The boy followed the man, and the blood, across the hard, uneven Welsh hill country.

Off to the west, all the way to where the crashing waves of the poisoned Atlantic ground hungrily into Cardigan Bay, all was brown and dry and shattered. Brittle and desolate; the result of the nuclear rain that had washed down out of Greenland, driven by capricious winds in the War of the American North over half a century before.

Sometimes, from a high vantage point on a clear day, you could peer out to where the dark stain of that dead land of stunted trees and rattling stalks started. Just at the edge of the horizon. The boy often looked at it. There had been a complex environment out there once, plants and animals coexisting: an intricate machine ticking quietly away. But humans had put a stop to that. Now that place was blighted and ruined.

Making their way through a thicket of alder trees, the boy marched quickly along behind the man saying nothing, trying to make sure that his tired feet did not stumble on the rough ground. The rust-green scrub––bracken, Hart’s tongue fern and dogwood––rustled and bent as they passed. The scent of bruised rosemary and lavender rose under their feet. Lethargic clouds of pollen, golden in the early morning sunlight, mingled with the steaming breath of the son and his father in the frigid air.

The blood was shockingly red against the dark earth and the moss-coloured leaves of the wild sage. As bright and vital a colour as the young boy had ever seen. A secret colour. Fascinating somehow. The child paused by some grey jagged rocks, stained with spreading lichen. Dipped his fingers into a thick warm splash of crimson. Saw where it had begun to clot in places to a darker red.

They followed the blood trail and emerged from the brush onto a ridge. Broken scree underfoot, with pendulous sedge growing in swooning profusion down and across the shallow but treacherous slope. The two of them picked their way across the face of the long hill, the lay of it turning north and then back westward. They discovered a narrow game trail. Followed it around a promontory so that they found themselves halfway up a far larger slope. Thigh-high Yorkshire-fog grass covered it; a roiling swathe of dusky purple that blanketed the hillside from the valley floor to the tops of the tors.

The father stopped and crouched. Pointed out a smear of blood against the rotting trunk of a fallen cedar. He looked to the sky. There were no birds circling. Not a hawk or buzzard or crow to be seen. He gazed up the hill, then back at the blood, and then down the slope into the gently waving sea of grass.

“Pa,” the lad said, “how do you know which way he went?”

The man, strands of loose auburn hair flying about his face from where they’d escaped his wool cap, regarded his son. He smoothed his beard thoughtfully. Hard blue eyes glittered.

“A wounded thing is like water, boy. Takes the path of least resistance. You ever see water run uphill?”

The boy thought hard for a moment and then shook his head. “No,” he said.

“No,” said his father, and started pushing his way down through the heather-coloured grass.

They found the billy goat by his smell. It was the smell as had drawn them to him at first light, at the spring, as they approached it slowly with the wind in their faces. The musky stink of stale piss. They’d been looking for a doe, or maybe even a boar, but the billy had been the only animal by the water and so the boy’s father had tried a shot at him with his old Purdey bolt-action rifle—his treasure, and the boy’s legacy. The .240 calibre round had punched in just behind the shoulder and the creature had run. The man had cursed softly as he had carefully ejected the spent casing and put it in the pocket of his soft flannel shirt. Brushed the peaty fen soil from the knee of his jeans.

The billy tried to heave itself to its feet when the man and the boy pushed through the high grass and found it lying where it had fallen. Vivid blood spotted the crushed bracken. Fat ruby beads scattered across the emerald grass and amongst the cow parsley.

The boy had not yet cultivated the barrier. Hadn’t learned to erect the veil between her eyes and her mind. He looked down on the buckled body; the blood sprays painting the ground grass like esoteric art he’d never understand; the ragged, matted hole in the hairy flesh, and saw it with a child’s horror.

The man lunged forward, grabbed the billy by the horns and forced it down, a knee on its neck. The goat started to scream. It was a thin, tearing shriek that made the young lad’s face crease up tight. His heart clenched like a fist in his chest. It sounded like a human screaming. Like a child. Like his baby sister, back at home, screaming for milk from their mother.

“Your knife, Archibald,” the man said. He had to speak loudly, so that he could be heard over the wailing of their quarry.

The boy fumbled at his belt. Pulled the simple blade from its worn leather sheath. Bone handle. Rough edge. Dull steel glittering under the Welsh sky.

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The billy goat shrieked and shrieked. Its bloody sides heaved. It seemed to the boy that it barely needed to draw breath, just carried on squealing and crying ceaselessly with froth foaming over its lips.

“Archibald, come here, lad,” Tristan Nyx said to his son. His face was impassive. Hard lines cut deep into the weathered brow and mouth by a hard life. A man who’d spent his days pressed to one grindstone or another.

The six-year-old Archibald gripped the knife in a trembling hand. Tried not to look at the screaming goat. Tried not to hear the sound that sent every one of his nerves to cringing. His father, keeping one hand on a horn, pulled him over to him. He pointed at the furrow where the goat’s neck met its chest.

“Here,” he said. “Here’s the spot, boy. There’s some as prefer cuttin’ the throat, but here, here the blood comes straight from the heart. Be firm. Be resolved.”

Archibald held the knife and looked at the goat. Into the strange slit of pupil. In that moment, it struck him how canny and knowing a goat’s eyes were. How cynical. He wondered what the goat saw. What it thought. Whether it knew that it was going to die.

“Seems unfair, Pa,” he said.

“It ain’t. Not when you think about. In this world, the hunter’s often hunted. Killer’s often killed, boy. Consider what people do to one another.”

He clenched the bone handle and looked at the tip of the knife. Took a steadying breath. Felt the air cold in his lungs. Heard the rushing sigh of the wind in the grass; a background to the haunting, panicked bawling of the goat. Sunlight gilded the feathery tops of the fog grass.

“I—I can’t do it, Pa,” he said.

“What?” his father asked over the screeching of the stinking beast.

The boy felt the coarseness of the bone handle in his palm. Noticed the glint of the blood speckling the ferns. Blood and bone.

“I can’t stick it.”

“Can’t?”

“I can’t stick it.”

“’course, you can stick him, boy. You’ve a hand and an arm and a knife, have you not? And the creature’s a heart.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t be absurd. What you’re tellin’ me is you won’t.”

The rangy man sat back on his haunches, still holding the goat by the horns. He pulled a flask from the back pocket of his jeans. It was beaten and bent as the man himself. Tristan took a long pull. He grimaced as he put it away, baring his strong white teeth. He was proud of his teeth. Credited them for wooing his wife, Archibald’s mother.

The screaming of the goat filled the little clearing. Relentless as the Welsh wind that scoured the hillsides.

The point of the knife wavered. The boy looked at his father crouching patiently in the bracken. Watching him out of those ice-chip eyes, while the billy shuddered and surged weakly in his unshakeable grip.

“Father, can you…?” he said.

“No,” Tristan Nyx barked over the wailing. “This ain’t my kill. I stood where you stand now, lad. Long time ago now. When we needed to hunt to eat. I did what was required. Now, you either do the same, or we sit and wait for this poor beggar to bleed out. A slow death. Painful—depending on where the bullet went. Not one that this beast can understand—any creature for that matter.”

His father took Archibald by the arm. Squeezed it hard. So hard that it hurt.

“This goat is dead, lad. Yes, still it breathes and moves, but it’s dead.” He enfolded the boy’s hand in his big callused paw so that they both held the knife. The fingers were rough as bark on the back of Archibald’s own fingers, toughened by years of labour; rebuilding what the war had been broken. The gruff voice softened a touch. “Best not to let him linger, boy. Beasts aren’t driven by malice or greed, only by necessity. Even a bear would only attack you out of fear or hunger or to protect its young.”

“What’s a bear, Pa?”

“Just some beast men killed off when I was a lad. Point is, animals don’t deserve to suffer. Best to send ‘em on their way as quick as maybe.”

The boy would dwell often on the words his father was careful not to say—that men are malicious beasts, and that they alone deserve to suffer.

The lethal point slipped easily through the skin and fat and muscle in a way that the boy thought he’d never forget—and never did. Archibald’s knuckles pressed against the warm, hairy chest and were suddenly drenched in hot blood as his father jerked the blade sideways, severing the arteries. The goat’s panicked cries were abruptly cut off. It heaved once. Shuddered. The boy watched in fascinated horror as everything that it had been or would’ve been faded from its eyes; drained out of it into the grass.

His father released his dripping, sticky hand. The little boy staggered away, staring at the goat that was now just a piece of furry, lifeless meat. Smelly. Empty.

It had been very easy—the killing of the thing—in the end. A simple case of applying pressure with a sharp bit of metal to make something stop being. Just like that, it was gone. All that it left behind was meat and a guilt that the boy couldn’t shake.

In the southwest, the sky groaned and grumbled as God moved about above the clouds that massed over the Black Mountains, sending thunder rippling slowly out over the rugged and dismally beautiful countryside. The wind turned to the north, driven by the building storms.

The stink of goat’s piss was suddenly added to by Tristan Nyx slicing open the animal’s stomach and pulling out the steaming entrails. The heady stench of half-digested grass and leaves, and half-formed shit, filled the small pasture clearing. Archibald stumbled further away, the reek of fresh death filling his nose and mouth and head. He did not want his father to see the tears prickling his eyes. He wanted to be a man. A hunter. And proper hunters did not cry over their prey.

The dirty, diseased-looking woollen clouds were gathering fast, promising rain. Ahead of them, the first crows drifted. The clever little things drawn by whatever sinister ability guided them to the freshly slain. Even the buzzards, riding high on the thermals, rarely got to a body quicker, so his pa said.

The boy hoped that the sound of the rushing grass and sedge would mask his sniffing and gulping. He closed his eyes, willing away the tears, but opened them when he saw the slit pupils of the goat looking at him from the backs of his eyelids.

Tristan Nyx’s voice was harsh in the sudden silence left in the wake of the goat’s screams.

“One day, Archibald,” he called, “you’ll see that killin’ is sometimes the generosity of a tender heart.”