Something stiff and indomitable in his soul was bracing him to a manlier humour.
There was no one to see the figure strapped to the fir, but had there been a witness he would have noted that at this stage Dickson shut his teeth and that his troubled eyes looked very steadily before him.
His business, he felt, was to keep from thinking, for if he thought at all there would be a flow of memories--of his wife, his home, his books, his friends--to unman him.

So he steeled himself to blankness, like a sleepless man imagining white sheep in a gate....

He noted a robin below the hazels, strutting impudently.

And there was a tit on a bracken frond, which made the thing sway like one of the see-saws he used to play with as a boy.

There was no wind in that undergrowth, and any movement must be due to bird or beast.