They are like the dark world with Paradise around it.

I reached for the boot. It was a good one, fur-lined, but with the remnants of some decoration. I held it in my hand, trying to forget, until above me on the hillside, a boy came running down. Dogs were with him, barking and excited. He carried dead animals from the end of a long pole, and now he swung the pole up over their heads and kicked them as they snarled and jumped. He capered down the hillside out of breath, the dogs around him. And when he passed me, he stopped and swung the pole above my head.

I saw the naked tail hang down from one of them. “Rabbits,” I said.

“Rabbits,” he repeated proudly.

“Look what I have,” I said.

He seemed doubtful. I held the boot out by the heel, and he took it, saw it was too small for him, cast it on the bank. I admired the sparseness of his mind. “Boot,” he said.

I explained what I was feeling as well as I could. He understood me, or rather understood the words, the music, the sense, but not the point. I could tell he thought me strange to concern myself when there must be other children still alive who fit my vague descriptions. But he retrieved the boot, examined it more closely, threw it down again. And, sick of listening, he said, “Come eat,” and leapt away from rock to rock, brandishing his pole, humming part of a song called “I forget.”

I did not follow, even though the smell of dead meat swinging near my head had lit in me a burning hunger. I turned and walked up to where I had left my horse. I knelt by the stream and ran my fingers in the water. It had gotten dark, but even in the darkness I could see the shadows of the trees. And when I stood up to lead the horse away, I saw that he held between the cruel ridges of his beak a child’s severed hand. He was sucking on it the way barbarians eat candy. I reached up, and he pulled his head away and glared at me; he had been scratching for toads in the flaccid grass and had found something better. I let him be.

The air was perfectly still. The grass grew thick where I stood in a bowl-like indentation in the slope, lined with trees and slabs of stone. Paradise had risen, once again, up over the mountain crests, and rinsed the grass with silver light. And from one tree there came a drip, drip, drip. Something hung from a rope among the lower branches. It circled quietly in the quiet air.

I walked up the slope until I stood beneath the tree. I reached out and caught some of the drops. In that light they had no color of their own, but it was blood, of course. I knew it by the feel and smell and taste, and it awakened in me a hunger like the smell of my brother’s rabbits—blood past its first freshness. I stood admiring the light until a little pool had formed in my palm. Beneath the tree, the grass lay crushed, as if an animal had rolled in it.