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tries not to notice the creature’s gentle, living eyes, but keeps a blind company for it in these last minutes. She can see her father coming back down the lane, shotgun cracked open over his arm. He is inserting cartridge cases, looking down. And at the back of her mind she knows better than to hope for the impossible. She knows she won’t beg her father not to shoot it. He would not mind her pleas, but certainly he would tell her to leave because of them. As her position as guardian it is vital that she stays, a witness to the events entire. And she does not want to disappoint him, he has no son. She wonders if she will cover her ears when he raises the gun. Her father’s boots on the gravel track are louder, and she thinks, thinks hard about the motionless cow, and salvation falling away, perhaps never existing at all.
    He bends down to her, the gun like a broken branch in his arm. It’s such a strange and foreign object, half natural, half abhorrently man-made, cast metal. Later, she will be proficient in its handling, able to clean and load it. Later still, andher aim will be better than her father’s. Crows will tumble out of the branches as she fires.
    – Right? Right, lass. Gudgirl. Yer mam wants yer in. But stop here if y’like. S’up to thee.
    The girl nods, barely a nod. Her father walks to the middle of the field. The cow is falling before she hears the shot.
     
    There is a smooth white scar on her forehead. It is shaped like a raised star to the right on the plateau of bone. A little too far out across the skin for a piece of loose hair to pass over it as she leans forward and so it usually remains visible. On her body there are several such masculine scars, she has spent too much time with the daily, impersonal violence of livestock and has laboured with heavy equipment too many times in poor light to come away unscathed. Her knees have been lacerated against a lifted plough and there are fingers which do not grow straight, but crook towards her palm like the bent bars of a cage. A broken rib from a frisky goat, its slight indentation in her stomach. Perpetually bruised or missing nails. Swollen ankles. These are accidents of minor proportions, unexceptional in the farming community. Even to her they are normal and acceptable. She does not consider herself unlucky or particularly broken in comparison with the rest of the valley’s female population, nor is she possessed of damages out of proportion with other women of the area. As she grows, her father will gradually wean her out of farm work and instead a brother will help to move the full herd. She will begin tutoring more often at the school, write the occasional commentary for the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald under an assumed name, and avoid early marriage, much to the chagrin of her mother. The welts and old scars will heal and diminish, shifting position on her body as she grows.
    But the star is the deepest of the collection. It sits against her head as a reminder that her life has included the sporadicbrutality of her family’s trade. It is the clearest mark perhaps, the key, a touchstone by which her father always finds his way back to her. He holds high regard for the scar, a reverence, the way a man might invest powerful emotion in a small icon or that ruptured portion of the past captured in a single object which he has inherited from a dear relation.

    She was eight years old and Samuel had already begun to suspect that there were things at work in his daughter a man should be wary of. At times, if he concentrated hard, he thought he could hear a low growl coming from her, emitted from a non-specific region of her chest, like the sound of snow about to move off a mountain in large pieces. As if she was tempered wrong. Her ways were not in keeping with her youth or her sex. She was seldom frightened as a small child will be during a new experience and she had developed a disturbing habit of staring at things, staring clear into them,