"Never mind him, but tell me how you came here, and where you belong." So I told him that I was Oswald, the son of Aldred, the thane of Eastdean, thinking, of course, that all men would know of us, and so I bade him take me home quickly.
"I have been hunting," I said, showing him my unsavoury prey, which by this time was frozen stiff in my belt.

"Then I followed the hare this was after, and I cannot tell how far I have come." All this while the man had me in his strong arms, and he had looked at the track of the dog in the snow, and now was walking swiftly from it, through the beech trees, looking up at their branches as if wondering at the way the great trunks shot up smooth and bare from the snow at their roots before they reached the first forking, fathoms skyward.
"I am a stranger, Oswald, the thane's son," he said.

"I do not rightly know in which direction your home may lie." I know now that he was himself as lost as I, but that he did not tell me, for my sake.

It is an easy thing for a stranger to go astray in the Andredsweald.

But I could not tell him more than that I knew that I had left the sea always behind me so long as I knew where it lay.