The morning had dawned, silent and grey : there was a quiet mood in the glen as Gordon and the children walked along. Quietness that reflected their own moods, too, as they headed down to the track-end : rucksacks on backs and crunch of pebbles underfoot. Here and there a bird called out and otherwise it was just stillness and solitude - the solitude of the deep wilderness which lay before them, and into which they were heading.

It always took time to attune oneself to the wilderness, Gordon knew. Days in fact, to find the slower rhythm of the natural world all around. Nevertheless, he noticed that they all seemed quieter, pensive, at the outset of their adventure in the footsteps of Prince Charlie.

It would have been reasonable to expect an almost discordant noise and excitement from the children as they began their journey. But now that they were actually on their way, the sense of being pushed out - of being cut adrift from home - seemed to surface, and they appeared subdued like the morning.

Harry was walking by himself, at the front : watching, alert like a fox, and self-sufficient. It seemed as if he had decided that self-sufficiency was the best way to avoid getting hurt - and, it meant you didn't have to trust anybody except yourself. His eyes looked, this way and that, as he left the defined track and headed for the fallen tree.

Roberta followed at a distance, tall, thoughtful and self-contained. She, too, had an air of resolve and self-sufficiency about her : as if she wanted to prove to her father that she was capable and resourceful, and worthy of being taken seriously as his daughter.

She had the capacity to suspend thought and to simply listen, feel, respond. The mountains seemed inviting to her, full of mystery, beauty and unseen life; and she breathed in the scents and the air, and was quiet and self-contained within. The smell of crushed thyme and bog-myrtle underfoot was seductive, the call of the glen entreating, the moorland whispering to her fancifully. In the silence, there seemed to her to be, almost, a presence, a lurking. And she felt quiet and passive, accepting. It was a consolation for other places in her heart, where she felt only empty and rejected.

Alasdair walked with Gordon, at the back, and their conversation broke the silence now and then. The boy was unhappy at home - he would bury his head in his pillow at night to deafen the arguments of his parents - and he felt inadequate in some way, as if he had disappointed his father and lost his approval. In compensation, Philip Gordon's kindness and good nature seemed to fill some of the loneliness which lingered inside him. It was a relief, in a way, to be off.

Gordon, actually, felt relieved as well. He was glad to have some space for himself, so that he could be himself; and besides, every journey or expedition commenced with a sense of adventure and mystery. In addition, this treasure : it was something he didn't have an answer to. So much in education these days seemed defined, regulated, objective - devoid of feeling. And yet, here was something vague and alluring, into which the children could only grow instinctively, intuitively.

This was the matter Alasdair was discussing with him, as they approached the river, aware of the day all around them, yet engrossed in the past.

'So we will test your theory first,' said the boy.

'Yes. It will take us a couple of days to walk to Glen Pean, and my hunch is that on the pass above Pean the ground becomes so rugged that the Prince's horses would have to be left behind. And so might his treasure.'

'I can see that,' said Alasdair, 'but I think the treasure would have been left nearer the sea, because why carry it all over the place until you need to? That's why I think the cave above Loch Beoraid could be the place. It's wild, high, but near enough that the treasure could be returned to the boats if necessary.'

They walked on, a bird flitting across their path now and then, the day very still, the low roar of the river just audible now.

'How many days would it take us to Beoraid?' he asked Gordon.

'Two days to Pean, and another two to the Cave.' The land was deep and lovely, falling back so far into its recesses and hidden glens.

'Four days. Do you think mum would mind if we were away that long?'

Gordon gritted his teeth and thought.

'No, I don't think so. I don't think she would mind.'

Alasdair needed to relieve himself. Philip Gordon went ahead and called to the others to stop. The boy seemed keen for some privacy and was soon thrashing his way up the hillside towards a boulder. It seemed to take him an age.

Harry called hoarsely, 'What's Ally doing?'

Roberta answered, 'He's going behind a rock for a pee.'

Harry looked bemused.

They arrived shortly afterwards at the fallen tree over the river. The children by now were experts and one-by-one manoeuvred across to the other side. Gordon was last and, with the largest pack, found it quite difficult to negotiate the limbs and needles sticking out from the tree. The Tornish was not dangerous, if he fell in, but the supplies would get soaked.

Alasdair took off his pack and went back to lend support. Harry, meanwhile, had loosened a large rock and threw it into the water just to the left of the teacher, soaking the teacher but not the supplies. Roberta rolled about laughing. Already, a team-spirit and camaraderie had begun to develop, after a fashion.

Gordon wiped his glasses when he reached the safety of the opposite bank.

'So this is the Forgotten Kingdom,' he said, in a good humour. It felt to them all, that they had now entered the wilderness and left the other world behind them. They had been here before, of course, but this time they had the supplies and equipment to go deep into the wild country : to explore the unknown interior, to take to themselves the mysterious land with its glens and rivers and woods.

It felt quite intimate to Gordon to be here, alone, with these children in such an empty wilderness. As they marched on ahead, and he brought up the rear studying the map, he felt content and quiet.

After twenty minutes or so, Harry Baxter stopped, however.

'It's Wiggy!' he shouted. The three children all seemed pleased and excited, and pressed on faster. Philip Gordon followed behind, quietly amused and intrigued at the prospect of meeting this 'jolly insalubrious character' - as Caroline had described him.

Drawing closer, he saw a kilted man with a telescope, speaking to the little knot of children. The man, with his back to Gordon, was pointing to deer on the hillside.

'I can't see them,' Alasdair was saying.

'Over there,' Harry pointed.

And the man passed over the telescope and said

'Here, have a look through this.'

At the last moment Gordon, who was trying to locate the deer himself, lost his balance in some wet peat, and the weight of his pack sent him crashing to the ground.

The man turned round and said, drily,

'You don't need to kneel, you know. Are you alright?'

Gordon, looking up, blinked. He picked up his glasses, disorientated, and put them on. 'You mean you...are...'

'Wiggy,' said Wiggy, smiling kindly. 'Oh, I get called a lot of things, but you can call me Wiggy! It has a distinctive ring about it, don't you think?' Gordon nodded.

Turning to the children again, the sad-looking man said, 'Have you seen them yet? If you point it... there.' Then he looked the teacher straight in the face.

'And I assume that you are Mr Gordon?'

'Philip Gordon. How do you do?'

'I've heard a lot about you,' said Wiggy. 'Off looking for treasure, I gather?'

'That's the general idea, yes -' and added - 'not that it belongs to us...'

'Oh, I shouldn't worry about that,' he said. 'Finders keepers.'

The children gathered around again, and Gordon could see that a bond of affection had developed between them. He was struck, too, by the man's kindness. Yet he looked doleful, troubled.

The previous day had, in fact, been dreary. The sun had shone, but he had felt heavy, and Chalmers had been his only companion. In fact, Chalmers was nowhere to be seen - not because he was trying to remain inconspicuous, but because he had been sent off to fetch some spare flies, a newspaper and general provisions. Or to be more precise, because Wiggy was rather fed up with his company.

How much longer had he got on holiday, Alasdair asked.

It was his last day, he answered, looking even more doleful.

He winced.

Alasdair and Harry got themselves ready to go on. Wiggy offered to help with Harry's pack again, but he said, 'I can manage.' Then they set off over the heather into new territory.

About ten steps further on, Harry turned round, cocked his quizzical head on one side, and said 'Goodbye.' They headed away. Wiggy looked after them, longingly, and beyond to the wilds. Then he gazed across to the deer, camouflaged on the hill, which he had been watching. He seemed pensive.

Roberta was lingering, and looking at him quietly.

He seemed to be - not thinking deeply, that wasn't it - to be listening to something out there, or deep within himself. She recognised the impulse.

Time seemed to falter.

The wilderness called : the day was beckoning.

'Listen,' he said to Gordon quietly, hesitantly. 'Do you mind if I ask you a question?'

The teacher waited.

'Could I come along with you? Would it be an awful imposition if I joined the hunt for this treasure of yours?' He bit his lip and anxiously fingered a coat button.

Roberta looked at Gordon.

He stood, impassively in thought.

'I think,' he started, 'that would be absolutely terrific. The children would love you to come...' Before Gordon had finished, Roberta had leapt into the air, shouting 'Yesss!' with clenched fists and, rushing to the brow of the bank, yelled 'Wiggy's coming with us! Wait! Wiggy's coming with us.'

At a distance, Harry looked at Alasdair, and repeated 'Wiggy's coming with us!' in a delighted voice. They dropped their packs.

Of them all, Wiggy's face looked most moved : his eyes seemed to dance and he grinned broadly, shaking Gordon's hand.

'That's terribly good of you,' he said. They looked face-to-face, and man-to-man, knowing that they shared together in a decisive moment of adventure. It seemed like the sort of spontaneous decision a native Australian might take, to drop everything and set off into the blue.

'I should be able to increase your food supply,' Wiggy added, with excitement and determination. 'Roberta, could you lend me your pack?'

He got down on his knees, picked out food from the hamper and placed it in the rucksack, urgently, with a gritted smile.

Roberta, by his side, saw some peaches and said, 'I'd like those!'

'Well take them,' he said. 'Come on, come on! What about these?'

And so they sorted, and packed, and got ready to go.

Roberta was watching him closely.

'Do you think you should tell anybody?' she asked, aside.

'Don't worry,' he said. 'I think I can leave that to Chalmers.'

'Come on,' said Gordon. 'Let's go! The map says that we should follow that burn up to the ridge over there, then drop down into the next valley. Then we will really be on the trail of Prince Charlie.'

Harry eyed the route up the hillside, and Alasdair hit the front at the thought of the treasure. Roberta dreamed along in a world of her own.

As they left, Wiggy picked up a piece of paper that was lying in the peat - a wrapper of some kind - and stuffed it in the back of Philip's pack.

'Nice to know my proper station in life,' said Gordon drily.

'Litter!' Wiggy complained. 'I do dislike litter.'

They overtook the children halfway up to the ridge. Wiggy's limp had almost gone. He looked the part of a Jacobite in his flailing kilt.

'Hot work!' he puffed.

'We've got a good party,' said Gordon. 'The children are doing well. Though I'm not too sure -' he paused for some breaths - 'why we are really doing this.' He looked to the other man for suggestions.

'Sometimes, I think we just need to let go a bit. To put ourselves back in the perspective of the vast natural universe, and bury ourselves in it. Go down into it. Instead of asserting ourselves with our tiny minds all the time. Do you know what I mean?'

Gordon nodded, and glanced across the glen at the opening views.

'"Skulking",' he said. 'I think that's what the Jacobites called it. Hanging about in woods, in glens, and just being there; getting in touch a bit; doing nothing in particular.'

'Quite. You see, archaic societies, ones that are more organically in touch with nature around them, have always recognised the need to periodically enter some kind of ritual or mythic state.'

'You mean, go walkabout?' asked Gordon, trying to understand.

'If you like : to get away deep, to recede into nature, to let go of cerebral controls, to regenerate. It's so important. Also, I think we all lead such repressed lives that, in a way, we need to exorcise demons, lay to rest subconscious conflicts.'

Gordon frowned. 'Otherwise?'

Wiggy shrugged his shoulders. 'Auschwitz? Pol Pot?'

'The burning of heretics?' Gordon added pointedly.

Wiggy laughed. 'Exactly. They're all the outcome of repression. If you keep the lid too tight on your subconscious, it just surfaces in ugly, unnatural ways. Whole societies can go that way, I think.'

They walked, groaned, and heaved their way upwards. The children had stopped further down for a rest, so they paused to take in the view.

'Look! There's another deer, a hind,' said Wiggy. 'Do you see how it's camouflaged? Did you ever watch a film called "The Invisible People"? About the rain-forests and how a simple tribe just merged with the landscape.

'That's the thing,' he continued. 'We have to live in harmony with the landscape, recognise ourselves as only part of it, respond to it.'

'No monstrous carbuncles?' Gordon jested.

'Well exactly. Why do we have to be so bloody assertive about everything? You asked why we are going on this walk a few minutes ago - I'd say, the surrender of pride. Otherwise, if you don't strike a balance with nature : well, nature will have the last word... it's too big not to. I've seen the camouflaging of past civilisations, you know; visited the ruins. What will become of ours?'

They pressed on to the top of the ridge, and smiled at each other, over the shared effort and shared satisfaction, both breathless. Wiggy grabbed Gordon's sleeve. 'But you and me,' he said, panting, 'we agree not to ask too many questions, be too cerebral... we do it because we do it. We take each moment as it comes... let the wilderness... speak to us...'

Gordon nodded.

They had lunch, just over the brow of the hill, with a view down into Glen Mallie, over the remains of an old Caledonian pine wood. The day was hushed and overcast, and they spoke quietly to one another, Harry sitting a little way off - self-contained, watchful.

As they walked down through the ancient wood, with the lovely, lonely sweep of hills to the west, it felt like a going back : these were hillsides that the Jacobites would have walked, round the back of Loch Arkaig, toward the boats and the sea.

Old, moss-covered trunks lay scattered across their paths, other trees swaying with their huge contorted boughs overhead. The smells of the undergrowth and of greenery all around; the land wilder, untamed, full of quiet hollows and shadowy dark recesses. It felt as if Lochiel had only just passed, through the same wood, just around the next spur of the hillside; or rested under the same branches, so near to them, over the cycle of the seasons, as the world wheeled and turned.

Alasdair and the others went ahead again, with the two men walking more slowly. The children seemed so small against the great shadowy hillside, inheritors of the years to come, passing and going across the ageless face of the mountain.

'This wood must have been here hundreds or thousands of years,' said Wiggy. 'It has repeatedly regenerated and settled into the glen slowly and deeply. What I really object to are blocks of indiscriminate forestry, planted for profit, with no sympathy for the landscape. Man's domination again, you see : crass, short-term, doing untold damage.'

A red squirrel scraped up the bark of a nearby tree and watched them calmly, more out of interest than fear. As they approached the valley bottom, the trees were starting to dance gently in a rising wind, the sky looking grey and watery on the western horizon.

'It feels like there could be some rain later on,' Gordon said.

They got to the River Mallie where the children were waiting for them.

'Where now?' said Alasdair.

'Across the river,' Gordon answered, watching their reactions.

'There's no bridge,' said Harry.

'Then we wade,' smiled Wiggy, and took off his kilt, wrapping it in the top of Roberta's rucksack.

He led the way, yelling 'Hee-ooh!' as the high mountain waters slapped cold against his knees. At the far bank, he turned and splashed his head in the chilly current, lifting it afresh and looking around at the ancient glen. It felt good to be alive : elements, rough simple pleasure, and physical sensation. The others stripped to their pants, and Wiggy watched them cross, screaming against the cold, each brought alive by the physical insistence of the elements, all united by the shared experience and relationship with the environment.

'I can see Roberta's knickers,' laughed Harry hoarsely.

'Piss off!' She splashed him.

'Hoi, stop it!'

Gordon watched on and said nothing.

On the opposite bank they dried and struck off up the glen along an old track. They came to signs saying 'Private: Keep Out' - erected by one of Fraser's friends, no doubt - and Alasdair said, 'Can we go any further?'

'No-one's going to stop us,' argued Roberta.

'I think,' said Gordon, 'that these are red-coat signs. From now on, we are outlaws - at least, if you want to find the Treasure?'

They agreed : it appealed to them to be on the run like Charlie, and the free spirit of the wilderness had already infected them. Harry, in any case, had ignored the sign and was a hundred yards on up the track, blazing a trail.

As they walked on up Glen Mallie in the early afternoon, past ruins and broken walls, Gordon warned Wiggy that they were heading for a rough shelter where they could stay the night. It had no comforts.

'Why should I mind?' Wiggy replied. 'The thing is, a few days living rough like this is as good as a year in a bloody fitness club : and it serves the whole person, puts things in perspective.'

He looked around him to take in the valley and the day.

'I mean, where's the spirituality in weight-training... idolatry of the body, I'd call it.'

Gordon demurred. 'I think that's going a little bit far.'

'Maybe,' continued Wiggy, appreciating his honesty. 'But I do think a little asceticism from time to time is good for anybody : a bit of endurance instead of instant kicks. Do you understand?'

Gordon clearly did, and Wiggy beamed because he was succeeding in making his point.

'The trouble is, there is too much of a bloody theme-park mentality these days - a half-hour run down the rapids, instead of really getting to feel the wilderness. Kids grow up with a kind of facile, pleasure ethic.

'Look at this...' he swung his arm round at the scenery. 'They'd probably turn all this into a theme park if they had the chance.'

'They wouldn't if they ever came here in the winter,' replied Gordon.

'I know,' muttered Wiggy deeply. 'In the winter they can be like death.' He repeated, 'Those mountains - they can be like death in the winter.'

By the quietly flowing river, further stilled, Wiggy asked after the children, bobbing on ahead of them in the russet heath. And when Gordon explained, he seemed sad and tender.

Something else was playing on his mind.

'When they offered a thirty thousand pound reward for the capture of Bonnie Prince Charlie, any one of those highlanders could have made a fortune, but they didn't did they?'

'There was one incident at Scalpay - a place of betrayal - when a local vicar tried to capture him.'

'If there's one thing I can't stand,' said Wiggy, a little anxiously, 'it's disloyalty. He wasn't betrayed by his friends though, was he?'

'No, he wasn't. Murray of Broughton turned King's Evidence afterwards.'

'Spilt the beans, did he?' Wiggy looked closely at Gordon.

'I couldn't do that to a friend, could you?' said the teacher.

Wiggy seemed re-assured.

'What time is it?' he asked.

'I don't know. I left my watch in my pack. One o'clock? Two o'clock?'

That seemed precise enough.

The day held them quietly as they passed by, the mountains, huge, looming, ever-present. 'Take each moment as it comes' he had said. They passed on calmly in the silent valley.

* * *