had been nothing more than an illusion, a product of the changes taking place in her body, the night itself, and her own fertile imagination.
When the weather permitted, Michael, along with Martin Tom Bawn, had taken to going up the mountain in search of new places where lumpers might be cultivated in secret. This they did under cover of dusk, to avoid the ever-watchful eyes of Pakenham’s spies.
In the course of one of these expeditions, the two men came upon a spot overlooking Glenbeg which was inaccessible from the valley below and protected from above by a big overhang of rock.
They stumbled on it by accident after they had startled a hare. The hare, in its flight, seemed to disappear right over the side of the mountain. Turning to Michael, Martin Tom Bawn said, ‘Where the hare goes, grass grows, and where grass grows, praties will grow.’ So they followed the hare’s route to a large outcropping of rock, beyond which they couldn’t see. Edging their way along a precariously narrow ledge, they rounded the overhang to find that the mountainside seemed to cut away back into itself, revealing a patch of ground about thirty feet wide and sixty feet long, filled with marshland grasses and boulders and stones of all shapes and sizes.
The two men looked at each other, excited at their find.
‘This will do the job rightly!’ Martin Tom Bawn exclaimed, bending down to test the soil. ‘The lumper will grow well here, Michael.’
‘You were right about the hare, Martin,’ Michael replied.
‘Faith I was! Them’s clever fellows. They know every inch of the mountain and it’s not too often you see them caught, either. They’re even too glic for the fox himself!’
With that, the two began the task of clearing their find. Day by day, they started with the small stones, then the bigger rocks, stacking them up around the sides of the Hare’s Garden, as they called their secret place. It was backbreaking toil, but if they were to be ready for spring planting, then the work had to be done, and neither man complained. Martin Tom Bawn quoted the old saying:
No bread without sweat,
No soil without toil,
No love without longing.
And together they sweated and toiled to make this soil their own.
‘Will we get the dozen beds out of it, Martin?’ Michael asked when it was almost cleared, except for three or four of the largest boulders.
The older man straightened up, pushing the cap back off his forehead and, in the same movement, wiping the soologues of sweat that had gathered there. He squinted and pondered, and squinted again at the perimeters of the Hare’s Garden before he answered: ‘Faith, Michael, we’ll be doing well if we get the half-score out of it – maybe the one or two extra rows for luck. But I don’t think she’ll take the dozen, though I could be wrong, mind.’
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