“I know how much you love him,” Barbara said. But they both knew this was an understatement; Neal Nash collected everything Trachtenbroit-related that he could. Letters to colleagues. Notes for assistants. Journals he’d kept while studying his prized birds. Photos. Paintings. Drawings in dirt. From the rarest item (Neal believed he owned the very wire that was used to strangle Trachtenbroit on Freedom Hill) to the most common (a keychain in the Scottish hunter’s likeness). Neal knew better than anybody that Trachtenbroit was the actual hunter’s watermark. The best. The best hunter Goblin had ever called son.

And every time Neal referred to himself as such, Trachtenbroit’s visage hovered in his mind like a ghost.

Tsk, tsk, he seemed to say. For I found the Great Owl.

Neal could never rid himself of the possessive in hunting. He wanted to have and to own. To stuff and to show. But Jonathan Trachtenbroit bred and fed and then freed. For Gobliners, this made Trachtenbroit an easy guy to root for.

The hunter with feeling.

The exact hunter.

The gentleman hunter, to all.

Not even Goblin historians could be sure when the Scotsman first came to the city, though it was known he met George Carroll on the latter’s way out. He kept to himself, a strange and solitary stranger, always dressed in a red velvet jacket, who quietly studied cats and rabbits, dogs and squirrels. What was known was that, after six months of studying the animals who called Goblin home, he stood before the blocked entrance to the fabled and feared North Woods. A sign blocking the entrance read:

A DANGEROUS WOOD

He wondered what might thrive in there.

Back in town proper he quietly, selectively asked about the “dangerous wood” and could anybody tell him any more? But nobody could satisfy his hunter’s curiosity because no one had ever been inside.

It was illegal, they said.

But why?

He was told the legend of a witch who inhabited those woods. A witch who could enlarge your heart with a story, a whisper, until it exploded inside your chest. He was told of Chief Blackwater’s madness and how it was forged among those twisted trees.

But Trachtenbroit was a scientist first. And though he enjoyed stories of this nature, he wasn’t going to let them stop him from exploring. He asked whom he might speak with about breaking the rule of entering. He was directed to George Carroll. By then Carroll was eighty-something years old and when the fresh-faced Trachtenbroit introduced himself, Carroll laughed.

“I know why you’re here,” he said.

“Why?”

“You’re the man obsessed with the animals.”

“Yes.”

“And you wonder what’s living, what’s breeding, what’s dying in the North Woods.”

“Yes.”

“And you want to ask me if you may break Goblin law and enter.”

“Yes.”

“I daresay,” Carroll famously told the young hunter, “dying is up to you.”