TGWLAMC Part II

***~~~***

The man left the next day at dawn without saying a word. At least, not one that anyone could understand. He had camped the night out by the ocean, despite the protests of the fishermen in their fierce hospitality, and the children ran out in the morning to look for forgotten treasure at his campsite, though they found nothing. His footprints led off away along the beach, where they were erased by the coming of the tide not long after.

The impression he left wasn't much greater to anyone. Of all the strangers who had come to those parts within living memory, he was by far the most boring. And still, his very existence, his idea, stirred itself into the Girl's thoughts. He may not have come from the mountains, but he had come all the same.

And maybe it was in some way because of this traveller, or maybe it was because of the mountains, or maybe it was just because she was bored that she decided one fine summer day (there were always at least one or two of these every year) to go on a journey of her own.

To which she was told variously that she was crazy or insane. Her grandmother said that she was fey, by which she meant poetically suicidal.

To which she took no heed, packed up the few things she had that were worth taking with her in a pack she had knotted out of leftover bits of net and rope, a bizarre kind of proto-macramé, and walked away into the sunset.

"That's the last time we see her again," said her next-door neighbour, scratching an ear. "Don't suppose I could get her old hammer, could I? Shaft on mine crackered the other day."

"Make yourself a new one then," said her grandmother crabbily. "She may be poetically suicidal, but she's only been that way for a few hours or so at the most. So we'll just wait and see before taking her hammers and making her epitaph. We'll just wait and see."