Maggie was on her way out the door. ‘A sore paw will be the least of its worries if it comes after my chickens again.’

Ned and his father followed her. They went into the house, took off their boots and damp socks, began doing the things they did at the end of each day: washing their arms and faces, scraping away the grit they’d collected. Ned scrubbed potatoes, boiled water. He was exhausted by the emotions of the day. A month of feeling had been packed into a few bright hours. Usually in these moments of untaxing chores he’d plan and daydream, but his wrung-out mind gave him no ideas to mould, no fantasies to fiddle with. Couldn’t think of the shed. Couldn’t remember what Falmouth’s boat had looked like.

His father disappeared into the other room to pore over the newspaper, staring at the black lines of reports, seeing if he’d missed something when he’d first read them that morning. Reading them again and again and again.

Later at the table, his chewing paused. ‘You’d have got good money for that pelt.’

Admonishment or admiration. Ned couldn’t tell which.

~

The money dragged at him and he didn’t want it anymore; he felt sick at the thought of it under his bed, sick and hot at the idea of it just sitting there. So at dawn he biked to Falmouth’s and poured it into the man’s palms, who watched the coins land with unshining eyes. They agreed that Falmouth, who owned a truck, would deliver the dinghy to Limberlost later in the week. Ned shook his hand. Felt cold, hard knobs of skin. Tore home on the bicycle, dust clagging the sweat running down his calves.

Jackbird tried to visit, but Ned saw him coming and hid. He didn’t want to talk about the boat until it was properly his, didn’t even want to think about it. It was too close. He couldn’t hold the reality of it straight; the boat blurred his vision, gave him a headache.

He still went to the vet’s—Telle, as he’d started thinking of her now—every morning, because rabbits continued to feast on her garden, and his debt had still not been paid. Once he had prised the corpses from the traps around the garden’s borders he took to the forest beyond it, as he used to, but no longer with his rifle; he went only as a walker. Felt the settling peace of shade and moss, creek and stone. He wondered if the rest of the world was like this. If forests cooled the blood of people in every type of land and country. If there were places like this in the Pacific. In Murmansk. In Singapore.

Sometimes he thought of the white goshawk. He wondered if it had escaped the ravens. If Callie had blasted it from the sky.