters; they float. I suppose this is the extra element revealed; the quickness found in living things which ranks above the rest and makes fire, air, earth and water seem closer to each other than ever they are to it.

Just so, the bird and fish, elementally distinguished, are more similar to each other than either is to us.