I dig earth with cupped hands, extracting the weed and its roots, throwing it onto the pile of ugly vegetation behind me. Although the work is calming, I feel an urge grow. The creature is bolder. Teasing perhaps. I try to keep my thoughts on bindweed, yet it’s impossible. The creature pushes a long snout out of the bushes; I can see from my rear-view. Her eyes are like the pollinated centres of sunflowers, yellow and black in the centre. I suppose she wants to talk. It certainly looks that way. Why else would she come back, day after day? Slowly she pokes her head further. First eyes emerge, then a broad, flattened skull, finally twitching ears and a long thick neck. Her tongue hangs low, ridged and dripping with a translucent liquid that steams as it hits swaying grass. She’s a huge beast, magnificent. I’ve never seen one like her. She steps a great clover-shaped foot onto my territory.

I turn and leap, covering the distance between us, some sixteen metres, in one bound. By the time I land she’s already disappeared from the hedgerow. Jazari. When I leap onto the arid land beyond the creature runs into the metres-high grassland that marks the wild, fogged by dust, feet scrambling, ears low, her tail a sharp, straight line. She disappears into the whispering grass and that’s the end. I’ve lost sight of her, maybe for ever. I look around in case anything witnessed what I’d done, but the land is bare for miles. Couple. I shake damp earth from my fingers and wait. Nothing moves. I give up, leaping back to my side of the hedge.

The appearance of the creature and my handling of her are unsettling. I’m not a being of impulse, far from it. I’ve suppressed my predatory leanings to such a degree I’ve erased all but the faintest remains of pogroms. I know my temperament is not the same as yours, it’s why I moved from the city and into the land. You still curse The Others’ name routinely. In Utoma City, when I was there, they were treated with violent apathy, disgust. Then they were few, their sightings rarer than creatures, but I heard and saw enough to cause me to wonder why this was, to realise I was the anomaly, not you. What knows which turn of circumstances created me like this? None are like me, and my course of action became clear soon after my daymark. I had little possessions, only the seeds collected over time if you remember or care to track that far.