He raced ahead at the thought. He knew he was in debt to humanity because he wasn’t born properly to his mother and father like his little brother, but had ended up with them, by an improbable stroke of luck. He was adopted, and his real parents were horrible people from Copenhagen, who weren’t even married. ‘God forbid you ever meet them,’ his mother had said when she told him that. For a while afterward he would stare at the outsiders who visited his town, imagining they had come from Copenhagen to take him away. He would put up such a fight and yell for his mother! He might be small for a seven year old, but he was strong. He could pump water from the well and carry two buckets at once. Little brother might never be able to do that. Such a runt. He lay at his mother’s breast, sucking like crazy until it made her sick. One day John asked if he had ever eaten like that, and his mother laughed. ‘No, you poor thing; you were bottle-fed.’ He imagined that he might have been made in a bottle, just like people make ships in bottles, but now he knew what it meant. It just sounded so strange to be different. And he would always be different, but only in a good way. He could run faster than any boy in his class.

His breath steamed from his mouth like smoke from his father’s pipe. He sniffled and switched the basket between his arms again. Then he paused to wipe his nose on his sleeve. Now the woods weren’t like a mountain anymore, and he could see smoke rising from the chimney. He could also hear an axe chopping, which was his father, felling trees. The estate owner marked the victims himself. They just stood there not knowing anything until they felt the axe on their trunks. Until then, they were just like any other trees, figuring they would stand there for all time, blowing in the wind, sending out new shoots in the spring and losing it all when the cold arrived, making the poor squirrels visible from a distance. He felt bad for the trees, but his mother said trees didn’t feel anything. The little squirrels didn’t know they had to be shot either, and it didn’t hurt them at all when their heart was struck by a pellet. Only poachers were bad, because they often didn’t shoot right, and they let the animals lie there until his father found them. His father loved animals. They had three hunting dogs and a little fox terrier, which was going to be shot soon, because it shed, and all the dog hair made little brother cough. The doctor had said that. Still, John loved that dog.