The bear pressed his hands to his chest again and told Goodwill, ‘I promise to tell only the truth, and the truth is so strange that I think it will more than satisfy your curiosity. But before I begin, why don’t we make ourselves comfortable?’

Goodwill stayed standing, his wariness undiminished, while Ysbel and Raia sat crosslegged and Seven sprawled on his side, explaining that he had been one of a small tribe of cubs snatched from their mothers at a very early age and treated with medicine to counter the bad blood that made bears crazy fierce. They were raised in the camp by a troop of Goodwill’s people, and visited from time to time by humans who subjected them to medical examinations and quizzes designed to test their intelligence and reasoning. The keepers who looked after them meant well, he said. He and his fellow cubs had been taught arithmetic and how to read and write, given access to a small library and shown how to keep goats and grow vegetables, how to throw clay pots and, yes, how to tan leather. All the skills necessary for living in the wild. Even so, they were prisoners and experimental subjects, rigorously disciplined and controlled, forbidden to stray outside the camp’s perimeter.

‘How many of you were there?’ Ysbel said to Seven.

‘I was Seven of Sixteen. That was how many there were, to begin with. Sixteen.’

‘More cubs were treated and turned out later on,’ Raia said. ‘There were about forty in the camp when Seven escaped.’

‘We were told that one day we would be free,’ Seven said. ‘When we could be trusted. When the world was ready for us. But as we grew older we began to suspect that day would never come. Some of us reverted and became crazy fierce, fighting with their brothers and sisters, trying to attack their keepers.’ He pulled up the sleeve of his coat, showing the pale trench of a scar on his forearm. ‘A cub half my age and size did this when I tried to calm him. But there was no way of calming those who reverted, and they, and those who failed to pass the tests set by our human visitors, were there one day and gone the next. I hope that they were returned to the wild, sentimental fool that I am, but I rather doubt it.’

When two cubs disappeared after they’d been found devouring a goat they had killed, Seven and two of his friends decided that it was time to leave. They dug under the fence and headed north, but one of them was caught by keepers who tracked them through the forest, and the second was killed by a bear when he and Seven unknowingly trespassed on its territory.