Judah shakes his head. -Very many, very very many more will be killed if you do not go, he says, and the stiltspear shakes its head too-it has learnt the motion from him and uses it with pride.

-We will be trees, it says.

Judah can make his mudling dance. Each day he is stronger at it. Now he makes foot-tall figures from the clay and peat. He does not know what it is he makes happen or how the stiltspear children have taught him or what the adult put in him, but his new capabilities delight him. His little model can beat others now, at the golem circus they play.

It is his only pleasure, and he hates that it feels like an evasion. Once or twice more he begs the stiltspear to come with him to the deeper swamp. It degrades him that he cannot find the words to move them. It is their culture, he says to himself, it is their way, it is their nature. They-not he-are to blame. But he does not believe his own thought.

He feels pinioned by history. He can wriggle like a stuck butterfly but can go nowhere.

There are more reverberations and the explosions from hunters’ guns are audible throughout the days. Judah understands something. He watches the stiltspear corner a calf-thick amphibian, and together sing-breathe the uh uh uh uh uh rhythm and for half a second the newt-thing petrifies midflick, held in time made thick, and Judah realises the rhythm they have sung is an echo of the children’s mud-golem song. The same, made vastly more complex, given several parts.

He is obsessed with the chant. He wants to preserve the moments of its utterance, congeal the sounds, strip them down. He can only time them as closely as he can and write them to work out their relations.

Judah works fast. He feels a knot tying in him. His near-friend Red-eyes helps him. -We make shapes that move. All of us: young one way, hunters another. And Judah sees that the children’s chants are only mimicry; it is their hands that make their golems. The rhythm of the hunters does the work of the children’s pinching fingers. Both intercessions are of a kind.

There is a noise of industry, far off. A growled rhythm.

The first stiltspear to die is a young too confused to control its camouflage. It is shot by a hunter frightened by the rapid flickering between states of a four-footed animal thing and what seems a rotting tree. He does not know what he has killed and it is only chance and neophobia that he does not eat the child. The clan find the little body.

They’ve reached the lake, Judah thinks. He imagines uncountable wagonloads of nothing, of soil, stone and dirt bloating the swamp.