We arrived at the bothy an hour before dark: me, two students from Dundee, and a retired postman who had walked in from the far glen. By nine we were old friends. By ten we had pooled dinner.
The economics of shared noodles
A bothy runs on a simple currency: whatever you carried in, offered around. Noodles, a heel of cheese, someone’s astonishing hip-flask. The postman contributed forty years of hill stories, which was the richest anyone got that night.
I slept on a stone sleeping platform, badly and happily, and woke to the loch doing its silver trick at dawn.