The witch was cast out for her failure. The nets were all bound together, into one that could sweep through half the lake, from the muddy bottom to the surface. There was talk that some otters might be snared, or fishing birds. But those creatures had long since left. Or died. Every canoe was pushed out into the water, to draw that net through the waters. They circled the island, a slow spin around its treeless mound, and when at last they returned to their camp, everyone joined in the task of drawing in that net.

It was easier than it should have been.

Tradition is the great slayer. It clings to its proof and it drowns in its own net, from which nothing ever escapes.

Glyph and the other men had left their camps when the leaves turned brown. They trekked into the north, out on to the barrenlands, seeking the last, dwindling herds that had summered in the forest. Bearing bows and javelins, they gathered into hunting parties, seeking hoof-sign, and at night they told tales of past hunts, of hundreds of beasts slain where the herds crossed the cold rivers. They spoke of the wolves that joined them, and became comrades in the slaughter. Wolves they all came to know by sight – and surely, it was the same for the wolves – and like old friends they were given names. Odd-eye. Silvermane. Broketooth.

And, as the fires died down and darkness closed in with the moaning wind, the hunters sought to find the names the wolves had for each of them.

Fartwind. Sackscratch. Prickpump. Nubhide.

Laughter bit the cold from the air on those nights.

The layering of memories built tradition’s high walls, until the place made by those walls became a prison.

Glyph now saw how the very last tradition, when all the others had done their grisly work, was just this: a prison. The tales told, the memories gathered up like clay and then made into something hard as stone. It was what the elders of the lake had clung to, with their bleeding fingers. It was what Glyph and his fellow hunters had clung to, on those empty nights so filled with empty words.

He walked through the scorched bones of the forest, and the bitter ash on his tongue had become a kind of mortar, and he felt himself beginning the building of his own wall. A modest two or three stones. A meagre wall. But he would find more to work with, he was certain of that. Constructed from new memories. These memories…

The failed hunt just past. The cruel pathos of the stories told at night out in the barrens. The hopeless search for hoof-sign. The wolves that did not come and did not howl with the fall of dusk.