The Tracker — hints

What leaves a sign. Type ground in every room — it costs nothing and it is the whole game. Scree and rock hold nothing; peat and sand hold everything; water holds nothing and carries silt.

examine the hag, and then take your brogues off. Eleven nails in the right sole and nine in the left is a signature; a bare foot is only a person.

The meal, buried under the flat stone in the kailyard. Lifting it leaves a turned stone and a square of dug ground, and there is nothing to be done about that.

In the birch wood. Ask her about the news, about Alasdair, about the fire, about teaching, and — the one that matters — about why.

You can. Ash keeps a month and smoke is seen from twenty miles, and the act will tell you exactly what it cost when you get to the top of the pass.

Go out north over the moor. At the top of the Bealach Odhar the act shows you everything you left in that glen, and tells you who is taking the Corran ferry in the morning.

That depends entirely on what you left in Act I. spy from high ground — the Craig above the Sput, or the top of the pass.

ford the burn at the Sput and you go down half a mile of rock channel and come out at the Allt Beag having left nothing at all. Your feet will be numb and you will fall once.

Bog holds a print and holds it wet, and wet says this hour where dry says some time. If you must cross it, cross it barefoot and cross it once.

wipe. It takes an hour of the day and it takes out prints and bruises and nothing else — not ash, not a turned stone, not wool on a thorn.

Four women, nine children and thirty beasts on the lawful summer grazing, who have done nothing at all. Everything you leave here reads as theirs.

Cross on the brae — short grass full of beasts’ feet, where your print is one among four hundred — and go out through the fold or the burn. Stay off the turf round the huts unless your brogues are off.

Anna offers it and knows exactly what it leaves: the shape of a fifth person in a hut that holds four, and a hearth fed at an hour that matches nothing anybody will say. Four hours of sleep indoors, and it is the most expensive thing in the game.

warn anna. It costs them a day’s milk and her a night’s sleep and she will tell you that is nothing, and a person who is expecting a question answers it differently.

No. He casts and casts and finds the line eventually. Type bait.

It has to be made of real things: prints in ground that keeps them, a thread of your plaid on a thorn at shoulder height, a fire lit and put out and covered badly. It costs the plaid, and two hours, and it has to go somewhere.

The north track — eleven miles to Balnain with no house on it, which costs nobody and which he may not quite believe. The empty shieling on the south side, roofs in since 1745, which costs nobody and which he would believe. Or back to Allt Beag, which he would believe without thinking about it for a moment.

Four women and nine children. The game will ask you twice.

Over the col. Watch him from the shoulder above the birch wood if you want to see it work.

In the open, a mile below, with his bonnet off, where you cannot possibly miss him. He has not hidden once in five days and you have been telling yourself that was carelessness.

At the top of the pass, type options. Four things, and one of them is not running.

go down to him. Then ask him about the Sput, about following, about June, about the shieling, and about why — why he has been sitting in the open in the last of the light. And then about the murrain.

Go into the corrie with no line on you and the cattle go north. Go into it with his line on you and they go down the Great Glen. Take the murrain, and he holds a lie until he is seventy and it costs him Ardgour. Or go north and never come back, and be entirely right about it.