Enough already, but they’re screaming, and he wishes he were sitting in Manitoba. If he were, he would wait for sunrise, lens trained on the reedbed. This spring the bittern sounded like a foghorn in the landscape. As if it knew everything. It would have been easier if he’d been a widower, he thinks, because then an aversion to death might keep them from his door, and there’s a glow over by the maple, behind the birdbath. Maybe there’s someone there. He’s not sure, but in the reflection from the living room window he resembles a normal man around sixty. He no longer has any wish to regulate his abnormalities, only to withdraw. If he walks southwest, he’ll have to cross a couple of drainage channels and a fen with beef cattle to reach Manitoba. He could take a sleeping bag, he thinks. If he’s caught sleeping in another man’s hunting cabin, he’ll have to put his house up for sale. Maybe that would be for the best. He should have bought a place at the end of a dirt road after all. They do agree on everything here. Property rights are holy, youth is a virtue, and the wolf that’s been sighted in the tree plantation should be shot. It’s only a question of time before it gets together with another wolf, has pups, and forms a pack. It’s happened other places and it’ll happen here too. They won’t stand for it. His neighbor’s got a Small Munsterlander. They walk around, out in the plantation, and look for the wolf. He’s got a deer stand out there. Then he can watch the animals from a slightly elevated perspective. His wife isn’t afraid of the wolf; there isn’t anything she’s afraid of. Yet she dislikes disorder, and now they’re providing the ground for a summer camp on their fallow field. The field stretches​ 115down to the river. During the day, the young people build rafts and towers from spruce poles. The other morning they woke the village with song. “Isn’t it lovely having some youngsters around?” asked the farmer and his wife afterward. “Yes,” he replied, “but they scream in the evening.” The farmer and his wife couldn’t hear them, they said, pointing at the farmhouse. It sat right behind the tent area. “They scream like wild animals,” he said, and now there’s that glow beneath the maple again. It’s by the birdbath, a figure. And now he can see her, a girl scout in the summer darkness with fever-white hair. He’s turned everything off in the living room, and she probably can’t see him. Her face takes on an odd luminosity from her phone. He can see her chewing her lip in concentration. Now she raises her eyes. It’s the girl from the driveway. She peers at the window, eyes wide. Quickly he shoves his face against the pane, pressing, opening his mouth. His teeth touch glass and her throat muscles tense, then she bolts like an animal down the bank, across the road, in her nightshirt.