The First Bite

On the second Tuesday after Easter, my father goes to the graves before it's light.

It's the day for that. Everybody takes a red egg to their dead and tells them Christ is risen. But the others go after the morning service, together, with their baskets. He goes on his own, in the dark, and thinks we're all asleep.

When he comes back, there's earth on his knees. There are two eggs fewer in the bowl.

His sack is by the door. It's been by the door for three days. A shirt, his other foot rags, a loaf, and his chisels, rolled in leather. The Department has its own hammers. Nobody has his chisels.

"Sit," says Grandma.

We sit. All of us, on the benches, with our hands on our knees, and nobody speaks. You sit before a road. You sit until the house is quiet enough to remember you. I did it once before, in the other life, with my bag at my feet. Nobody has left this house for more than a night since I was born.

Grandma gets up first. She takes the small icon down from the corner and makes the cross over him with it, three times, and he bends his head for it like a boy.

"I don't run after trains," she says. "I'll say it here."

She says it into his coat, with her face against his chest, so none of us can hear it.

The iron road doesn't have a station here. It has the striped hut, where the lane crosses the line, and the watchman with his flag.

The train hardly ever stops at it. Most days, the glass goes by, and the faces behind the glass.

Today the watchman stands in the middle of the lane with the flag held straight out, and the train slows down.

I feel it before I hear it. I always do now. Not the engine. What's in the engine. A deep well with a lid on it, coming along the bank towards us, with a great cold weight at the bottom. When I was four, I reached for it, and it bit me. I keep the hum behind my teeth and let it go by.

White steam. A smell of hot iron and wet cloth. The wheels are taller than Fedya. They stop turning right in front of us, and the whole train stands there and breathes.

"The brown one," says the watchman. "At the back. Quick, now. He won't wait."

My father puts his hand on Fedya's shoulder.

"The roof over the coal bin," he says. "Before the autumn. Don't let the damp get in at the anvil."

Fedya nods. His jaw is tight.

Masha gets both arms round his neck and holds on. He has to bend for it. She's nearly as tall as my mother. When she lets go, there's a wet place on his collar.

Then me. He doesn't pick me up. I'm six, and too big for that, and he knows I know it. He puts his hand on my head, the whole of it, like a hat.

It stays there for one breath longer than it ever has.

My mother does up the top hook of his coat. It was already done up. She undoes it and does it up again.

"Styopa," she says.

That's all. He looks at her, and takes his sack, and goes along the train to the brown wagon at the back, the plain one, where the Department puts its workmen. A hand comes down out of the door and pulls him up.

The windows in that wagon are small, and nobody has washed them. It takes me a moment to find him. Then there he is, behind the glass, between two men I've never seen, with his cap in his hand.

He's looking for us. The sun is on the glass. I don't think he can see anything at all.

His lips are moving.

I know what he's doing. I do it too, on the stove.

The engine shouts. The wagons knock together, one after another, all the way down. The glass slides away along the bank, with my father's face in it, towards the marsh. Out onto the causeway. Over the thirty plates he cut with his own hands.

The watchman rolls up his flag.

My mother stands in the lane until the steam is gone. Then she ties her shawl tighter, and turns round, and we go home.

It's Easter again.

On the stove, in the dark, before the bells start for the night service, I count.

Fedya. Masha. Grandma, down on her bench. My mother, behind the curtain.

Four.

It used to be five.

Sitrep, then.

Date: Easter, one year after the train. Age: seven and four months. Height: Grandma's shoulder. There's a new mark on the forge doorpost. Fedya cut it in December, with my father's knife, and it isn't straight. Feet: bast shoes by Rodya, the third pair. I wore the first two out. Speech: every letter. Range: twelve steps, for small things. Personnel: one mother, one grandmother, one sister, one brother. One friend. One wolf. One father, in the city, by post.

Everybody alive. One of them behind glass.

Masha is sixteen. She has her own bag now. My mother sewed it in the winter, out of sailcloth from the ferryman, with a long strap, and everything in it is in the same place as in my mother's. Half the calls on our street are Masha's. People have stopped asking for the mother when the daughter opens the door.

Fedya turns fourteen this spring, and fourteen is the age when the guild can take you on. For sweeping. That's what the guild book says. Fedya has swept the guild yard once. The rest of the time he's in the forest with Zhar. He sets snares for the guild pot, and he comes back and tells Gavrila what he saw. Whose tracks. What's been digging, and where. What's moved. Gavrila calls it the news. He pays five kopecks a week for it, and a share of what the snares take.

Zhar is still the master's wolf. It says so in the steward's book. Nobody from the big house has come to look at the page.

And the forge is cold.

That's the one I can't get used to. All of this life, this house has had a sound under it. Tap. Wait. Tap. Now, when people on our street want a scythe mended, they walk half a day down the river road to the smith at the next village. They walk past our gate to do it. Some of them look in at the forge door as they go by, as you'd look at a house where somebody has died.

Nobody has died. My mother oils his hammers on the first Sunday of every month. Nobody asked her to.

We come back from the night service in the grey light, with our candles, and the whole street is saying it to each other over the fences. Christ is risen. Truly risen. Three kisses, and a red egg.

Grandma has laid the table. The eggs, in the bowl. The tall Easter bread. The white cheese.

Five spoons.

His is at the end of the bench, under the icons, where it's always been. The big one, with two notches.

My mother cuts the bread.

She does it standing, with the loaf held against her chest, the same as he did. The knife is his. She cuts five pieces. She puts the fifth one down by the big spoon and looks at it there for a moment. Then she sits down.

We eat. It's the best food of the year. I can't taste it properly until the third egg.

The watchman from the striped hut comes after dinner, with his bag.

The Department's post comes down the line with the morning train, and a letter from the Department's workshops is the Department's post. So it comes to him. He brings it up the street himself, and he reads it, because somebody has to. He gets a jug of milk for it. Today he gets an egg as well.

It's the sixth letter in a year.

I know the other five by heart. The first one came at Trinity, last summer, and it was mostly numbers. How many chimneys he could see from the barracks door. How many men worked at one bench. How long the rail shop was. He'd paced it. A hundred and forty steps, under one roof. He said he'd never been under a roof that big. He said he didn't know they made them.

I've stood in shops where you couldn't see the far wall for the smoke. A hundred and forty steps would have been the small one.

The watchman unfolds the paper. He holds it a long way from his face.

"To my dear mother," he reads, "a low bow from her son, down to the damp earth, and I ask her blessing, which will stand until the grave. To my wife Darya, a low bow and my love. To my children, Masha, Fedya and Kolya, a father's blessing, to keep all their lives. I write to tell you that I am alive and well, thanks be to God, and I wish the same to you from the Lord."

None of that is my father.

That's the man who sits by the gate of the works with a board on his knees, and writes letters for ten kopecks. A retired corporal. He puts himself in at the bottom of every one: "Written at his asking by a retired corporal, who also bows to you." Every letter begins with the same bows, in the same order. The watchman says every letter he's ever read begins like that.

My father starts after the bows.

"And now I will say how it is with me." The watchman clears his throat. "I did not come for the holy day. The year on my paper is up, and the foreman would have let me go. But the shops are working through the week, for the new line, and a man who stays gets a rouble over. So I stayed. Forgive me, Mama. Forgive me, Dasha."

Grandma's mouth folds in on itself.

"A rouble," she says.

My mother's hands are in her lap, one on top of the other. They don't move.

"They have taken me off the plates," the watchman reads, "and put me on the grates. These are the iron beds that lie under the boiler of an engine. The marks on them are not my marks. There are masters here who cut marks I have never seen, for heat, and for holding steam. One of them has cut for thirty years, and he lets me watch his hands. I am learning them, Mama, at my age, like a boy. The big hammers here go by themselves. I still stand back when they start, and the others laugh. I don't know yet where to put my hands in this place."

He turns the paper over.

"The bread is dear, and it isn't like ours. The bell rings four times a day, and I go by the bell. Is the forge dry? Did Fedya cut the post on Kolya's day? Nobody told me how many fingers."

"Four," says Fedya.

"Three," says Masha. "And a bit. You cut it crooked."

"It's not crooked. The post is crooked."

"I send three roubles and forty kopecks," reads the watchman, a little louder. "Out of the ten, they keep two for the bed, and three go into the common pot for our food, and boots are wanted. I will send more at St Peter's. I bow to Gavrila, and to the Kuzmins, and to Father Ivan. I kiss you all."

Then the corporal, and his bow.

The watchman folds the letter and holds it out. My mother takes it. Three silver roubles come out of his bag after it, and forty kopecks in copper. He counts them into Grandma's hand, and she counts them again.

Nobody says it's less than the paper promised. We said that at Trinity last year, and again in the autumn. It doesn't get bigger from saying.

I've done the sum anyway. Ten, less two for the bed, less three for the pot. That's five. Three roubles forty are on our table. So there's a rouble and sixty kopecks, every month, that the letter doesn't have a word for.

Boots, he says. Nobody buys boots every month.

Grandma lifts the board by the stove and brings up the pot.

It isn't the pot it was. Last spring, the fifth went to the master in one morning. Sixty-six roubles and sixty-seven kopecks, and the clerk counted it twice. What's in there now is what comes down the line in the watchman's bag. In the autumn, sixteen roubles go back out of it, to the Treasury. Then salt. Then flour, when ours runs out, and ours runs out sooner every year.

Nine houses on our street put their cross to buy, like us. The others couldn't find the fifth. They stayed as they were, on the master's days, until they can. The Kuzmins are still out in his fields four days a week. Yegor says the only thing that's changed is what it's called.

And the pasture by the stream is on the master's side of the line now. Our cow doesn't know that. Twice this spring she's gone across to the good grass, the way she has all her life. Twice the steward's man has walked her home with his hand out. Thirty kopecks a time.

The coins go into the pot. The board goes back. Grandma presses it flat with her foot.

That evening, I go out to the forge.

It still smells of him. Coal, and iron, and a little sweat. But thinner, like tea when the leaves have been used twice. There's a sack over the anvil. His old apron hangs on its nail by the door, stiff, and keeps the shape of him.

On the doorpost, there's my mark from the last winter he was here. Then a gap of three fingers and a bit, and Fedya's. It slopes.

I put my hand flat on the anvil, through the sack.

It's cold. Iron this size takes a whole day to lose its heat. This is a year's worth of cold.

On the stove, later, I let it in, the way Rodya taught me. All of it. The stove under my back. Four people breathing. And the thing I've never had a name for, small and warm, going round between them in the dark.

There's a thread of it that doesn't go round. It leaves by the window and goes off down the iron road, thinner and thinner, further than I can follow.

It hasn't broken. I check.

By St Nikolay's day in May, the birches are green, and Rodya and I have a workshop.

It's behind the graveyard, at the bottom of the bank, where the stream bends and nobody's path goes. There's a flat stone the size of a table. There's a birch-bark box, pushed in under the roots of an alder, with a turf on top of it.

Rodya takes the things out of the box and lays them on the stone, one by one, in the same order every time. He likes to do that part.

Three clay bowls, each with a chip out of the rim. Ulyana was throwing them away. A twist of salt. A little pot of ash water, the grey slippery water Grandma makes for washing shirts. A cow's horn with a wooden plug in it, full of old kvass, gone so sour it makes your eyes shut. A lump of pine resin, hard and yellow. Three nails from the floor of the forge.

And a long curl of birch bark, with my marks on it.

"Cups first," says Rodya.

He fills the three bowls from the stream and sets them in a row. Then he goes and sits on the alder root, with his back to the stone and his hands on his knees.

I walk away along the bank. Twelve steps. I count them.

A year ago, I couldn't hold a line for more than six.

I pick the bowl on the left. I don't look at it. Looking is a kind of wanting, and he can feel that. I look at the stream, and I think about the lecture hall in Nizhny, the big one, with the windows that didn't open. Second week of the first term. Water going to ice. The page had a drawing on it, a row of little balls shaking themselves into lines.

Then I take the heat out of the bowl on the left, and put it into the bowl on the right.

I don't make any cold. Making things costs. Moving them is cheap. So I take the heat out of one bowl and put it in the other.

On the left, a white skin runs across the water from the rim. It thickens. It creaks, a tiny sound, like a boot on new snow. On the right, a thread of steam comes up off the water and bends in the wind.

Ten slow breaths. The bowl on the left is ice all the way to the bottom. The bowl on the right is too hot to put a finger in.

"That one's gone to sleep," says Rodya. He points behind him, without turning round. Left. "And that one's woken up." Right. "And you went away first. You always go away first, before the big ones."

"I was thinking."

"That's what I said." He grins at the alder. "My pebble."

He has a heap of pebbles by his foot, and I have a heap by mine. His is bigger. It's been bigger since March.

I go back to the stone and tip the ice out into my hand. It comes out whole, the shape of the bowl, with a bubble in the middle. Real ice, in May. I hold it out, and Rodya takes it in both hands and puts his tongue on it.

"Do the long one," he says.

So I do the long one. I put a finger to the middle bowl and pull up. Not the water. The heat, out of a line of it, thin as a straw. The water follows my finger up out of the bowl and goes hard as it comes. I stop at the length of my hand. A needle of ice, standing in a bowl, clear all the way through.

Rodya breaks it off and tries the point on his thumb.

"Ow," he says, very pleased.

I scratch it on the bark with the corner of a nail. Bowl, twelve steps, ten breaths. Needle, one hand long. Last May, the bowl was a bead of frost on the end of my finger, and I was proud of the bead.

The hum isn't a jar any more. I don't know what to call it now. On a day like this, I can do the bowls a dozen times before the slow feeling starts in my arms.

"Now the bang," says Rodya.

"It doesn't bang."

"The tick, then."

I break a crumb off the resin, the size of a lentil. I put it on my thumbnail.

Any fool can throw heat, Gavrila says. I can't. I've tried all winter. Heat doesn't want to go anywhere in a lump. I've seen him put it in a boar's eye from three steps, and I still don't know how he gets it to cross the gap.

But a fire isn't heat. A fire is something being eaten. Wood, or fat, or resin. All it wants from me is the first bite.

I flick the crumb. While it's in the air, I put the heat into it. Not much. But all in one place, and all at once.

It catches.

A bead of yellow fire goes across the stream in a low curve, spitting, with a tail of black smoke behind it. It hits the far bank and sticks to a wet stone, and goes on burning there, as if the stone were on fire.

Rodya's head turns after it. His nose goes up.

"Resin," he says. "And you only wanted the start of it." He frowns. "After that, there wasn't anybody wanting it. It just went."

I sit down on the stone.

A whole winter, it took me to see that. I worked it out with a year and a half of lectures, and a hundred beads of resin, and a burn on my thumb. Rodya got it in one go, with his nose.

The crumb costs me about as much as melting a bit of ice the same size. After that, the resin pays for itself. I knock on the door, and the fire walks through on its own.

Bolt of fire, I scratch on the bark. Four steps. Sticks where it lands.

"What's that one?" says Rodya. His thumb is on the bark, beside my hand.

"What one?"

"That." He runs the thumb along the row. "There's two long ones and two short ones. You did the same after the bowl."

"Twelve," I say. "It says twelve."

He goes over it again, slowly, with his lips moving.

The ash water is his favourite.

I pour a little of it into the last bowl. It's grey, and it feels like soap between your fingers, and if you leave it on your skin it starts to sting. Grandma keeps it away from the little ones.

Then the kvass. One drop from the horn.

It hisses.

Rodya's whole face opens. He bends over the bowl with his ear nearly in it. I pour more, and the grey water fizzes up white, and spits, and the smell that comes off it makes us both pull faces.

"Who's doing that?" he says.

"Nobody. It's doing it to itself."

"It's loud." He listens. He holds his hand flat over the bowl, not touching. "And there's nothing in it. No draught. Not from you, not from anybody." He sits back on his heels. "It's just two waters having a fight."

Two waters having a fight. My old professor took three lectures to say that, and he had a blackboard.

I put my finger in the bowl. It's a little warmer than it was. I didn't warm it. The fight did.

That's the thing I go round and round, on the stove at night. There's heat shut up in things. In resin. In ash water and sour kvass. In the powder in a river-road man's gun. It's just sitting there, paid for already, by the sun, or the tree, or I don't know what. It doesn't come out of my hum at all.

If I could find the right door to knock on, I'd never have to carry anything.

Then there are the nails.

They're in three bits of broken pot, at the back of the box, and they've been there since the snow went. The first one sits in stream water. It's brown. The second one sits in water with salt in it, and it's browner, with an orange crust that comes off on my fingers.

The third one is in salt water too. It's as bright as the day I picked it up.

It has three small cuts on its head. I found it under my father's bench, with the scrap. He must have tried the chisel on it once, to see if the edge was right.

A year, in salt water. Not a speck.

"You've gone quiet," says Rodya.

"I'm looking at the nails."

"You look at them every time." He holds his hand out, and I put the bright one in it. He rolls it between his fingers. "This one's like a shut door. But nobody's behind it, pushing. It's just shut."

I've tried every day for two months to make the brown ones go faster. Or slower. Or anything. I put the hum on them and push, and nothing happens. It's like pushing on a wall in the dark, with no idea where the door is.

And that's odd. Because the ice comes when I call it. The fire comes.

I look at the bark. At the scratches, row after row, a whole winter of them.

Everything on there that's got cheap is something I sat through, in the old life, with a pen in my hand. Heat. Ice. Burning. I can still see the pages. I see them better than I see last Tuesday. And every time I go and look at one, really look, the thing it's about comes a little easier the next morning.

Rust was a course for later. I went to the war instead.

So it isn't the hum that got clever. It's that the old life didn't stay where I left it. It's still doing something in here. I don't know what. I don't know why it should.

I put that on the shelf, next to the pig with iron in its hair. But nearer the front.

"Kolya." Rodya has his head on one side. "You're thinking loud again."

"Sorry."

"I don't mind. It's like a mill." He puts the bright nail back in its water, exactly where it was. "Do the bolt again. I want to count how long it burns."

I break off another crumb.

He counts to thirty-one. He takes a pebble for it, though I don't see why.

From the top of the bank, Ulyana shouts that if two boys don't come for their kasha this minute, she's giving it to the hens.

Rodya puts everything back in the box. The same order, backwards.

At Trinity, the house is full of birch.

Branches over the door, and over the icons, and stuck in behind the benches. Cut grass all over the floor. The whole room smells green. Grandma says the dead come and sit in the leaves for the three days, to rest.

At supper, on the second day, Fedya puts down his spoon.

"I want to take Kolya in," he says. "To the snares. He can carry."

My mother doesn't answer at once.

She has a rule about the guild and me. She made it when I was four. I've never asked her to change it.

"It's not the guild," says Fedya quickly. "It's mushrooms, nearly. It's the near wood. I'm there every day."

My mother reaches across the table and takes my wrist. She turns it over, and puts her finger and thumb round it. They meet, with room left over. She looks at that for a moment.

"As far as the split pine," she says. "Not one step past it. And Zhar goes."

"Zhar always goes."

"And you bring him back the colour he went out."

She lets go of my wrist. Under the table, Masha kicks my foot.

The forest starts where the rye stops. There isn't a fence. One step you're in the sun, with the larks going. The next you're under pines, and the light is brown, and it's cool, and your feet don't make any sound.

Fedya walks in front, and he talks.

He talks the whole way. Which way a hare runs when it's frightened, and which way when it isn't. Why you never set a loop where the path is straight. What a fox does with its tail. What Gavrila said about elk in September. He points at things with his chin, the way Gavrila does, and he's got Gavrila's voice for it, a bit too deep.

I keep maybe one thing in three. It's a lot of hares.

Zhar goes between us. He's as tall as my chest now, long and narrow and the grey of a cold stove. Where he puts his feet, the moss goes pale, and comes back slowly behind him. On a warm day like this, he hardly smokes at all.

The snares are along a hare path, by a stream. A loop of twisted horsehair, held open with two twigs, tied to a bent sapling. Fedya has twenty of them. He visits every one, and they're all empty, and he doesn't seem to mind.

"Most days it's nothing," he says. "Gavrila says the forest pays like the master. Late, and short."

Then he stops.

Thirty steps ahead, in a patch of sun, there's a bird on the ground. Brown and grey, the size of a small hen, rolling in the dust with its wings out.

"Hazel grouse," Fedya breathes. "Don't move."

I don't move. I don't breathe. I'm seven, and I haven't had meat since Easter. I want that bird more than I've wanted anything in a year.

The grouse stops rolling. Its head comes up.

Then it goes. Straight up, with a noise like somebody shaking out a wet shirt, and off between the pines.

Zhar turns his long head and looks at me.

"That was you," says Fedya.

"I didn't move."

"You leaned. Birds go for anything." He crouches down in front of me. "But you did the other thing too. I don't know what you call it." He waves a hand at my chest. "Plain birds don't care about that. The horned ones do. Anything the forest has got into. Why do you think Zhar won't come near me when I'm angry? You have to go flat. Like this."

He shuts his eyes. He breathes in, and out. His face empties, and his shoulders come down. It's what he does in the guild yard, every time Zhar's back starts to smoke.

I try it.

I hold the hum as still as I can, like a full cup. I've done that before, behind a graveyard fence, in the snow. Rodya found me anyway. When somebody hides that hard, he said, it's the loudest thing there is.

So holding it isn't the trick.

The trick is the other thing. The thing Rodya has been telling me for two winters, and I never had a use for it.

I have to stop wanting the bird.

I sit down on the moss. I look at an ant. It's carrying a pine needle three times as long as itself, and it keeps getting the needle stuck, and backing up, and trying again. I watch it get the needle over a root. It takes a long time. Somewhere in the middle of it, I forget about the grouse.

"That's it," says Fedya, very low. "Stay like that."

Something comes out onto the path.

A hare. Ten steps off. It sits up, and washes one ear with both front feet, and then the other. It's a big one, brown, with black tips to its ears.

Between the ears, there are two small prongs. Dark, and shiny, with a fork at the top. Like the horns on a goat kid, if a goat kid had been a deer.

I must make a sound. The hare's nose stops.

"Horn hare," Fedya whispers, without moving his lips. "Don't even look at him. A buck that size will open your leg." He waits. "The guild gives eight kopecks for the horns. Somebody in the city buys them. Don't ask me what for."

The hare drops down and goes on along the path, in no hurry, and into the ferns.

I let my breath out.

And because I'm flat, and empty, and not wanting anything, the rest of it comes in.

Not the hare. Not Zhar, though I can feel Zhar, like a warm stone at my elbow. Something else. Under everything. I've had my head full of my own noise every time I've been in here, and I've never once heard it.

The forest has a hum.

It isn't in one place. It isn't in the pines, or the stream, or the hare. It's in all of it, low and slow and very old, like the sound of the mill when you stand on the bridge and feel it in your feet.

I turn my head, the way Rodya does.

Towards the deep wood, it's thick. Towards the south, where the light comes through the trunks, it's thin. Thin and uneven. It's how the hum gets in me, in the fifth week of Lent.

South is where the iron road is.

"What?" says Fedya.

"Nothing."

He gets up and brushes the needles off his knees.

"It's wrong in here this year," he says. "That's the news. That's what I tell Gavrila every week, and he writes it down." He points with his chin, back along the stream. "There were snipe by the second stream on Monday. Marsh birds. In the pines. And something's been dragging its belly through the mud down there. Something with hands." He scratches Zhar between the ears. "Gavrila says the marsh is coming out to see us."

We're back at the split pine with the sun still high. I've got a basket of nothing, and a pocket of ants.

My mother looks me over at the gate. I'm the colour I went out.

Ten days into Peter's fast, there's a hare in the fourth loop.

A plain one. No horns. It's caught by the back leg, and it's alive, and when it sees us it throws itself against the string so hard that it turns right over in the air.

Fedya gets a hand on it. He has it by the ears and the back legs before I've taken a step. He's good at this. He holds it out to me, stretched long, with its white belly showing.

"Yours," he says.

"You caught it."

"The loop caught it." He isn't smiling. "Papa made me do the first one I ate. Go on. Behind the ears, with the stick. Hard. One go, or it screams."

I take the hare.

It's heavier than it looks. It's warm. Under my fingers, in its chest, its heart is going so fast that I can't count it. Not beats. A shaking.

One of its eyes is looking at me. Big, and brown, and all the way open, with the white showing round the edge.

I carried a rifle for a year. The things I shot at were at the far end of a field, most of them, and they were shapes, and I mostly never knew. I have never once had my hand on something while it stopped.

Except me. I had both hands on that, and by then I didn't have hands.

"Kolya," says Fedya.

"I know."

I know how. He showed me on a log. I know why, too. I could say the why in my sleep. Bones are built out of this. My wrist goes inside my mother's finger and thumb, with room left over.

The heart goes on shaking against my fingers.

I think it should be harder than it is. That's the thing I notice. I stand there with it for three breaths, and I wait for something in me to say no, and nothing does. What I get is the calm. Not the two fingers at the back of my neck. That isn't here. It doesn't come for hares. Only the ordinary calm, the one from the trench, flat and clear, that tells you the job and the order to do it in.

I shift my left hand. I take the stick.

One go.

The hare kicks, twice, a long way apart. Then it's longer than it was, and looser. The eye is still open. It isn't looking at me now. It isn't looking at anything.

One breath, a hare. The next, meat. I've seen that happen to men. It looks just the same.

I lay it down on the moss. I put its ear flat with one finger, the way it was when it was washing.

My hands are steady. I look at them for a while, because I think they shouldn't be.

Fedya doesn't say anything clever. He takes the hare, and ties its back feet, and hangs it on his belt. Then he puts his hand on the back of my neck, and leaves it there, and we walk.

"It doesn't get nicer," he says, by the split pine. "It gets quicker."

I carry it home myself, the last part. Up the street, past the well, by the back legs, with its ears dragging in the dust. Two small girls at the well stop to stare.

I put it on the table, in front of Grandma.

"I killed it," I say. "Fedya caught it. I killed it."

Grandma picks the hare up. She feels along its back with her thumb, and under its ribs. She's pleased. I can see she's pleased.

"Fat," she says. "For June."

Then she looks up, at the corner. At the icons, with the dry birch still over them.

"It's the fast," she says.

Nobody moves.

I knew that. I've known what day it was all week. Peter's fast, from the week after Trinity to the saints' day, and no meat, no milk, no eggs. I walked the whole way home knowing it. I just didn't put the two things together. The hare was in one hand, and the fast was in the other.

Fedya has stopped in the door with one boot off.

"He's seven," he says. "It's his first. Grandma. It's one hare."

"It's nine days."

"It'll be bad in nine days!"

"Not in salt."

My mother is at the stove, with the long spoon. She hasn't turned round. But the spoon has stopped.

I look at the hare. At its feet, tied with Fedya's string. All the way home I could smell it cooking. I had the pot picked out.

My face is doing something. I can feel it doing it, and I can't make it stop, and that's the worst part of having this face. It tells on me. I'm thirty years old in here, near enough, and my chin is shaking over a hare.

Masha looks away.

Grandma sees it too. Her mouth works. For a moment, I think she's going to give in. She looks at the hare, and at me, and at the saints.

Then she picks up the salt box.

"God sent it in the fast," she says. "So He means it for the feast. That's all." She says it to the hare. She doesn't look at me again. "Fedya. Skin it. Don't just stand there on one leg."

Fedya skins it, in the yard, with his mouth shut tight. Grandma rubs it with grey salt, inside and out, and wraps it in a cloth, and takes it down to the cold place under the floor.

Supper is cabbage soup. It's thin, and there's a lot of it.

My mother fills my bowl last. When she puts it down, there's more in it than in anybody's, and all the thick part from the bottom of the pot.

"Fish isn't meat," says Fedya, into his soup.

Everybody looks at him.

"In Peter's fast. You can have fish. Father Ivan says." He looks at Grandma. "Doesn't he?"

Grandma chews for a while.

"On the days he says," she says.

The next morning, before it's light, Fedya and I carry the long basket down to the mill pool, the one that's wide at one end and narrow at the other, and sink it under the big willows with a stone in it.

On St Peter's day, we eat the hare.

It's been in salt for nine days. Grandma boils it for half the morning, with an onion. It's grey, and stringy, and so salty that Fedya drinks a whole jug of water after it.

I eat the back leg, down to the bone. Then I eat what Masha leaves of hers.

In the week after St Peter's, Gavrila came to the door with his cap in his hand.

Masha had never seen him take it off for anything but the church. She was at the table, picking over dried peas. Her mother was at the stove. Neither of them asked him to sit.

"I'm taking five men along the cut," he said. "To the marsh, and back by dark. I want to see what the boy's been telling me with my own eyes." He turned the cap round. "I'm not walking five men to the marsh without a healer. Not this year."

"Then I'll come," said her mother.

"You've got the carter's wife due. And I didn't ask for you." He looked at Masha. "I asked for the one with the paper."

Masha had had the paper since Easter. A square of grey card with the guild's mark burned into it, and Gavrila's cross, and her name in the deacon's writing. She was sixteen, and the guild could send her into the forest. It was in the bag, at the bottom, under the linen. She had not once taken it out.

Her mother put down the cloth she was holding.

It was a long time before she spoke. Masha watched her look at Gavrila, and Gavrila look at the floor. There was something old between those two. It was older than Masha, and nobody had ever told her what it was.

"Behind the spears," her mother said at last. Not to Gavrila. "The whole time. You're no use to anybody if you're the one on the ground."

"Yes, Mama."

"You wash before you touch. Even out there. Even if he's screaming."

"Yes, Mama."

Her mother took the bag down from its nail and opened it on the table. She went through it with her fingers, without looking, the way she went through her own. Rags. Linen. The needle. The two birch-bark flasks of boiled water, stopped with wax. The twist of yarrow.

She stopped at the yarrow. It was last summer's, and it was small.

"The new isn't dry yet," said Masha.

Her mother nodded. She added a second roll of linen, and did up the strap.

Then she tied Masha's headscarf for her, under the chin, as if Masha were six. Her fingers were quick and hard.

"The body shuts," she said. "You don't shut it. You go with it." She pulled the knot tight. "Bring them all back."

They went at sunrise.

Gavrila in front, in his black gloves, with the gun. Timofey Lapin behind him with his sword. Two guild men with the heavy spears, and the two men from the river road, the old one and the young one. Three dogs. Masha walked where her mother had told her to, with the bag bumping on her hip.

Fedya had wanted to come. He was sitting on the guild step with Zhar when they left, and he didn't wave.

She had never seen the cut.

She had heard about it for three years. It was not what she had thought. She had thought of a road. It was more like a field, laid down through the middle of the forest, so wide that the pines on the far side looked small. The Department had felled everything and burned it where it lay. Down the middle ran the bank, with the two iron lines on top, as straight as a pulled thread.

And everything that wasn't the bank was pink.

Fireweed. It stood as high as her chest, in tall spikes, thousands and thousands of them, all the way to where the cut bent out of sight. It grew out of the black places where the fires had been. There were young birches in it, no thicker than her wrist. Bees were working in it so loudly that she could hear them over the men's boots.

"Pretty," said the young river-road man.

"It's what comes after a fire," said Gavrila. "It's the first thing. Don't get fond of it."

They walked until the sun was high. Then the ground went soft, and the fireweed stopped, and Gavrila put up his hand.

"There," he said. "That's what he's been telling me."

It was the marsh. Masha had seen it from the meadow all her life, green and flat and shining, with the mist on it in the mornings. It was not green here.

On this side of the bank, it was dead. The moss had gone grey and split open, in cracks wide enough to put a foot in. The pools were dry, with a white crust at the bottom. The reeds stood up brown and rattled. It smelled like the bottom of a pot.

She climbed a little way up the side of the bank and looked over.

On the other side, the water stood up to the logs. Black, and still, and deeper than it should have been. Drowned birches stuck up out of it with no leaves on them.

"They wanted a road," said Gavrila. "They got a road. They got a dam as well, and nobody asked for that." He spat. "All the water that used to go through here stops at their bank. That side drowns. This side dries. And everything that lived in this side has to go somewhere."

He walked along the edge of the grey moss, looking down. Then he crouched.

Masha went and looked, from behind the spears.

There was a track in the dried mud. A long smooth groove, as wide as a trough, as if somebody had dragged a wet sack. And on both sides of it, pressed in deep, there were hands.

Not paws. Hands, bigger than Gavrila's, with the fingers spread. She counted the fingers. There were four.

The track came up out of the dead marsh, and crossed the soft ground, and went in under the pines.

Nobody said anything. The old river-road man crossed himself.

"How old?" said Timofey.

"A week. More." Gavrila put two fingers in one of the hands. "It was still wet here when he came through." He stood up, slowly, and looked at the forest. "Dogs in front. We go back along the trees, not the cut. I want to see where he—"

One of the dogs gave tongue.

It had gone into the last of the fireweed, by the foot of the bank. Now it came out backwards, yelling, with something after it.

Masha thought it was a hare.

It was a hare. A big brown buck, with black tips to its ears. But it didn't run like one. It came out of the pink flowers with its head down, straight at the dog, and the dog turned and fled. Then it saw the men. It had the bank behind it, and the dogs on both sides, and seven people in front.

It came through the people.

She saw the horns as it jumped. Two short black prongs, forked at the top. The old river-road man had his gun half up. The hare hit him at the top of the leg, and he made a noise like a kicked dog, and sat down. Timofey grabbed for it with his left hand. It twisted in the air, and went over his arm, and then it was gone, into the pines, with all three dogs behind it.

It had taken about as long as a sneeze.

"Horn hare," said one of the guild men, stupidly. "It's their season. They go mad in their—"

"Masha," said Gavrila.

She was already on her knees.

The old man was lying on his back in the moss, with both hands clamped on his thigh. Blood was coming out between his fingers. A lot of it. It had already filled the creases of his knuckles.

"Let me see," said Masha. "Take your hands away. I can't help it if I can't see it."

He took his hands away.

The horn had gone in high on the inside of the leg and torn its way out sideways. A hole she could have put three fingers in, and a long flap of skin. The blood was dark. It came up and ran over. It didn't jump.

Her mother's words came back to her. "Bright and jumping, you've got as long as it takes to say Our Father. Dark and running, you've got time to wash your hands."

"Gavrila," she said. "Here. Both thumbs. There, and there. Press. Don't look at it, just press, as hard as you would on a door."

Gavrila put down the gun and got on his knees in the moss, and pressed where she showed him.

She pulled the wax out of the first flask with her teeth. She washed her hands. All of them were watching her do it, six grown men, and the old one was moaning through his teeth, and it felt like the longest thing she had ever done. She did it anyway. Between the fingers. Under the nails.

Then she washed the hole. The old man screamed, and tried to sit up, and Timofey held his shoulders down with his one good arm.

She took the twist of yarrow out of the bag. She looked at the hole, and at the twist.

All of it. There wasn't a choice. She crumbled the whole twist between her palms, the grey leaves and the dry flower heads, and packed it into the wound with her fingers, deep, and laid the flap of skin down over it.

"Now let go," she said to Gavrila. "Slowly."

She put her own hands round the leg, and shut her eyes, and let the threads out.

It was always strange, the first moment. Like putting your hand into a stream in the dark, and not knowing how deep it was. The threads went in pale and thin, from both sides, feeling their way.

And the way was there.

She had felt it before, with her mother's hands over hers. Never this plainly. The yarrow had already started. At the torn edges, all along the cut, the blood was thickening. It was going slow and sticky, the way milk goes when it turns. The body was trying to shut. The yarrow was telling it to hurry.

All the threads had to do was go the same way.

It was like walking in snow where somebody had walked before her. She put her feet in the holes. She went along the tear from one end to the other, and drew the edges in behind her, and it cost her hardly more than breathing.

When she opened her eyes, the hole was shut. Pink, and puffed, and ugly. Dry.

The old man was staring at the sky. He had stopped moaning.

"Don't put that leg under you," she said. Her voice came out steady. She was surprised to hear it. "Not today. They'll carry you."

She bound it with the linen. Then she sat back on her heels, and looked up, and saw Timofey.

He was standing where he had been, holding his left arm against his chest with his right hand. He had been holding it like that the whole time. His sleeve was black to the elbow, and it was dripping off his fingers into the moss.

"It's nothing," he said.

"Sit down."

"It's a scratch. Do his—"

"Timofey. Sit down."

He sat.

It wasn't a scratch. The other horn had opened his forearm from the wrist nearly to the elbow. Not as deep as the leg. Twice as long. She could see the meat of it move when he opened his hand.

She washed her hands again, with the second flask. She washed the arm.

Then she reached into the bag for the yarrow, and remembered.

She turned the paper twist inside out. There was a little grey dust in the fold. She shook it over the cut. It was nothing. A pinch of dust on a wound as long as her foot.

"Something wrong?" said Timofey.

"No."

She put her hands round his arm and let the threads out.

This time there was no path.

The blood was running the way blood runs. Thin, and quick, and going nowhere. The body would have shut it by itself, in the end. A wound that size takes an hour of pressing. But she didn't have an hour, and nothing had gone in ahead of her to start it. It was new snow, up to her knees. Every step of it was hers.

She went in.

It was slow. She had to make the blood thicken herself, a finger's width at a time. As soon as she moved on, the place behind her began to give. She had to go back. Her hands grew heavy. Then her arms. The bees were very loud. Somewhere a long way off, Gavrila was telling the guild men to cut two poles.

Halfway along, her eyelids began to drop.

That was the rule. Her mother had a great many rules, and this was the first of them. "When your eyes want to shut, you stop. Whether it's closed or not. A healer who goes past that is one more to carry."

She stopped.

The cut was shut at the wrist end, for the length of her hand. The rest was a dark wet line. It wasn't running any more. It was only weeping.

"That's not finished," she said. Saying it was harder than the threads. "I can't finish it. Not today. I used what I had on him."

Timofey looked at his arm, and at the old man's leg, and at her.

"Good," he said. "His was worse."

She got up. Her knees weren't quite hers. She walked to the edge of the grey marsh, where there was still a little green left in a hollow, and came back with both hands full of bog moss. The pale kind, soft and springy, that drinks water like a rag. Her mother packed it under the linen when a wound was wet and there was nothing better. It kept the wet off the skin, and it kept the rot out longer than cloth did.

She wrung it out, and laid it along the cut, and bound it down.

"Tomorrow," she said. "First thing. You come to our door. I'll have fresh by then."

The old man found her hand on the moss and held it. "God keep you, daughter," he said. Something in her arms that had been heavy got a little lighter.

At the bottom of the bag, under the place where the paper was, she found a little horn with a wooden stopper. She hadn't put it there.

It was honey.

It didn't do much for her any more, not the way it had when she was small. She ate it with her finger anyway, sitting in the dead moss, while the men made the litter.

They went home along the edge of the trees, as Gavrila had said. The old man swung between two spears, with a coat under him, and swore at every root.

Masha walked behind the litter. She was watching the binding on the leg for red, and so she nearly walked past it.

A pine. One of the big old ones, right at the edge of the cut, with the bark black on one side where the fire had come close. At the height of her shoulder, somebody had taken an axe to it once. A blaze, the Department's men called it. A slice of bark and wood cut away, as big as two hands, to mark where the line would go.

There was something tied over it.

She stopped.

The cut in the tree had been filled. Packed, right to the edges, with moss, and over the moss a layer of grey clay, smoothed down with a thumb. She could see the thumb marks. And round the whole trunk, holding it on, went three turns of lime bast, soft and new.

It was tied off at the side. A flat knot, with the ends tucked under, so nothing pressed on the sore place.

She used that knot. Her mother had taught it to her, on Kolya's knee.

Masha put her fingers on the clay. It was damp. It had not been there long.

"Gavrila."

He came back. He looked at the pine for a while, with his head on one side. Then he walked on to the next blazed tree, twenty steps further along. Then the next.

Every one of them had been dressed. Moss, clay, bast. The same knot, every time, on the same side.

"Tar men?" said the young river-road man. "Come for the resin?"

"Tar men cut," said Gavrila. "They don't bind."

He stood there, turning one black glove over in the other. Something moved in his face. Masha had seen it on her mother's, over a sickness she didn't have a name for.

"It's not ours," he said. "Leave it alone."

They left it alone. But Masha looked back, before the path turned.

Seven pines in a row, along the edge of the pink field, each with a pale band round it. Like men standing in a line with their arms bound up.

Timofey was at the door before the cow was milked.

He had not slept. She could see that. He held the arm away from his side. The moss had gone dark, and the skin above the binding was red, and hot under her hand.

At the wrist end, where the threads had been, it was dry and clean. Along the rest, the cut had opened in the night. It was shining and swollen, and it had begun to smell faintly sweet.

She had been out in the meadow by the road at first light. The yarrow was up to her knee there, white and flat-headed, with the dew still on it.

She washed. She cleaned out the cut, and Timofey looked hard at the roof beam and said nothing. She bruised the fresh leaves between two spoons and packed them in. Then she put her hands round his arm.

The path was there.

It took her as long as it takes to boil an egg.

Her mother had come in from the yard with the pail. She set it down. She took Timofey's arm in both her hands and turned it to the window, and looked along the pink line from one end to the other. She pressed beside it with her thumb, in three places.

Then she went out again, to the old river-road man, who had been put to bed at the ferryman's. She was gone an hour. When she came back, she hung up her shawl.

"Which did you do first?" she said.

"The leg."

"Why?"

"It was the one that could have killed him."

Her mother took the honey pot down from the shelf, and put it on the table, and went to strain the milk.

In July, the haymaking comes round.

It isn't the same as last year. It isn't the same as any year before.

Nobody tells us which days are ours now. They're all ours. We put our cross on the paper for that, and sixty-six roubles and sixty-seven kopecks. There just isn't enough meadow to fill them. Our strip by the forest is done in three days, if the weather holds.

And the line of men is wrong.

It's always been my father at the head of it. The big scythe, the long slow swing, and everybody else keeping time behind him. This year it's Fedya, with my father's scythe.

It's too long for him. The handle was set for a man a head taller. He mows anyway, with his elbows up too high, and by the first noon he has blisters right across both hands, and by the second they've opened. He won't let Masha look at them.

Behind him comes my mother. Women rake. They turn the hay and they stack it. They don't mow. But there's a man short in our row, so my mother has tucked her skirt up into her belt, and she's mowing, in Grandma's row, with Grandma's old short scythe. She's good at it. She doesn't look as if she wants anybody to say so.

I rake. I'm big enough for the rake this year.

Across the stream, in the good meadow, the grass is up to a man's waist.

It's the master's now, by the paper, every blade of it. So the master has to find somebody to cut it. His own field people are down to half, since nine houses bought themselves out. So he hires.

There's a line of mowers over there, a long one. I know nearly all of them. The Kuzmins, on their four days, the same as ever. Some men from our own street, who bought, like us. They're over there mowing for the house, three days each. That's the price of the stream pasture this year. The house won't take money for it. It takes days.

And near the end of the line, there's Efim.

He's free. The paper said so, in front of the church. Free to go where he likes. He's gone as far as the carter's back room, behind the traktir, with his wife and his four. He mows for the master for twenty kopecks a day and his bread. Before the paper, he did it for nothing, and had a roof.

He mows well. He doesn't look across the stream.

My father would have had something to say about it. Yegor Kuzmin has something to say about it every evening, loudly, at his gate. Free men, mowing the master's hay for the master's grass. He says the Tsar should come and look.

I rake.

In the afternoon, the train goes by.

The little ones run to the edge of the field and wave. They still do that. I feel the well go past, deep and cold, with its lid on.

Under it, between the well and the water, there's an iron bed with marks on it. He told us so himself. So I look at every engine now, the way you'd look at a stranger wearing your father's coat. Somewhere on this line, there's a train that runs on what he cut. It's the nearest he's been to us all year.

I watch it until it's on the causeway. I don't wave.

The watchman comes out to the field at sunset, with his bag. It's three weeks after St Peter's.

He reads it by the last stack, with all of us standing round him in the stubble. I hold his milk jug. I stand close, at his elbow, where a boy with a jug would stand.

The corporal writes a big round hand. I've known that for a year. I've never been this near to it.

The bows. The blessing that stands until the grave. Alive and well, thanks be to God.

"And now I will say how it is with me," the watchman reads. "The heat in the shop this month is such that men fall down at the bench. They are carried out into the yard, and water is poured on them, and they come back. I have not fallen. I have learned to stand so that the big hammer is at my back, and now I don't jump. The foreman is a strict man."

He stops.

It's a short stop. He clears his throat, as he always does. His eyes go down the paper, past four lines, and take hold again lower down.

"On Sundays I walk to the river and look across," he reads.

Everybody in this field thinks I can't read.

The four lines are in the corporal's round hand, and I read them over his elbow. "He has a book, and what he writes in it comes out of the ten. Forty kopecks for talking at the bench. Thirty for a file that was cracked when they gave it to me. A rouble for coming late to the gate. The man beside me cut a mark wrong on a grate, and they took half his month for it."

A rouble seventy, this month. There it is. The piece the letters never had a word for.

"From the bank you can see where the ferry road goes up the far side," reads the watchman. "I look at it and then I go back, because the gate is shut at eight. I send three roubles. I will try for more at the Protection. I kiss you all."

The corporal bows.

The watchman folds the paper, quickly. He's in a green coat with brass buttons. It's the same coat the foreman wears, I suppose. It's the same Department.

He gives the letter to my mother, and the three roubles to Grandma. He takes his jug from me.

"Good boy," he says.

Fedya is looking at his hands.

"Men fall down," says Grandma. "At the bench."

"He hasn't," says my mother.

"He says he hasn't."

My mother puts the letter inside her blouse, with the other six.

That night we sleep in the field, by the stack. The sky stays green until late. Grandma hums. Nobody hums with her.

I lie on my back in the hay.

A rouble, for being late. That's three days' work. In his own forge, nobody ever wrote down when he came in, or when he talked. Now there's yet another man with a book.

My mother's hand comes across in the dark and finds my forehead.

"What is it?"

"Nothing, Mama."

She leaves the hand there.

I can't say it. I'd have to say how I know. So I lie there with four lines of round writing shut up behind my teeth, and I look at the green sky, and they don't go away.

By the end of August, the rye is in, and I've been to the snares more times than I can count on the bark.

Three mornings a week. Sometimes four. I can go flat now without the ant. I've done two more hares, and a grouse, and it's as Fedya said. It gets quicker.

On Sundays, my mother puts her finger and thumb round my wrist. They still meet. There's less room than there was.

This morning there's mist in the near wood, lying in the low places like milk in a saucer. It's the first cold morning. Zhar likes it. He goes ahead of us with his nose down, and a thin line of smoke stands up off his back in the still air.

Fedya is carrying the horn, and his knife, and nothing else. We're only going to the first stream. It's nowhere near the split pine.

"I want to look at the iron one first," he says. "The guild's. I put it down for the fox, by the hollow."

The guild has two iron traps, with jaws and a spring. They came from the city, and Gavrila counts them every Saturday. Fedya was allowed to carry one into the forest for the first time at Easter. He oiled it for an hour before he set it.

It's where he left it, chained to a root, at the edge of the hollow where the stream goes under the bank.

It's brown.

Not a bit brown. Brown all through, and rough, and swollen, like bread crust. One of the jaws has holes in it. I can see the moss through them.

Fedya crouches. He picks it up by the chain, and the chain comes apart in his hand. Three links drop into the ferns, and they don't clink. They crumble.

"It was new," he says. "It was new at Easter. I oiled it."

There's something on the ferns round the trap. I thought it was dew. It isn't. It's thicker than dew, and it's orange, and it hangs off the tips of the leaves in strings.

Iron doesn't do that in four months. Not in water, not in salt, not in anything I ever read about. I've seen it happen once before. On a rail, on the causeway, the day the first train came. Brown as bread crust, all the way through.

"Fedya," I say. "Don't touch the—"

"Kolya. Look."

He isn't looking at the trap any more.

A little way up the path, on the dry ground, something is lying across the hare run.

It's a horn hare. A big buck. It's lying on its side with its eyes open, and at first I think it's whole.

It's half.

Everything behind the ribs is gone. The back, and both back legs. The front half lies there with its paws crossed, as neat as a cut loaf.

Fedya turns it over with his foot.

I've watched him skin a dozen hares now, and I've watched Grandma joint them. A knife leaves an edge you can read. It drags. It goes round the bone, or it hacks through and leaves splinters.

This went straight across. Through the fur, and the meat, and the backbone, in one flat line. The end of the bone is as smooth as a planed board. There isn't a mark on it. Not a saw mark. Not a tooth mark.

And there's no blood. Not on the moss. Not on the fur. The cut face of the meat is dark and dry, like something that was cut a week ago. But the eye is still wet.

I put my finger on it.

It's cold. Much colder than the morning.

I let the hum go over it, the way I'd feel along a strip for Osip. Nothing. Not a thread, not a warmth, not the bitten feeling of my father's marks. Whatever did this took all of itself away when it left.

"That's the saddle and the legs," says Fedya slowly. "That's the meat. Somebody took the meat." He nudges the head. The two black prongs knock against a root. "And left the horns. Eight kopecks, lying on the path. Who leaves the horns?"

"Somebody who doesn't go to the guild."

He looks at me.

Then Zhar growls.

It's the stove-door sound, the low one. I've heard it once before. He isn't growling at the hare. He's standing with his back to us, stiff, facing the hollow, and the smoke is coming off him in a sheet.

Down there, the mist is lying thick over the stream. Under the bank, where the water has cut in, it's dark.

Part of the dark moves.

It comes out slowly. First a head, low and flat and as wide as a shovel. It's the colour of the trap. Brown and orange, in patches, and shining wet. Then two front legs, pushed out sideways like a lizard's.

At the ends of them are hands. Four fingers each, spread on the mud.

It goes on coming out. There's a lot of it. A body as long as two men lying end to end, and as thick as a barrel. Then a tail, flat on its edge, like an oar. Where its belly drags, the ferns go down, and stay down, and turn orange.

It has small black eyes, set up on the top of its head. They don't blink. They're looking at Zhar.

"Rust newt," Fedya whispers. His lips have gone white. "From the middle of the marsh. Gavrila said they never come out. He said they can't—"

It opens its mouth.

There are no teeth in it that I can see. It's just wide. Pink, and wet, and wide enough to take in a sheep.

"Back," says Fedya. "Slowly. Don't run. Don't—"

Zhar goes in.

He goes the way he went at the boar. Low, and from the side, at the back leg. His jaws close on it above the hand.

There's a hiss like a pan of water tipped on a stove. White steam bursts up round his head. The newt doesn't scream. It swings round on him, the whole length of it, faster than anything that size should move. On the wet ground, it goes like a fish.

And Zhar lets go.

He's never let go of anything. He falls back, shaking his head hard from side to side, with orange strings hanging from his mouth. He's making a thin high noise. He paws at his muzzle.

"Zhar!"

Fedya has his knife out. He doesn't think. He never does, when it's Zhar. He jumps the trap and drives the knife into the newt's shoulder with both hands, up to the handle.

The newt's tail comes round.

It catches him across both legs, flat, and he goes over backwards into the ferns as if somebody has pulled a rug. The knife comes out in his hand.

It isn't a knife any more. Half the blade is still in the newt. What's left is brown, and full of holes, and as I watch, the tip of it bends over and drops off.

"The marsh will eat their iron," Gavrila said once, "and ask for more." I was four. I thought he meant the water.

The newt turns towards Fedya, on the ground. Its mouth is opening.

I flick the resin.

I don't choose to. My hand is in my pocket and out again before I've thought. The crumb catches in the air, yellow and spitting, the best one I've ever done. It hits the newt in the middle of its back.

It goes out.

Just like that. A little hiss, a little grey smoke. On that hide, there's nothing dry enough to bite. It's like throwing a lit splinter into the stream.

Any fool can throw heat.

But the newt has stopped. Its head swings away from Fedya. The flat black eyes come round, and find me.

It felt that. The same as Zhar does. The same as the horn hare did.

It comes.

It's eight steps off. Then six. Its hands slap down on the mud, one after another, and its belly hisses through the ferns. Fedya is shouting something. I can't hear what it is.

And there's the calm.

The flat one, from the trench. The one that says: this is the job, and this is the order to do it in.

It's wet. All of it. Every hand's width of that hide is covered in water.

I don't flick anything. I put both hands on the ground, and I take the heat out of it.

Not out of the newt. I couldn't. There's too much newt. Out of the wet on it. The skin of water on its head, on its neck, on its two front legs. I pull the heat out of that, all at once, as hard as I've ever pulled anything, and I push it down through my hands into the cold ground.

White runs back along its head from the nose.

It's the bowl. It's only the bowl, at five steps, with the bowl coming at me. Frost goes over its eyes, and they turn grey. It goes down its neck. The ferns round its front feet go stiff and white, and crack when it treads on them.

It slows.

Not all at once. Like a cart wheel going into deep mud. One hand comes up, and hangs there, and takes a long time to come down. Its mouth is still opening. It's opening so slowly now that I can see the inside of it go from pink to grey.

It's a cold thing. It hasn't got a stove of its own. I knew that the moment I saw how it moved. It's as warm as the water it lies in, and no warmer, and I've just taken the water down to January.

It stops, with its nose three steps from my knees.

I hold it.

The hum is going out of me like water from a tub with the plug pulled. I've never felt it go like this. I can feel the level drop. Past the place where I stop for the day. Past the place where my arms go slow.

"Fedya," I say. My voice is very small. "I can't do this for long."

He's up. He's got Zhar by the scruff with one hand. He looks at the newt, white to the shoulders, with its hand in the air. He looks at me, on my knees in the ferns.

I see him think. I actually see it. He's fourteen, and his wolf is hurt, and his knife is gone, and he stands quite still for one whole breath and thinks.

"What does it need?" he says. To himself. It's Gavrila's voice. "It's wet. It needs wet." His head comes up. "The sand. Kolya, the sand! Up the bank! Now!"

He's got me under the arm before I can stand. I lose the newt as he pulls me up. I feel it go, like a rope running through my hands.

We run.

Up out of the hollow, away from the stream, straight up the slope. The ferns stop. The moss stops. Then it's the high ground under the old pines, dry as a floor, all grey sand and brown needles, where nothing grows.

Behind us, something is crashing through the ferns.

I look back. I shouldn't.

It's coming. The white has gone from its head already. It's coming up the slope after us with its mouth open, fast. It's too fast.

Then it gets to the sand.

The sand sticks. I see it happen. Every hand it puts down comes up coated. Needles stick to its belly, and its sides, and its tail, a brown coat of them, thicker with every step. Where the sand covers it, the shine goes off its hide.

Its hands are landing further and further apart.

Ten steps up the dry slope, it stops. It lies there with its sides going in and out. Its mouth opens and shuts on nothing.

It looks up the hill at us for a long moment, out of one flat eye.

Then it turns, the whole length of it, heavily, and drags itself back down towards the stream. It leaves a groove in the sand as wide as a trough. On each side of the groove, there are hands.

Nobody speaks until the mist has shut behind it.

I sit down. I don't decide to. My legs do it.

I'm cold. Not on the skin. Further in. My fingers have gone white at the ends, and I want to sleep more than I've wanted anything since the ford.

I know where the lines are. Three parts in four, and you go slow and stupid. Nine in ten, and the cold comes, and your face goes the colour of a candle. I've been past the second one once in this life, on the ice, when I was five. I'm past it again.

I didn't fall down. I didn't drop it until Fedya pulled me. I count that.

Fedya is on his knees with Zhar's head in his lap. He's got the wolf's jaws open with both hands, and he's looking in.

"His tongue's all blisters," he says. His voice cracks in the middle. "And his gums. It's like he bit a nettle. A hundred nettles." He wipes the orange off Zhar's muzzle with his sleeve, and then he looks at his sleeve, and wipes it hard on the sand. "Masha. Masha can do it. She did his shoulder."

Zhar lets him. He lies there with his eyes half shut, and a thread of smoke coming up.

Fedya looks across at me. Then he looks properly.

"You're grey," he says.

"I'm all right."

"You're grey, Kolya. She said the colour you went out." He comes over on his knees, and takes my face in both his hands, and rubs my cheeks with his thumbs. Hard, as if he's getting mud off a boot. "Come on. Come on. Go pink."

"That isn't how it works."

"You don't know how it works. Nobody knows how it works." He rubs harder. "It's working. You're a bit pink."

"That's because you're taking the skin off."

He stops. He sits back on his heels and looks at me. Then he lets out a breath that's half a laugh, and wipes his nose on the back of his hand.

"You stopped it," he says. "It was coming right at you. And you just knelt down."

"You got us up the hill."

"Gavrila got us up the hill. I only remembered him."

He holds up what's left of his knife. A handle, and a brown stump as long as my thumb.

I think of thirty iron plates, with three small cuts on each. They've been lying in the marsh for more than three years, in the black water, where those things live. The Department man went out with a lamp and a hammer. He couldn't find a speck.

"As long as I promised it," my father said.

"He'll want to know where," I say. "Gavrila."

"This side of the split pine." Fedya's face changes as he says it. "A long way this side."

He carries me the last part, on his back, the way he did when I was three. I don't argue. Zhar walks beside us with his head low.

At the edge of the rye, Fedya stops, and puts me down, and looks at my face again.

He doesn't rub it this time. He just looks. Then he takes my hand, which he hasn't done for two years, and we go up the street like that.

Gavrila turns the stump of the knife over and over in his black gloves.

He asks how long it was. He asks which way the tail lay. He asks about the hands, and Fedya holds up four fingers. He asks where, and when Fedya tells him, he asks again, as if the answer might be different the second time.

He doesn't ask how two boys and a wolf got away from it. Fedya says we ran for the sand. That's true. I look at my feet.

About the hare, he asks only one thing.

"Cut how?"

Fedya shows him, with the edge of his hand. Straight across.

Gavrila looks at the hand for a moment. Then he looks out of the guild door, towards the forest, and rubs his jaw.

That night, eight men go into the near wood with torches and spears.

They find the hollow. They find the ferns, flat and orange, and the trap. They find the groove in the sand, and they follow it back down to the stream, and along the stream for a mile, until it goes into water too deep for torches.

They don't find the newt.

They don't find the hare, either. Fedya asks, when they come back. Not the head. Not the horns. Only a place on the path where the moss is pressed down.

My mother hears it all from Gavrila, at our gate, in the dark. I'm on the stove. I can't hear what he says. I hear what she says.

"Inside the pine," she says. "It was inside the pine."

When she comes in, she doesn't shout. She doesn't make a new rule. She stands by the stove with the lamp, and looks at me, at my face and my hands.

Then she puts her finger and thumb round my wrist, though it isn't Sunday, and holds on.

Zhar sleeps in our yard for a week, with Masha's threads in his mouth. He eats kasha, and hates it.

After the Protection, when the cabbage is in and there's nothing left in the fields to keep a child at home for, the school opens.

A paper came about it in the winter. Father Ivan read it out from the church step. A school in every district, for the children of the free village people, by the will of the Tsar. The district sends a teacher. The village gives a roof, and a cart of firewood from every house that sends a child.

Our village gives the church lodge. One room, with a stove, where the bell ringer used to sleep.

There are twenty-three of us, the first morning. I count. Twenty boys and three girls. Vaska Kuzmin. The spoon-carver's boy, the one with the foot. Two of the miller's. A boy from the carter's back room, in new bast shoes, who sits at the very end of the last bench.

Not Fedya. Fedya says he's fourteen, and he has a wolf.

And Rodya.

Ulyana brings him to the door herself. "He's got ears," she tells the teacher. "Better than any of this lot. Let him sit. It's warm in here, and it's free." Then she laughs her big laugh, and goes, before he can say no.

The teacher is young. That's the first thing. I thought he'd be old. He's thin, with a thin coat, and town boots that are wrong for our mud, and ink on two fingers. He came from the seminary in the city. He has a cough.

He looks at Rodya. He looks at the door Ulyana went out of.

"Well," he says. "Sit by the stove, then."

Rodya sits by me.

There's a black board on three legs. There's a box of slates, one for every two children, and a slate pencil each. There's a counting frame, with wooden beads on wires. On the wall, there's a big printed sheet with all the letters on it, in rows.

I haven't seen that many letters in one place for seven years. I have to look at the floor.

"This," says the teacher, and he draws on the board with chalk, "is the first one. Az. Say it."

We say it. Twenty-three voices. Rodya's is the loudest, and it's right.

"What does it look like?"

Nobody knows what he wants. Then the spoon-carver's boy says it looks like the end of a roof.

"Good. A roof, with a beam across. Now make it."

The slates go round.

I've got a problem. I've had it since I picked up the pencil. I've picked it up the way you'd pick up a pen. Three fingers, light, near the point. I did it without looking. Nobody else in the room is holding theirs like that. They're holding them in their fists, like spoons.

I change to my fist. Too late, maybe. The teacher was going past. His eyes stay on my hand for a moment before he moves on.

I make an Az. I make it badly. It takes more work than making it well. I let one leg go too long, and I put the beam on a slope.

Beside me, Rodya has the slate on his knees.

He's holding his pencil in his fist too. He heard them all pick theirs up, and he's copied the sound. He puts the point to the slate, and stops.

"Like a roof," he says, under his breath. "With a beam."

He draws a line. It goes up, and it's a good line, straight. Then he has to start the other side. He lifts the pencil. And he doesn't know where the first line was.

He puts the pencil down somewhere else. He draws the second line. It doesn't meet the first. It isn't near it. Then the beam, and the beam goes off the edge of the slate, and squeaks on the wood of the frame.

He feels the squeak. He stops.

He puts his fingers on the slate, flat, and moves them over it. He does it twice. Slate is smooth. Slate pencil on slate is smooth. There's nothing there to find.

"Is it right?" he says to me, very quietly.

The teacher is standing over us.

"No," says the teacher. Not unkindly. He takes Rodya's hand in his own, pencil and all, and moves it. Up. Down. Across. "Like that. Do you feel?"

"Yes," says Rodya.

"Again. On your own."

Rodya does it on his own. It's worse than the first one.

On the next bench, Vaska Kuzmin has turned round to watch. He leans over, and puts his hand up in front of Rodya's face, and waves it. To see.

"I can feel that," says Rodya. "Stop it."

Vaska snatches his hand back as if it's been bitten. Somebody laughs. The teacher raps the board with his knuckles.

After the letters, it's numbers.

The teacher asks them out loud, and for a little while, it gets better. Seven and five. Rodya has it before the teacher's mouth is shut. Twelve and nine. Rodya. If a pair of bast shoes is four kopecks, and a man sells fourteen pairs—

"Fifty-six," says Rodya. "But you don't get four. You get three, in summer."

The teacher almost smiles. He brings the counting frame over himself, and puts Rodya's hand on it. The beads slide on their wires and click. Rodya's fingers go along them, row by row. In about as long as it takes to say it, he's got fifty-six set out, and he's grinning.

"Good," says the teacher. "Very good. Now write it."

The grin stays on Rodya's face a little longer than it should.

Then the teacher remembers. I see him remember. His ears go red, and he coughs, and takes the frame away to the next bench.

At the end of the morning, he gives out the books.

There are six. Thin, grey, with paper covers. A primer, the first book, the one you learn to read from. He says the word as if it's holy. We're to look at the first page, four to a book, and find the roof with the beam.

Rodya gets to ours before I do. He holds it in both hands. He smells it. Then he opens it, very carefully, and puts his palm flat on the page.

He moves his hand across it. Down. Across again.

"It's smooth," he says.

"Yes."

"All of it?" He turns the page, and feels that one. "Kolya. There's nothing on it." His voice has gone small. "Is there really something on it? Are they all looking at something?"

All round the room, twenty-two children are bent over six books, with their fingers on the page.

"Yes," I say.

He shuts the book. He holds it out, in my direction, until I take it.

He doesn't say anything else until the teacher lets us go.

We walk back along the graveyard wall. His hand is on my shoulder. He doesn't need it there. He's known this path since he could walk.

It rained in the night. The lane is all yellow leaves, trodden into the mud.

"What's tomorrow?" he says, at his gate.

"Buki."

"What does Buki look like?"

I have to think about how to say it. "A stick with a flag on top. And a belly at the bottom."

He nods. He goes in. He doesn't ask me to come to the tub.

I go down to the stream.

The box is where it always is, under the alder, with its turf on top. I take out the bark. The long curl of it, with a whole year on it. Bowl, twelve steps. Needle. Bolt of fire.

I turn it over.

On the back, where the scratches are, the bark has lifted. Every stroke I made with the nail has pushed up a little ridge on the other side. I never looked at the back before. There was nothing on it to read.

I shut my eyes, and put my thumb on it.

Two long. Two short.

I sit there on the flat stone until the bell goes for the evening service.

In the last week of October, the puddles have ice on them in the mornings, and Fedya says we should lift the snares.

"They come back with the snow," he says. "Zhar's lot. Gavrila wants everything out of the near wood before then. He doesn't want boys in there with the wolves and that thing both."

So we go in after dinner, and we lift them. Twenty loops. Fedya winds each one round his hand and puts it inside his shirt.

It takes longer than he thought. The days have got short without telling anybody. When we turn for home, the light between the pines has gone from brown to blue, and I can see my breath.

Fedya walks in front. Zhar walks in front of Fedya. His mouth has healed. He goes with his head up, tasting the cold, and where his feet come down, the frost on the moss goes dull.

I walk behind, and I'm flat.

I don't have to try now. It's how I walk in here. The hum is still, and I don't want anything, and the forest comes in by itself. The old low sound of it, under everything, like the mill. Zhar, a warm stone, ahead. Fedya I can't feel at all. I can only hear his boots, and they're cross about the time.

And something on both sides of the path that I've only had since the summer. I can't pick any of it apart. I couldn't point at one thing and say, there, a mouse. It's only that the dark isn't empty. It's full of small wanting, hardly there, the way a hayfield at night is full of crickets. You stop hearing them, until you listen.

On the left, there's a place where it is empty.

I nearly walk past it. It isn't a thing. It's a gap. A piece of the forest, about as wide as a door, where the crickets stop, and then start again on the other side.

It's what Rodya said about the bright nail. A shut door. But nobody behind it, pushing.

I stop.

I turn my head, and I look.

Two old pines stand close together there, twenty steps off the path. The dusk is thick between them. Blue, and then darker blue.

There's a man in it.

I can't see a face. I can't see a coat, or a hat, or hands. Only the shape of him, the height and the shoulders, a little darker than the dark he's standing in. He's standing the way a heron stands. As if he's been there since before the trees.

He's looking at me.

I can't see his eyes. I know it the way I know when my mother is awake behind the curtain.

I'm not afraid. That comes later, on the stove. Just now, there isn't room. I'm seven years old, standing on a path with my mouth a little open. Something in the dark has just noticed that I can see it.

I don't think it's used to that.

"Kolya!"

Fedya, from ahead. I look round. I don't mean to. It's my name.

"What are you doing? Come on! Mama will skin us both."

Zhar is beside him, with his head up. He isn't looking at the pines. He isn't smoking. He hasn't noticed anything at all.

I look back.

Two old pines. The dusk between them. Blue, and then darker blue.

"Nothing," I call. "A stone in my shoe."

I run to catch up.

On the stove, that night, I count. Fedya. Masha. Grandma. My mother.

Four.

Then I lie awake, and I count the other thing, over and over, to be sure.

Two pines. There were only ever two.