‘I’m thinking.’

‘She’s getting worse.’

‘She’s fine.’

Nora looked up the road, all but obliterated by snow that fell as if it would never stop as long as the world turned. She had half a mind to just get in the truck and start driving until the buck died, until the road wrenched him from the grille. She went again to the back of the truck and opened the tailgate and unloaded all their bags. She was looking for a shovel, something she could use to hit the thing over the head. Nothing in the flatbed. She lifted back the rug that lay on the bottom, and underneath was just sawdust and dirt and rust. Some tangled fishing line and a hook bent out of shape.

‘Somebody’s bound to come along soon,’ she called out. Something to say at least. She repacked their things and closed the tailgate. Back to the deer and the man, and she repeated these words again. Somebody’s bound to come along soon. Get the fuck up, she thought.

‘Aren’t your legs getting cold?’ she asked, cajoling. She whisked her hands together, her knuckles raw pink. The deer’s eyes were glazed and its face was set. Its movements now seemed involuntary.

Red looked down at his legs and brushed the snow from his jeans, but still did not get up.

‘What’s wrong with you, Red?’

He looked past her, up the road. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

She could use a rock to the head. It would be awful, but. ‘Screw it,’ she said, and tramped through the snow-filled ditch at the side of the road and into the trees, mainly birch and alder here, naked and spindly and asleep. A thousand branches nicked at her cheeks, caught her hair. She was looking for a rock small enough to carry; big enough for killing. No feeling in her fingers or toes. The afternoon light was so flat and the ground so uniformly white that it almost wasn’t there. Only indications of the land underneath were the baby green yew branches and the odd yellow grass stalks poking through the snow, like breathing straws in water. There were no rocks here but she kept trudging forward and, when she turned to look back, the truck on the road looked like a photograph, scratched and worn. That dark hump on the road was Red. That deep hum was the sound of the engine keeping her daughter warm. She tripped on a root and landed with her arms buried, got back up angrily. Black dirt under her nails and a scraped knuckle.

Red was calling her name and so she pushed back towards the road and then there he was, standing over the deer. Nora organized her face into a confident smile for Anouk, watching through the windshield.

The deer’s eyes were death-open.

‘Did you kill it?’ she asked.

‘No.’

He knelt again and laid his palms flat on the dead animal’s haunch, and Nora knelt beside him. He leaned closer, put his cheek on its shoulder.