“That’s a song about a man who goes to the fair and sells his cow,” he informs Cal, over his shoulder, “for five pounds in silver and a yellow guinea of gold. And he says, ‘If I drink all the silver and squander the gold, why should any man care, when it’s nothing to him?’”

He sings again. The trail slopes upwards. On the flat grassland below, the fields spread out shorn and pale in the sharp sunlight, divided by walls that lie along reasons that were forgotten centuries ago.

“He says, ‘If I go to the woods picking berries or nuts, taking apples off branches or herding the cows, and I lie under a tree to take my ease, why should any man care, when it’s nothing to him?’”

Cal takes out his phone, turns on the camera and holds it up to the view. “Turn that off,” Mart says, breaking off the song in mid-line.

“I told my daughter I was going walking up the mountains,” Cal says. “She asked for pictures. She likes the look of the scenery around here.”

Mart says, “Tell her you forgot your phone.”

He stands on the trail, leaning on his crook, looking at Cal and waiting. After a minute Cal turns the phone off and puts it back in his pocket. Mart nods and turns back to walking. In a little bit he starts his song again.

Ferny plants, like nothing Cal’s seen in the grasslands, reach from the verges to brush at his boots. Mart’s crook makes a small, rhythmic crunching on the path, underscoring the song. “The man says,” he tells Cal, “‘People say I’m a useless waster, with no goods or fine clothes, no cattle or wealth. If I’m happy enough to live in a shack, why should any man care, when it’s nothing to him?’”

He strikes off the trail and clambers through a gap in a crumbling, lichened stone wall. Cal follows. They cross a patch of land that looks like it was cleared, a long time ago, before being abandoned for tufts of tall fine grass to reclaim. In one corner are the tumbledown remains of a stone cottage, much older than Brendan’s. Mart doesn’t turn his head to look at it. A wisp of wind shivers the seed-heads on the grass.

As they climb higher the cold sharpens, slicing through Cal’s layers and pressing its edge into his skin. Cal knows their route is circling and meandering, doubling back on itself, but one gorse bush or patch of moor grass looks too much like the next for him to be sure exactly how. He glances regularly at the sun and the view, trying to keep his bearings, but he knows he could spend a year looking and never find his way here again. He catches Mart’s wry eye on him.

Without his phone, Cal can’t be sure how long they’ve been walking; more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half. The sun is high. He thinks of the four men trudging their slow steady way up these trails, the body in its sheet swaying between them.

Mart takes them through a thick stand of spruce, down into a dip, and out onto another single-file trail where the ridge spreads out into a plateau on either side. Glints of water show among the peat and heather.

“Stay on this path, now,” he advises Cal. “Every year there’s a sheep or two that steps into one of them bogs and can’t get out again. And twenty-five or thirty year back there was a fella that usedta come down from Galway city—mad as a bag of cats, so he was. He’d walk up and down the mountain barefoot every Good Friday, saying the rosary all the way. He said the Blessed Virgin had told him that some year or other, if he kept at it, she’d appear to him along the way. Maybe she did and she picked a bad spot for it, I couldn’t tell you, but one year he didn’t come back. The men went looking and found him dead in a bitta bog. Only eight foot from the path, with his arm still stretched out towards the dry ground.”

The spade is biting into Cal’s shoulder, and his knee throbs at every step. He wonders if Mart is planning to walk him in circles till it gives out, and then leave him to find his own way home. The sun has started to slide down the sky.

“There,” Mart says, stopping. He points his crook at a spot in the bog, about twenty feet off the path.

“You sure?” Cal asks.

“I am, of course. Would I bring you all the way up here if I wasn’t sure?”

All around them the plateau lies flat and wide. Long grass and heather bend, autumn-bleached. Small shadows drift across them, from wisps of cloud.

Cal says, “Looks a lot like about a dozen other places we’ve passed.”

“To you, maybe. If you want Brendan Reddy, that’s where you’ll find him.”

“And his watch is on him.”

“We took nothing off him. If he had his watch on that day, then it’s on him now.”

They stand side by side, looking at the bog. Patches of water shine here and there with reflected blue. “You told me not to go off the path,” Cal says. “If I go in there, what’s to stop me from ending up like the rosary guy?”

“That sham was a city lad,” Mart says. “Either he couldn’t tell dry bog from wet, or he thought the Blessed Virgin would haul his arse outa it. I was cutting turf on this mountain before you were born or thought of, and I’m telling you there’s good solid bog from here to that spot. How d’you think we got the lad in there without drowning ourselves?”

Cal can see exactly how this will read, if he’s misjudged Mart. A dumbass Yank, out playing back-to-nature in country he didn’t understand, put a foot wrong. Maybe Alyssa will remember that he was supposed to go walking with his neighbor; but then, half a dozen men will have spent the whole of today hanging out with Mart.

“If you want to turn around and go home,” Mart says, “I’ll chalk this up to a nice bitta exercise.”

“I was never much of a believer in exercise for its own sake,” Cal says. “Too lazy for that. If I’ve come all the way up here, there might as well be a point to it.” He shifts the spade to a less painful position on his shoulder and steps off the path. He hears Mart following behind him, but he doesn’t turn round.

The bog gives and rebounds under his feet, as his weight reverberates through the layers deep below, but it holds him. “Step left,” Mart says. “Now straight.” Far out in front of them, a small bird rises in alarm and vanishes into the sky, its high zipping call coming down to them faintly through all that cold space.

“There,” Mart says.

In front of Cal’s feet, a man-sized rectangle of the bog is rough-edged and lumpy, against the smooth sweep of grass all around.

“He’s not as deep as he should be,” Mart says. “But, sure, the government’s banned cutting turf on this bitta mountain. He’ll be left in peace, once you’re done with him.”

Cal burrows the edge of the spade into the peat, at the rough line where it’s been disturbed, and sinks it with his good foot. The blade goes in smoothly; the peat feels thick and clayey under it. “Cut in around the edges first,” Mart says. “Then you can lift out the sod.”