She set the little contraption on the forest floor and stepped back a few paces. She dropped to her feet, hunched her back and sidled towards it, her arms stretched before her, her hands shaped like beaks, snapping together. At once she was a lobster, unmistakable.

J laughed. ‘Lobster!’ he said. ‘Say “lobster”!’

She pushed back her hair where it fell over the left side of her face and shook her head in her refusal. She mimed eating, as if to say, ‘No. Eat lobster.’

J pointed to the trap. ‘You have made a lobster pot?’

She nodded and stowed it in the canoe ready for setting at dawn the next day when they went out.

‘But you must learn to speak,’ J persisted. ‘What will you do when I go back to England? If your mother is put in prison again?’

She shook her head, refusing to understand him, and then she took a twig from the fire and walked towards the river and J fell silent, respecting the ritual of casting tobacco on the water, which was the same at dawn and dusk, and which marked her transition from day to night to day again.

He went into the shelter and pretended to sleep so that she might come in and sleep beside him without any fear. It was a ritual he had developed of his own to keep them both safe from his growing fascination with her.

Only on the first night, when he had been so weary from paddling that he could not keep his eyes open, had he slept at once. All the other nights he had lain awake listening to her near-imperceptible breathing, enjoying the sense of her closeness beside him. He did not desire her as he might have desired a woman. It was a feeling more subtle and complicated than that. J felt as he might have done if some precious rare animal had chosen to trust him, had chosen to rest beside him. With all his heart he wanted neither to frighten nor disturb her, with all his heart he wanted to stretch out a hand and stroke that smooth, beautiful flank.