Having been brought up in tropical Singapore surrounded by the sea, I just love the idea of walking in the mountains. (The Gentle Giant loved going to the beach for the same reason, in reverse: he’d been brought up in a country with mountains, so they’re not exotic to him.)
Being Swiss, the Gentle Giant knows the ways of the mountains, one of them being trails in the mountains are marked at fairly regular intervals to guide the walker, especially when it comes to a fork. The markings on this particular walk of ours on that occasion were red and yellow: sometimes as an arrow if it’s a fork, sometimes as two short parallel bars; sometimes on a tree trunk, sometimes on a boulder by the path.
At one point, I noticed purple markings on a boulder here, a rock there. As we were taking the red route, I didn’t say anything at first. Then, when I saw a few more of these patches, I asked the Gentle Giant to look at his map to see which route it was. He said, “There’s no purple trail on this walk.”
The next time I saw one on a boulder by the path, I pointed it out to him. It turned out to be bird droppings — the colour was from the wild berries they’d been eating.
(Switzerland, 1988)
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