‘You ever tried to outrun a goat?’ Wolf said. ‘Keeps you fit, that’s for sure.’

‘There are other ways,’ Ben replied. On the trestle table was a large, well-worn knife the villagers had been using to cut up their bread. He picked it up, then stepped over to a corner where a long-handled broomstick stood propped against the wall. With the head knocked off, the broom made a decent spear shaft. He started hunting around for something to lash the knife handle to it.

‘Gone native at last, I see,’ Wolf said. ‘Getting in touch with the old ancestral spirit. Nice.’

‘Whatever works,’ Ben replied, finding a strip of cured goat leather that someone had been fashioning into a belt. ‘This’ll do.’

‘Well, Tarzan, I’ll leave you to it. Got to pee.’ Wolf disappeared, as Ben got on making his makeshift spear. When Wolf returned a couple of minutes later, he was looking pleased with himself. ‘I found something better,’ he said, showing Ben.

Wolf’s discovery was an old wooden recurve bow, battered and weathered but still with plenty of spring in it and a fairly fresh bowstring fitted. Its former owner had obviously used it a good deal and taken care of it. The arrows in the goat leather quiver were homemade too, carefully fitted with flights cut from something like vulture feathers and sharp steel tips fashioned out of razor blades. It was a crude but deadly tool.

‘You any good with one of these?’ Wolf asked him. ‘They’re the one projectile weapon I can’t shoot for shit.’

‘Been a while,’ Ben replied. He’d once, briefly, been involved with a medal-winning lady archer. Another romance that hadn’t ended well, but he’d learned a lot from watching how she handled a bow and arrow.

‘You kill ’em and I’ll dress ’em,’ Wolf said. ‘Then whatever else happens out here, at least we won’t starve to death. Not for a couple of days, anyway. Unless we get shot to bits first.’

‘That’s what I like so much about you,’ Ben told him. ‘That eternal optimism.’

‘My best feature.’

They left the house and wandered back out of the village, Ben armed with the bow with an arrow fitted and the quiver over his shoulder, Wolf carrying the spear just in case. ‘My mouth’s watering already,’ Wolf said.

The sound of bleating led them towards some thorny bushes a few yards beyond the village perimeter. On the humans’ approach a young brown nanny goat was startled out from the cover of the bushes and broke into a run. Ben took aim at the moving target, drew the bowstring back all the way and let go. The arrow whistled through the air, passed three inches over the running animal’s shoulder and embedded itself with a vibrating thonk into one of the wooden posts of the livestock corral.