The crow ignores him. The bell begins tolling in the priory, and from the river a mist rises, thick as fleece. Thomas turns back to the copse, resolute now, but he can find no way in through the tangle of brambles. He hacks at them with his staff, circles the copse until he finds a track; the lay brother John’s prints, he supposes. He ducks under the first low branches and fights his way in. The brambles pull at his cassock, snow tips down on him from above. He steps over a fallen trunk and finds himself on the edge of a tight clearing and something makes him stop. He eases aside a branch, and there it is: the fox, a slur of matted red fur in the gloom.

He steps forward.

Its neck and foreleg are caught together in a loop of wire, and the wire itself is hooked over a spur of hornbeam. The fox is on its hind legs, half-hanged, half-frozen, its narrow snout sunk on its blood-wet chest. The snow below is scraped to the frozen black earth and bloodstains and clumps of russet hair are everywhere.

Thomas makes the sign of the cross, and stands stock-still, listening. He can hear something. Then he realises it is the fox, still alive, still breathing, each breath a high bubbling drag followed by a racking exhalation that subsides in a hoarse whimper.

After a moment it seems to sense him and lifts its head.

Thomas gasps and takes a step back.

The fox is blinded, its eyes gone, each glistening socket weeping a tag of thick blood.

The crow caws from beyond the thicket.

‘Bastard bloody bird,’ Thomas breathes. Again he makes the sign of the cross.

After a moment, the fox’s head sinks wearily back on its chest.

Thomas steels himself. He steps forward, raises the staff just as the Dean suggested, then brings it down. Crack. The fox jerks in its noose. There is a delicate patter of blood on the snow. The fox shudders. It gives a long rattling sigh; then it is dead.

Thomas pulls the staff from the cup of broken bones. It is smeared with a dark-veined soup of grey brains that he wipes in the snow bank below the hornbeam. Once he has done this he stands for a moment, then makes a final sign of the cross over the fox, blessing it as one of God’s creatures, and is about to turn and go when he remembers the Prior’s instruction.

With a sigh he sets aside the staff and begins following the line of the snare back from the branch on which it is caught, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, down through the wet spray of traveller’s joy to the base of the tree. It is awkward. His fingers are so numb, and the knot is set in the ice, pulled taut by the fox’s struggle.