‘Come on, Gaia,’ I called when she lagged behind. I was carrying Coco now and simultaneously wrestling a twig out of her mouth. Coco liked to experience the world, twigs included, through her teeth. When Gaia remained rooted to the spot, staring down at a patch on the ground, I finally begged her to hurry up. I was tired and freezing cold on account of possessing only a woefully inadequate jacket and boots. I was on the verge of offering her unlimited Netflix time when she looked up and shouted:

‘No! You need to come and see!’

I reluctantly turned back and squelched across the muddy forest floor towards her.

‘What is it?’ I said wearily. She was still staring down at something by her feet. My vision was blurry on account of the heavy rain so all I could make out was mud and branches.

‘An elk has been here,’ Gaia explained. She looked around as though expecting to see one nearby. I squinted down and the print came into view: two devil horns imprinted in black mud and filling quickly with rain. I recognized it immediately – it looked identical to the marks I’d spotted on my bedroom floor.

‘Let’s go inside,’ I told Gaia, tugging her away, but she kept glancing back across the trees, hoping to see the elk.

‘How did you know an elk left the prints?’ I asked Gaia as we shook off our coats.

‘I’ve seen one,’ she said. ‘Mummy taught me how to spot its prints. Come, I’ll show you.’

I followed her into the hallway where she stopped and pointed up to the wall.

‘There,’ she said.

Up until this point I hadn’t paid much attention to the photographs on the walls of the house. They were dreamlike, at once old-fashioned and modern. It took me almost two months to identify Gaia in several of them, because she was just a detail in an otherwise wide frame. In one of the photos, a line of trees appeared as odd black shapes against a white sky, and in the darkness of the lower part of the frame I saw a blurred image. It was Gaia, running, or spinning with her arms held out.

The picture she showed me, though, revealed something I hadn’t noticed before – the faint outline of an elk amongst the narrow birch trees on the other side of the house, close to the cliff. It was indeed a huge creature, with antlers that towered high above its head – more branches than antlers. Its face was turned to the camera, as though it had heard the click of the shutter from all that distance.