‘This is the Haflinger. The only breed that’s not indigenous. She’s a savage.’

  She was stunning, with a white mane, and she didn’t let him get close.

  At the far end of The Meadow was the shepherd’s shelter where he slept. A pine wood stood between it and the brothers’ house. The Meadow area was a mosaic of alpine meadows and glades, the last habitat before the glacial belt.

  The shelter was once used by Fatma and Metya, but they’d got themselves a static caravan in the meadow next door. It was a primitive structure made from wood, with a plastic sheet for roof and walls. But it was a small compound nevertheless. Inside the fence made from branches was a space for a fire where you ate, and under the plastic roof was a raised wooden plank wide enough for two, with a dirty sheepskin on it and a rolled-up mat. This is how Gyulten had spent her childhood.

  ‘Welcome to hotel Under-the-Stars. It’s a bit basic and you’re used to luxury.’

  ‘Are we both going to sleep on that?’ I asked.

  ‘Unless you want to sleep on the ground,’ he said rudely. ‘I can sleep anywhere. It’s still light. Wanna stretch our legs? We can go up to Dry Lochen, there’s a view.’

  Dry Lochen was an hour uphill.

  ‘I’ve stretched my legs enough,’ I said and sat on a stump.

  ‘You’re the boss,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the fire going then.’

  He quickly stoked a fire with a few pine branches and went to fetch water from the stone fountain with a barrel. It was far. This main meadow of The Meadow was about 600 metres long and had two water fountains, the stone one I’d used to climb on Marta and another one further on, made by Ahmed the mountaineer, where families from The Birches came to picnic in pick-up trucks. While he was gone, the stillness of the scene struck me, chord after chord. I saw The Meadow and I heard it at the same time.

  It was different now. It wasn’t raining like it had been with the Godless party, but it was also that with Emin, everything looked different. It was a scene framed by dark woods and I was small and remote inside it, like a memory.

  The thought of sleeping here alone, eating alone, lighting the fire alone and returning to its cold ashes alone, listening to the black mountain alone and the sunny mountain alone, year after year – it was crushing. I couldn’t do it, I would go insane. It was too big, too awesome to bear.

  I watched him stride back casually with the heavy barrel of water, talking continuously. Talking to himself and talking to me was the same thing. He was bringing the barrel as others bring a glass of wine in a living room. He moved across The Meadow the way others move through their house. This was his house. The meadows and glades were the rooms and different music played in each.

  ‘We’ll heat the water if you want to wash,’ he said. ‘Cos the spring water is cold.’

  Darkness crept from all sides. It closed in around our little hut, then the only light left was the smoky fire which made my eyes sting all night. The horses became outlines on the edges of The Meadow, then nothing.

  ‘Aren’t you gonna gather them now?’ I said.

  ‘It’s early yet. After we’ve eaten.’

  ‘How will you find them? They’re scattered.’

  ‘They’re here. Can you hear them? Can you see the Chocolate One?’

  I couldn’t see or hear a thing.

  ‘Yala yalaaaaa!’ he yelled.

  A bell chime answered him. The Chocolate One.

  ‘Look.’ He switched on a head torch with a strong beam. ‘I bought it the other day in case you wanted to come up and have proper light. I’ve been walking like a vampire with this old lighter. Giving the wolves a fright.’

  We ate the burgers and potato salad I’d packed, and some sheep’s cheese, bread and rakia from his rucksack, though he drank even less than me. Alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, any strong substance made him sick. He kept the lard lump out of view this time. A few things were left in a box inside the pen – sugar, shrivelled cucumbers, old socks and a spray for horse wounds.

  ‘I use it too when I cut my foot or get a thorn in my hand.’

  No table salt. He’d given it to the horses.

  The Meadow was strewn with yarrow. As the moon rose and the forest became black, the yarrow turned a colour I’d never seen – a fluorescent white that glowed. They glowed so that you could walk without a torch. I saw how a single yarrow plant had 128 chemical components. I saw how this kind of white had staunched the blood of soldiers and women for thousands of years. The yarrow glowed like the stars above which suddenly appeared in their millions. The yarrow was stardust. The Meadow was the cosmos. We were spinning upside down. The earth was a suspended garden.

  ‘Yeah, it’s beautiful,’ Emin chewed. He had missing teeth. ‘But when you’ve got nobody to see it with, it grows ugly.’

  Emin rose and picked up a horse-hair harness. It was woven by his father in the Karakachan tradition he’d learned as a boy in the 1950s. You used your knees and elbows in the process, your whole body. Emin hadn’t had the patience for it. With his father was gone the art of the horse-hair harness. It was called yular. Another one for the museum. The harness was light like lace.

  ‘Stay by the fire. Don’t go wandering.’

  I had no intention of going wandering. He melted into the darkness.

  Clouds obscured the moon. The primal flooded in. The absence of sound was like the bottom of a sea. His axe lay on the ground and he hadn’t taken the torch. No phone signal. There was not another human being between here and the Birches Hotel. I laughed when I remembered my first night there the previous summer, when I thought I’d reached the end. In this mountain, the end cannot be reached.

  A thump in the woods. I stood up and threw another pine branch on the flames. But my dread was not really of the bear. It was of my own self. Of what I would become overnight if Emin didn’t return. Of shrivelling inside, of forgetting, of feeling that never being touched was worse than being attacked by a bear. This is what he talked about when he talked about loneliness.

  A whistle in the distance, drawn-out like a spell, like something played through a reed flute. He was gathering the horses. We are dream weavers of our lives and others’ lives, and we don’t even know it.

  ‘Your life is like a film,’ I said to him later. ‘Or a dream.’

  ‘A nightmare, more like it,’ he said.

  Emin was returning with the horses, silent except the chime of the Chocolate One’s bell and the ground that thumped under the hooves, because even when they walked, the horses were running. I can’t explain it but that’s how it is. Man and horses looked like one.

  He removed the yular from Marta and loosely tied her to the fence. She was the only properly tame one. The others gathered for the night, snuffling, breathing, warm – like a fire themselves.

  ‘The foals will lie down,’ he said. ‘When I’m up by the lakes without shelter, I curl up on the ground and they lie down next to me. That’s how I survived cold nights, I almost said didn’t survive cold nights.’

  He stepped through the opening in the twig fence and smiled nervously, finally making eye contact, and in his face was all the broken beauty of this world. The full moon made a sudden appearance from behind cloud – corn-yellow. It was September. A scream in the forest made me freeze.

  ‘A fox,’ Emin said.

  We were inside a pulsing grid. Everything felt multiple. Three entities were stepping through the fence, three Emins.

  One, a boy born of a mare who, for thousands of years had roamed this mountain with foxes and wolves, bears and birds, singing with elm bark, wading across spring torrents, dressed in rags, walking-talking and playing reed flutes. His history has not been written, the film of his life has not been made, but it has been transmitted through the cells of the living mountain, like seeds from the original giant forest.

  Two, an eccentric horseman whose path nearly didn’t cross mine. I was about to share a plank with him for the night, wrapped in raw-wool cardigans, under a torn blanket he kept tucking around me.

  ‘Here, take my cardigan. Do you want a toffee?’

  He chewed toffee like a horse and talked ceaselessly, not letting me sleep.

  And thirdly, someone who was my own creation. In him I saw reflected the electrical mountain with its yarrow-starred meadows, its crystal peaks and its vales of fathomless feeling, its layers of mood and weather, its saplings rising from the ashes. In him I saw a lost part of myself, an uncoupled half that might just restore the lost ecosystem.

  I could thankfully smell geranium – Fatma the shepherdess had planted it, to make her nights here more pleasant. The horses were quiet all night. Just the occasional hoof, a sneeze, or a jet of urine hitting the ground.

  ‘There are horses with human heads on them. I had one, dark grey, he pulled the cart. Nothing scared him. We always took him with us to the city market. He carried logs and tobacco and ploughed the field for thirty years. When he grew old, he went white. Like a person. When I was wee, I rode him. There was never one like him again. Horses have personalities.’

  ‘Like dogs,’ I said.

  ‘Like humans,’ he said. His voice was strangely old.

  ‘That’s because I’m a hundred years old,’ he said. ‘I was born old.’

  ‘Or maybe because you talk too much,’ I said.

  ‘Too much or not at all,’ he said. ‘That’s how things are for me. Sideways is too wide, below is too deep and above is too high. I can’t get things right. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Horses have the same feelings like us. I found him dead one day. Horses don’t make a fuss when they die. I grew old with that horse.’

  ‘Are you cold? Two o’clock. I’ll put a log on. Can you see the moon? She’s looking at us. I wonder what she sees. I’m talking too much. I’m starved for conversation. For love.’

  ‘Three o’clock. Want a toffee? Okay, you get some sleep. I don’t sleep much in summer. I close one eye and open the other. I don’t want to fall asleep because I’ll snore and wake you up.’

  ‘But you’re not letting me fall asleep in the first place!’ I protested.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said to the darkness. ‘I’ll let you sleep now. Should I toss another log on the fire? I’m repulsive. I’ve let myself go, I know it.’

  ‘Yes, you really need a bath,’ I said. ‘You smell like a rubbish bin.’

  ‘Aye, it’s a true story. But I don’t have time to bathe. I’m flying all the time, up the hill then down the hill.’

  A howl nearby, then another. I sat up.

  ‘Dogs, not wolves,’ he said. ‘That’s Fatma and Metya’s sheepdogs. When I sleep by Dry Lochen on the ground, sometimes I don’t light a fire. I just gather the horses by the fountain and I keep one eye open. And I can hear the wolf in the bush. But they don’t dare come out when they know there’s a human. There’s no animal in this forest that wants to meet a human.’

  ‘Three thirty. What sort of book are you writing?’

  ‘It’s called Elixir,’ I said.

  ‘Elixir.’

  ‘How people look for it and can’t find it.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he said. ‘Four fifteen. I’ll feed the fire. Can you hear the owl? Loneliness kills. You walk around and they think you’re alive but you’re dead inside.’

  ‘Five o’clock. The empty years. I’ve no words for it. Thank you for coming, for showing interest. I’ll never forget you.’

  ‘Five-thirty. I’ll untie Marta and let them off. Mornings are the coldest. Pirin is a mountain of four seasons. You stay here and keep warm.’

  ‘Six o’clock. There’s no coffee but I’ll put some water on the fire. No tea either. You like coffee and tea, I saw you drinking it. I’ve no brain, but I have eyes in my head at least.’

  The Meadow had tea. I went to pick some. The horses scattered, finding good patches for the day. The moon had crossed the sky, white like a ghost. The sun hadn’t risen over The Meadow yet. Everything had a tentative outline, making up its mind between night and day. I walked through cold dew and flowers still closed shut for the night. It was like the first day of creation. The world unfurled. I was somewhere inside it. The meadows of flowers with us two human flowers. The mixed forest, the pine forest, the darker dwarf pine and juniper, the glacial lakes and beyond them – the blue peaks.

  The dandelions were folding back into the earth. The yellow was long gone, the seed heads long scattered. In the last week, the birches had turned golden and my right temple had gone silver, but not the left.

  I hear it grow already, the bone of dandelion that I will be.

  Everything was mellowing, rounding up for autumn. Everything was spherical, like a dandelion head.

  I greeted Marta and her foal and they greeted me back. Why do horses have that look of knowing? They just know.

  Wild horses are a big part of a mountain ecosystem, like here, called a mosaic biosphere, where every piece fits with the rest. Their movable feast makes it easier for other wild animals and plants to partake. Emin and his herd were the last of their kind in Europe.

  At the stone fountain, he had taken off his T-shirt and was washing under the spouts. His back was a galaxy of sun damage. He reached for his T-shirt. Under his rib was a huge purple bruise.

  ‘I tried to get Arap off a mare. It was black but it’s fading.’

  We have a rich canon of nature literature in English, but nature and wilderness have parted ways. Nature and culture meet on culture’s terms only. Their creatures don’t mingle, not as equals. The last wild places and their few denizens have become a reservation to visit while wearing expensive gear, then return to one’s own kind to report. At literary festivals, academic conferences and climate conventions, people who rarely venture beyond Starbucks wear designer cowboy boots that Emin the last cowboy can’t afford, sip vegan lattes and discuss wilderness.

  People like Emin almost don’t exist anymore because wilderness almost doesn’t exist anymore. But we used to be everywhere. The wreath of seventy-seven and a half herbs was woven from the Beauly River to the Mesta to the Nile and beyond. Until the herbs became weeds, the women became witches and the child of nature became a madman.

  The early ecopsychologists of the 1960s could not be more explicit about their discoveries of how the health of the human mind and the health of the earth are inseparable, and how the ecological ego’s ‘maturation moves towards ethical responsibility with the planet’. Emin embodied this symbiosis and it made him an outcast. An outcast of a corrupt and demented civilisation. The price we have paid to be collusive members of this corrupt civilisation is the bankrupting of the organic world. And with it – the core of our collective mind. Emin was borderline insane because he carried the collective insanity, alone.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ I asked Emin when we sat by the rekindled fire, me with meadow tea and him eating the remains of dinner.

  ‘Because when I look at the horses, I see my father. He could’ve done easier and better-paid jobs but he was crazy about horses. This whole way of life in the forest. Even in his early days horses were on the way out. It was never good business. He got the bug from the old Karakachans. They’re the last of the animal people. Once, an old Karakachan logger we knew crossed us with his horses. “Mate”, he said, “we are condemned to death.” “Aye,” my father said, “us and the horses both.”’

  Emin means loyal.

  ‘And I see other things when I look at the horses.’

  Tomorrow when I’m gone, he’d walk up here again. And the day after. In winter, he waded through snow. It was not just the mileage, the scale, the loneliness, the privation, the predators, the quixotic devotion, the sneer of those in the lower world. There was something else.

  ‘I didn’t choose this,’ he said. ‘It’s an inherited condition. Some inherit diseases. I inherited horses.’

  There was a bitter pride. ‘I look for no one and no one looks for me. They’re all fucking imitators,’ he spat on the ground. His heart was full of sorrow, it was in his eyes.

  I began to frantically think of solutions. Something had to be done.

  ‘Wanna stretch our legs to Yanuzov Ridge? That peak there.’

  I looked up at it – 2,600 metres, a two-hour hike from Dry Lochen and Dry Lochen was an hour from here. My phone battery was flat and there was no signal anyway. Maybe the only thing that had to be done was to walk?

  ‘I’ll show you the source of Stormy River. The area’s called Crooked Burns. There’s a view. We don’t have food but there’s blueberries and mushrooms. We can stay in luxury in the shelter. Or walk down to The Birches before dark. I’ll drop you off at the hotel and come back up for the night. I don’t mind. Or we can return now. You’re the boss.’

  At Dry Lochen where Emin had slept countless nights by Ava’s fountain, I heard the laughing bell voices again, this time in plain sunshine. Emin was too busy battling his own demons to be bothered by it. One autumn he’d looked for a lost mare and found her dismembered remains in the meadow of St John’s wort above Dry Lochen, where the rain made the world a liquid yellow.

  ‘That mare was special and her foal was now an orphan. Orphaned foals are easy prey.’ He’d raged and cursed his luck. Hungry and not wanting to return to The Birches, he’d gone all the way up to the alpine shelter to raid the cupboard for food and found a jar of pesto. It was dark by then but he didn’t stay the night, he was too deranged and headed down in the blackness. Here at Dry Lochen he opened the jar which broke into his hand. A fountain of blood erupted.

  ‘I thought about opening a vein too,’ he said. ‘Guys like me hang themselves when they’ve had enough.’

  He’d bandaged it with his T-shirt in the end and walked down to The Meadow, then The Birches, leaving a trail of blood in the woods.

  The alpine shelter was a new chalet with bunk beds and a wood stove, luxury after the plank. There were cans, bread and sugar left behind. Sometimes, blueberry and juniper pickers from the three rhyming villages spent the night here.

  On the vertical cone of the top ridge we saw horned alpine goats that seemed to fly and a smaller herd of wild horses who ran downhill, shaking the ground, and crowded around Emin in a circle. They pulled the grass around him with their teeth while he chopped dwarf pine for the stove with his left hand, then with his right – the first ambidextrous person I’d met. The horses took no notice of me and when Emin went inside to light the stove for the evening, they dispersed.