Now you dont have to read anything into this but feel free to do so should you wish.

Earlier this month, 8^th of August in fact, 8 of us climbed up to Pilate's Lake in the Sibilline mountains in Le Marche, one of our intended playgrounds I should add, (having a mouse's eye to the future).

Wasn't my idea (heaven forbid)… but it was Monica's, that we should leave the bar in town precisely at 8 seconds to the 8^th minute before 8 o'clock. Being Italian she was of course late and arrived breathless at 8 o'clock announcing that we would all now be leaving at 8 minutes past the hour and if anybody had any objections, they should say so there and then. Nobody dared! particularly because she was wearing nifty little shorts and sported an impressive compass (I ended up paying the bar bill, I was so confused).

We drove in convoy to as far as we could go by car, to Foce. Now Foce is more like, in my eyes at least, a cowboy town, a last refuge so to speak before the departure point higher up where the slope begins to steepen It's got a bar selling lots of fizzy stuff, crisps and chocolates, the sort of good nourishment you need to climb up mountains and which make you feel sick when you get to the top and eat it all immediately.

So began the slow ascent up Mount Vettore (derived from the word Bi-Tauri in local Marchgiano dialect)

Throughout history, the Lake had been a meeting point for witches, Satanists and necromancers, something which the Church attempted to put a stop to by destroying a coven which existed on an island (since disappeared) in the middle of the lake. They had also built a chapel at the foot of the pass to prevent those of the above persuasions from getting through. Interesting!

Back to the mountain. It was a Jezebel of a climb. The path up is only really safely open in the high summer months because of the snows, which descend down the valley sometimes as early as October. The first part of the trek was a doddle; walking past and through an impromptu campsite looking very much to me like a scene from a Cowboys and Indians movie (can I say that? Of course I can). This only re-enforcing in me the heroic nature of the task ahead as by this time I was well into the imaginative stuff which saw me through my boy-scout days.

So! Here we are half way up the first slope, calling back and forward to each other to ask if the others need help, or perhaps a crisp or an energy drink but really just to have a rest from the first waves of pain which were hitting knees, hips, legs generally but in my case my entire body.

Now, in case you are losing the plot I will lead you directly to the point of the story, which is really to do with mental attitude and courage.

At this most difficult part of the climb, I must confess I was thinking 'Uhmm, why am I doing this? I'm hot and bothered and aching and I feel irritated and who wants to see a million red shrimps anyway'. Such shameful thoughts drifted over me whilst I was simultaneously shouting encouragement to the others and then I looked up hearing the sound of laughing and singing to see a group of some six people led by a guide at either end all tied together a metre each apart by a thick rope and each of these people in the centre carrying a white stick! all of them walking slowly slowly down and past me.

Well, there's no point in explaining how we felt, enough to say that seeing that group of blind people pass us changed the whole aspect of the day. We saw and felt every step after that wondered at every turn and reached the lake, although nobody said a word about it, with feelings which could fly.

Now this is the bit, which interests me the most. That group must have left base at some un-earthly time in the morning to get up to the lake and back to that point by the time we past them. Not the lazy time we chose. And so, I told this story to a friend in California last week.

And she replied:

That she'd been on a trek, a short trail to a creek bed. A moss covered tree was lying in the bed - with many butterflies landing all about her and a small rodent lying frozen in an eddy in a standing position. She was currently re-writing for her own understanding a story based upon a native American myth where the primary character is a mouse on a spiritual quest, a personal journey - at the end of which the mouse goes through a cathartic change. The mouse was blind at the end of her journey - and in her darkness she was lead by a guide - a wolf - to the Great Lake of the Sacred Mountains where she was allowed to transform, to change and live again in an enlightened form.

My friend said she'd never really thought much about butterflies before - but decided there and then - that that was the change that she would personally have to make, from mouse to butterfly. After getting home she'd looked up the butterfly in a Medicine Circle book to discover a wonderful parallel for the "catharsis" that she was writing about, represented in the change from mouse to caterpillar to butterfly.

This rounds up this little adventure story pretty well enough, don't you think?

Mice,

23^rd August 1999