‘She’s awake yet not awake.’

‘Then I suppose I’ll have to carry her,’ she heard herself say.

The woman bent down and scratched her lower calf hard. The brown, deformed nails sticking out of her toes were curved like claws.

‘My God,’ Diana exclaimed, ‘your feet.’

‘Could you do that? Could you carry her?’

‘I guess we’ll find out.’

‘I can fire a gun. I can fire a gun from the other side of the lake. Everyone’s going to wonder who’s shooting. Then you can go into the house and get her.’

*

She followed the woman, who ran ahead of her between the spruce trees with her black hair billowing across her back like a hunted hulder. She was bafflingly fast; Diana wanted to call out to her to slow down, but was afraid to raise her voice.

Suddenly, the woman was squatting on top of a big, moss-covered boulder; there was no way of telling how she had got up there. She was pointing to a house that could be glimpsed through the trees.

‘She’s in there, in that house there, and she’s alone. She’s in the bedroom, upstairs. I’ll open a window and you’ll climb in through that window and then you’ll go out the same way and hurry out of here.’

After she disappeared around a tarred log storage shed, Diana ran to the edge of the wood at a crouch and settled down behind a fallen tree, peeking out at the house like a child playing hide-and-seek. The squirrel darted up and down the fallen trunk. Diana kept her eyes on the house while swatting at the mosquitoes that swooped at her face in silent attack waves.

A bang and then another bang. The sound seemed to be coming from the top of a tree-covered hillock rising beyond the eastern shore of the lake; it had to be the better part of a mile away as the crow flies and at least three times that on foot. Could she really have run that far, or had the sound ricocheted? After the echo faded, a mighty silence enveloped the landscape.

Then there were voices. Someone was calling and someone else responding. Rough voices blended with shrill ones. An engine sputtered to life and moments later, a quad bike roared by between the houses, soon followed by a fiery dirt bike. A pack of wolves, three, four, five of them. A man running on stiff legs.