And then she turns very pale blue eyes upon him and says, Do you believe in God?

What a question! He looks at her and just for a moment a tiny sliver of paranoia rises up in him, an ancient fossil of a thought that her sharp gaze has chipped out of the little-boy part of him, and he shushes and soothes it, No, no, she means no harm.

Because he hasn’t answered her, she says, I don’t any more. How can you, when you see something like this? It makes no sense. It’s just so random, isn’t it? Nature.

I don’t know, he says. I didn’t believe in God, but now—

And all those children. All those children dying on the news. It doesn’t make sense.

He doesn’t know to what news she’s referring. He has stayed away from news for a long time for the very reason that there are always children dying on the news. He looks at the bird, the toad a lump in its throat, like emotion it failed to express, something it was trying to say.

I just think we’ve got the wrong idea about it all.

No intelligent person can imagine there’s a God, she says.

If you mean some grey-bearded chap on a cloud, I’m with you, he says. But as a shorthand for something else—

Like what? she says, and again her eyes are so sharp, so inquisitive, that for a second or two he’s afraid to answer. He breathes; he listens to the peace of the forest.

I can imagine this as the answer to somebody’s prayer, he says.

She laughs. Who exactly?

A fox with cubs.

With the stick, she turns the bird’s head over on its loose neck, this way, that way, as though it is saying, No, no, no.

Foxes don’t pray, she says.

He nods. I bet they wish for things, though. Edible things especially.

She laughs and throws the stick into the brambles, the better to cross her arms and confront him. Okay. But if they did, and wishing was the same as praying, and prayers worked, wouldn’t we have enormous birds with frogs in their throats falling out of the sky all the time? Head cocked on one side. Achilles, sitting beside her, takes up the same pose.

You can look at it many ways, Logan says.

What ways?

Maybe it’s for the fox. Maybe it’s for a local man who is breeding prize koi and needs one less predator in order to fulfil a dream. Maybe it’s for the suicidal toad. Maybe it’s just for you and me to have this conversation.

Maybe it’s meaningless, she says.

I don’t think it’s meaningless now that we’ve talked about it. Do you?