“Dear God, keep me safe through the night and show me what I must do in the morning,” John said as he closed his eyes.

He waited in the darkness for sleep to come, listening to the sounds of the forest outside his door. He had a moment of acute terror when he heard a pack of wolves howling in the distance, and thought that they might smell the food and come and ring the cottage with their bright yellow eyes and their lean, serene faces. But then they fell silent and John fell asleep.

When he woke in the morning it was raining. He put his cloak to one side and put the pot by the fire to heat. He stirred the porridge but when he came to eat it he found he had no appetite. He had gone through hunger into indifference. He knew he must eat; but the gray porridge, dirty with the old ash from the inside of the pot, was tasteless in his mouth. He forced himself to swallow five mouthfuls and then put the pot in the fireplace to stay warm. If there were no fish in the trap, and if he could not shoot something, then it would be porridge for dinner as well.

The stocks of wood beside the fire were low. John went outside. The woodpile was low too and damp from the rain. John took nearly all of it and stacked it inside the house to dry. He went to grasp his ax to go and cut some more but the pain from his burned hand made him cry out. He could not use the ax until the burn was healed. He would have to gather wood, break up what he could by stamping on it, and burn the longer branches from one end to another, pushing them into the heart of the fire as they were consumed.

He went out into the rain, his head bowed, wearing only his homespun coat, leaving his cloak behind to dry. He had seen a fallen tree rather like an oak when he had been out with his gun a few days ago. He trudged toward it. When he got there he saw that some of the branches had split from the main trunk. There was wood that he could use. Using only his left hand, he pulled a branch away from the rest of the tree, and tucked the limb under his arm. It was hard work getting it home. The broad sweep of the branch kept getting caught in the undergrowth, wedged against trees, enwrapped in ground vines. Again and again John had to stop and go back and break it free. The forest of John’s headright was thick, almost impenetrable, it took John all the morning to travel just one mile with his firewood, and then another hour to break it up into manageable logs before bringing it inside the house to dry.

He was soaked through by the rain and by sweat and aching with tiredness. The burn on his hand was oozing some kind of liquid. John looked at it fearfully. If the wound went bad then he would have to go to Jamestown and put himself in the hands of whatever barber surgeon had set up in the town. John was afraid of losing his hand, afraid of the journey to Jamestown, one-handed in a dugout canoe, but equally afraid of staying on his own in the cottage if he became ill. He could taste the sweat on his upper lip and recognized the scent of his own fear.

He turned to the fire, wanting to think of something else. The fire was burning well and the room was warm. John looked out through the open window and through the gaps in the plank walls. The forest outside seemed to have come a little closer, to have advanced through the sheets of rain to press a little nearer to the solitary house.

“Don’t let it destroy me,” John whispered, knowing himself to be absurd. “Don’t let me come all this way and try so hard, to be just grown over as if I were nothing more than the dead body of a dog.”

There was nothing to eat but yesterday’s porridge. John did not bother to heat it. Warm or cold, it was equally unpleasant to him. He took a spoon and made himself eat four spoonfuls and then took a drink of water. He knew that he should go out into the forest with his gun and shoot a wood pigeon, a squirrel, anything he could get, for its meat. But the rain was too forbidding and the darkening sky was threatening thunder. John felt a sense of deep, helpless terror at the thought of being out there amid all that powerful green life, with the rain pouring more life and more energy into the avid earth, and him the only thing in the woods that was cringing and growing weaker every day.

“I’ll sleep while it rains,” he said, trying to comfort himself. “I’ll take the gun out at twilight, that’s always a good time.”

He took off his wet coat and his sodden breeches and spread them out to dry, then he pushed one of the big branches into the heart of the fire, wrapped himself up in his warm cape, and fell asleep.

John felt as if he had slept for perhaps a minute and then he woke with a start of terror to the realization that it was dark. He could not see the window. The whole cottage was in darkness. Only the embers of the fire glowed, the branch of the tree had quite burned through and fallen away from the hearth.

His first thought was that it was a terrible storm which had darkened the sky, but then he heard the silence of the outside, all he could hear was the patter of rain on leaves, an awful, remorseless, unforgiving patter of steady rain on fresh leaves. John struggled to his feet. He found that he was half-naked, wearing only his shirt, and remembered that only minutes ago he had taken off his sodden trousers and jacket and lain down for a rest. He pulled them on; they were dry, they had been dry for hours.

“It’s night,” John suddenly realized. “I slept all the afternoon and now it is night.”

He looked around the room as if everything might have changed during his long, enchanted sleep. His heap of goods, the tools he had thought he would use to farm his new land, his stores of dried goods, were all there; and higgledy-piggledy beside them was the pile of wood that he had brought in only this morning.

He took a couple of logs and put them on the fire. When they burned up the shadows in the room leaped and flickered at him; but the window and the cracks in the walls looked darker and more ominous than ever.

John bit back a sob of misery. It might be the middle of the night or just before dawn, but he could not lie down and sleep again. All his senses were alert, he felt surrounded by danger. His certainty was that it was afternoon, early afternoon, and that he should be out fetching firewood, checking the fish trap, hunting, or at the very least starting to clear a patch of ground and digging so that he could plant his seeds. But the darkness, the strange, inexplicable darkness outside the house was impenetrable.

“I shall have to wait until dawn.” John tried to speak calmly but the quaver in his voice frightened him and made him fall silent. He thought instead, arranging the words in his mind so they sounded like calm good sense. “It will be good to start early in the morning. I shall take my gun and shoot wood pigeon while they are still roosting. I might get a couple and then I could dry the meat. I might get several and then I could smoke them in the chimney and always have meat to eat.”

The darkness outside the window did not lift at all.

John sat down before the fire, stretched his legs before him and looked into the flames. Hours passed. His head nodded and he stretched out before the fire and closed his eyes. He slept. At dawn he woke, warned by the growing chill that the fire was dying down, got up and heaped more wood on the embers. He slept again. It was not until the middle of the morning that he woke. His empty stomach rumbled but he did not feel hungry; he felt weak, light-headed and weary.

“I’ll sleep again,” he said. He glanced toward the closed shutters of the window. Around the frame was a line of bright golden light. The storm had blown away and it was a beautiful sunny day.

John looked at it without interest. “I’m tired,” he said to the silent room. He slept.