A child’s body had been tied up like a package. It rotated slowly at the end of a rope, and I saw the rope was barbarian-made, because of its contemptibly high quality.

I climbed up into the tree. A child had been strangely mutilated, his eyes dug away, his tongue cut out.

Only his torso and his head remained; his arms and legs had been severed at the joints and carried away.

His strange, empty head fell loosely from side to side as the rope rotated. His neck must have been broken. Standing on a low branch, I reached out to shake the silken rope, to make the body jerk and dance. It was my little brother.

I climbed down. My horse was already nosing at the grass, but I pulled it free, down the slope. There was no space to ride, but in a little while the trees gave out into a grassy meadow. And there I swung myself into the saddle. Paradise was bright like day, and the horse uneasy, pulling at his rope. At first I thought it was from horsey love of open spaces, until I smelled what it smelled: once again, the smell of death. The grass had been trampled in a muddy track down towards the town, as if a troop of men and horses had passed together. That was unusual enough. But in the middle of it lay the body of dog, a great noble brute, silver in the gleaming starlight. His silver fur was seething, alive in the shadows of the grass.

But he was stone dead, lying on his side, his heavy head stretched out in the mud. I walked my horse around him in a circle.

Farther on, over the next hillside, I found my brother’s body, the boy whom I had seen that evening, running down the mountain, full of laughing plans for dinner and the love of running.

I dismounted. He had been shot with an expanding bullet through the back and had fallen with his arms in front of him. His stick had broken under him, and the rabbits were trampled in the mud. They had shot another dog there too, shot it in the side and disemboweled it later, it seemed. And again, the boy’s face was mutilated, as if they had tried to carve a letter or a sign into his features.

I gathered together my brother’s scattered arrows. There was no bow, but that morning I had taken mine, taken my knives and steel slingshot—tools for hunting. And when the track of horses broke away uphill again, I followed it up into the fields beneath a mountain slope of red volcanic stone. It was a place I knew well. At one time, biters had brought their sheep up here to graze on insects incubating in the snow; they had lit fires and stayed for a long time. I had come, too, with my childish music, or with some childish problem only a biter could resolve—an earache, a hole in my boot. And now the grass lay thick and white, and it dragged at my horse’s feet. His claws got stuck in it, and sometimes he came near to stumbling, for I spurred him hard, driven by my anger, until we broke the crest of a steep hill, and I saw in the valley underneath us, a bonfire.