She had gone beyond the field edges of Juniper Hill, heading round and up towards the peak of High Vinnalls when she’d seen it. Out of the corner of her eye, something in the ditch by the side of the narrow path. She had thought it was a branch at first until her eyes adjusted to the muddy fur. A badger, long dead now. She turned it over, gingerly, with the scuffed toe of her boot. One of the paws had rotted clean away, leaving just the white coral bones. A hand reaching out. Fingers not unlike her own. She held her palms in front of her, turned them over and examined them. Flesh over bare bone, knuckle and sinew. A flash of understanding. A moment of wonder deep in her heart and brain alike. Was this what Scout’s soft, leathery paw had been hiding too? A hand more like hers than she could have imagined? And what of his heart, his brain . . . ? Her mind had whirled, spun on its heel and fizzed off in a million and more different directions. Had that not been less than an hour since?

She gags again, a dry empty bark like a wounded fox. Harder this time, more painful. The next retch throws her to her knees at the edge of a small clearing, palms damp on the forest floor. The sun disappears behind the clouds for a moment, throwing her into the forest’s grey shadows. She cries out, roars, as a searing pain cracks across her back, twists her agonisingly over herself once, twice, and then a third and final time.

The wind drops and the world stops.

All becomes silent – not even a solitary bird sings.

A weight of something sits behind her, a shadow of a presence. The pain has gone, burst right out of her, drained all her energy too, but something else sits on her shoulders now. Scarlet blood drips down from them onto the back of her hands. She has survived – for now at least – when she feared she might not. Breathless and shivering, she sits slowly back on her haunches, not daring to look behind. The skirt of her dress is sodden with damp autumn leaves. Birch and beech. Oak and larch.

Come, Etta, she says to herself. Come. Open your eyes. Whatever it is, the worst must surely be over. Wrung out and exhausted, she edges slowly to her feet, wobbles as she comes to stand. But she has no need to turn her head. The sun emerges from the clouds above, stretching Etta’s shadow far in front, taking her breath away with it.

It is impossible.

It cannot be.

But there before her stands a winged silhouette. The shadow lifts its arm to its face and she sees herself, feels herself, as her hand softly touches her own tear-stained cheek and the birds resume their orchestra.