We walk down the valley with the dogs running ahead, coats flowing, thin ice shattering when we crack the ruts made by cows wandering backwards and forwards to the troughs and hay bales, and as I walk I think about the language of loss. For all that my mother has ever tried to explain to me about words conveying meaning, I’ve never felt anything but their essential inadequacy. I couldn’t ever really tell anyone — Sonja, my mother, Harry - about what it was like to realise that I couldn’t hear, and, worse almost, that I couldn’t swim. I know my mother has never been able to describe adequately, completely, what she felt when she looked in the mirror Harry gave her. Words fail us; they have always failed us. So when we’re in the dense woods on the ridge, I touch my mother on her shoulder and she turns to me. I pull the letter from my pocket, hand it to her without speaking, without words, and I walk on. I walk slowly, through the woods, past the crumbling byres at their edge. Looking back I see my mother sitting on a felled elm trunk in the distance, the letter in one hand, a cigarette in the other. I call the dogs from a rabbit-hole and head for the house.

I sit in Ellen’s kitchen stroking the dogs, pulling the tip of my beard, waiting for my mother. The light in the kitchen changes and I turn to see her opening the door. She’s been crying and I can’t remember the last time I saw that. Unthinking, I reach up to scrub at the zest of a lime spraying my cheek. She disappears into the music room and returns with a bottle of Crown Royal and two glasses. She pours us each a shot, downs hers and pours herself another. We sit in silence (no change there, then) and stare at the dogs yawning and licking in their old cane chairs. There is a stillness about my mother I’ve never noticed before, or rather, I think there’s a stillness that has never existed before. If I have spent nearly thirty years listening to the wolf’s breath, what has she been doing? Whatever it was, it’s stopped.

She stretches out both hands to cover one of mine. Her skin is cold. ‘How do you feel?’

I shrug. 'It’s over,’ I say, and I wonder what exactly I’m talking about.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ I try words. ‘For a long time I could hear — there was a sort of noise in my head … It’s stopped.’

‘Good.’ She pours another drink and I see her hands shaking a little.

‘What about you? I never knew him but you did.’

‘What about me? Well, I haven’t been hearing noises in my head but I’m glad it’s over.’ She smiles weakly. ‘It just went on so long.’

That was how Sonja found us, sitting with a bottle of Crown Royal, my mother holding my hand, a letter on the table between us. She opened the latch door and looked at me with grave, grey eyes.