Feeding was a dangerous, unpredictable process. Ned could never know how the quoll would react to him. Inching the bin lid open usually summoned the creature upwards, its teeth flashing and snapping at the aperture, and he could do nothing but jam in slivers of meat before hurriedly resealing the gap. Other times it lay still, regarding him with benign curiosity, and he could remove the lid entirely, offer hunks of rabbit to its snout, and wait for the quoll to deftly snatch them from his shaking fingers.

Occasionally it was asleep, and he could watch its snowpatterned torso shift with the air that came in and out of it. In these moments he studied the delicacy of its face, the bunched strength in its neck and shoulders, the curling length of its tail, the shape of its lithe body. It became a marvellous thing, beautiful and impossible. A demon from a sharper world. He avoided looking at its savaged leg.

Sometimes it let him dip a hand near its face, only to hiss and snap at his fingers. Sometimes it screamed. Sometimes it bashed against the walls of the crate the moment it heard him approaching, its furious barks rasping through the shed, and he did not risk feeding it at all.

He knew he shouldn’t be keeping it. Its pelt was worth more than his boots. Its wound was a scene of carnage. He should kill it, for mercy as much as for money. And even if its leg somehow healed, if he somehow nursed the quoll to health and set it free, it would not abandon its instincts or its hunger. It would return to the chicken coop, find a way under the wire, smash open the eggs and slaughter the flapping mothers, ripping at flesh and feathers with ancient, efficient violence. Blood would drench the straw. Maggie would wake to the carcasses.

He hadn’t thought about the boat for days.

~

When the heat broke Maggie asked Ned if he wanted to go riding. He didn’t like horses—huge, storm-mouthed creatures that had huffed terror into him when he was younger. The jitter in their necks, in their eyes, despite their size and muscle. He’d never believed that they wouldn’t kick or throw him. One of the first times he’d climbed onto a horse it had laid a fierce bite on his upper arm. Each winter he could feel its jaw through his flesh—a ghost clamping on the hardness of his bone.