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Early next morning Angus rose to leave, but before he went he had advice for his foster-son.

'O Diarmuid,' he said, 'in your flight from Finn go not into a tree with one trunk, not into a cave with one opening, nor to an island with only one approach. Where you cook, eat not there. Where you eat, sleep not there. Where you rest tonight, sleep not tomorrow night. And so farewell.'

Many times, in the days that followed, the lives of Diarmuid and Grainne were in danger. Finn looked for them far and wide. Enemies from the sea and venomous hounds chased them till at last they left Two-Willow-Point and went into the forest of Dubhros, where there was a famous quicken-tree or rowan. This rowan grew from a berry brought by the Tuatha De Danaan from the Land of Promise. The Tuatha De Danaan had dropped the berry by accident during a hurling game against the Fianna, and from it grew a wonderful tree. The berries of this tree had the taste of honey, and those who ate them felt the liveliness of wine, and a person of a hundred had the youth again of one aged thirty.

The guardian of the tree was a Formorian from Lochlann called Searbahn the Surly, and he was very big and black and ugly, with crooked teeth and a single eye in the middle of his forehead. He had a belt of iron and a club of iron, and he would not die except from three strokes of his own club. Fire could not burn him, nor water smother him, nor weapons kill him. He slept in the tree by night and watched it by day, and he made a wilderness around where none, not even the men of the Fianna, dared hunt or chase. If Diarmuid and Grainne could settle there, it would be a safe place for them.

Diarmuid went to this giant and made a bond with him to live there and hunt so long as he touched not the rowan or the berries. Diarmuid made a hut and he and Grainne lived safely in the wood of Dubhros, eating beasts from the wild and drinking water from the spring.

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