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partner. Though I had just emerged from cold water, I burnt with
shame. I began to realize, too, that I was not yet out of it.
The beach on which I had landed is one of the least visited places on
the Welsh coast. It was, as it almost always is at that season, deserted.
The nearest road was far away. It was bounded by a low but unscala-
ble cliff of glacial till: the slippery clay and round boulders dumped by
the ice sheets. Between the cliff and the sea lay just three or four yards
of strand, and the tide, my watch told me, was still rising. The beach
was a maze of rocks, grey and tan, that had been eroded out of the
cliffs. I looked along the shore, hazy with the spray kicked up by the
waves, as far as I could, and felt overwhelmed by loneliness.
It was, I found, impossible to drag the boat over the exposed boul-
ders, and on that lumpy beach I could not carry it more than a few
yards. My only option was to pull it through the surf. I soon discov-
ered how difficult this was. I could pull the kayak forward for a second
or two on the incoming wave, but then it would tip over, sweep round
and knock my legs from under me. On the outgoing wave it would
advance a little, then suddenly become grounded and wedged between
the boulders. Only as the backwash began could I make significant
progress. So I waited, tried to hold it steady on the incoming wave,
sprinted forward through a momentary patch of smooth water, then
stopped dead as it thumped back down onto the beach.
Already sapped when I landed on the beach, I was becoming even
more exhausted. Whenever the boat turned over, more water seeped
through the hatch. As it became heavier, it became more dangerous.
But to empty it I had to drag it out of the waves and over the boulders,
which was also tiring. I was beginning to wonder how I would get
back without abandoning my most precious material possession when
an extraordinary thing happened.
I knew what it was the moment I saw it, but I refused to believe it.
It was so improbable that I imagined for a moment, in my wretched
state, that I was hallucinating. It simply could not be true. It was like
seeing a zebra trying to hide among the dresses in a department store.
But though I had never seen one before, and though, when I first spot-
ted it, it was sixty or seventy yards away, I knew that there was
nothing else it could be.
It walked with odd jerky movements, extending and retracting its
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