Dreamhunter by Elizabeth Knox

passed he visited Chambers in the doctor’s rooms at the front of his residence on the west bank of the Sva River. Hame showed Chambers how, when he planted his feet to play reels, his bad leg would tremble. Chambers told Tziga Hame that although he could still expect some improvement his limp was with him for life.
    Hame was cast down. After seeing the doctor he took to his bed for a time, using the winter’s first cold snap as an excuse not to exercise. Hame lay in bed and did some thinking. He thought about the dream he had had, night after night, in the first week after his accident. Hame felt that the dream had helped him to heal. He reviewed what had happened to him. He’d had a fall and had broken his leg and, while unconscious, he had caught a dream as one catches a cold. When he’d caught his dream, he’d seemed to be in another place — somewhere dry and silent, a place whose trees had bark that was peeling in sooty strips; somewhere unlike the road through lush Wry Valley.
    Hame later explained that he would never have known that he had gone into another place had the farmer who found him come from the Doorhandledirection. Fortunately the farmer was coming from the coast with a cartload of seaweed for compost. Hame, crawling back the way he had come, slithered from the dusty trail on to the muddy road and heard a cart coming up behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the farmer coming around the bend of a road he hadn’t crawled along . The farmer stopped and looked Hame over, then picked him up and tried to carry him to his cart. But Hame simply dropped out of the farmer’s arms and fell back through what he called ‘a fold in the map’.
    ‘I’ve always imagined the Place is a whole territory hidden in a fold in a map. Everything on the map apparently joins up, the roads, rivers, mountain range — but the map can open wider, and show a whole concealed country.’
    The farmer, finding his arms empty, to his credit did not immediately decide that Hame was a ghost and flee. A calm and practical man, the farmer waited on the spot at which Hame had disappeared until the young man managed to collect himself and crawl out again. The farmer saw Hame’s arms break through the air. He said later that it was like watching a calf born from an invisible cow. When Hame appeared the second time, the farmer led his horse past the spot where Hame lay and only then picked the young man up, and put him in the cart.
    Hame, lying in his attic room in Founderston’s old town, discouraged and in pain, thought about his fall and came to a conclusion. He concluded that he had caught his dream in a place he might be able to find again. A place on the road beyond Doorhandle. And so he pawned his violin, and bought a seat on the Sisters Beach stage as far as Doorhandle. He found the farmer and asked the man to accompany him to the point on the road where theyfirst met. The farmer was quite clear about the location of the spot where he’d found Hame — a section of road shadowed by a mature hawthorn tree.
    It was late afternoon when they reached the spot. The road was narrowed by drifts of fallen leaves. There was a cloud of midges under the hawthorn — but the road was otherwise an empty, everyday road. Hame and the farmer crept under the tree, their hands held out before them. Then Hame disappeared — and the farmer walked on a little alone. A moment later Hame reappeared out of the air and asked the farmer to build a cairn by the tree to mark the border. And then he went back In.
    It is possible that, having injured himself on his first arrival in the Place, Hame had been pushed into a certain kind of adaptation to its weather. I will use that word ‘weather’. Sailors talk of winds, of Trades and Variables, Doldrums and Roaring Forties. Just as different vessels are adapted to different weather conditions, so each dreamhunter is adapted to sail down different winds of sleep. Directly over the Doorhandle border