She tracks through the papers and the blogs – there is a huge public outcry over the dead wolf; the picture is being widely circulated. So like the English, Rachel thinks: object, ignore, and then, late in the day, after a tragedy, rally.

His belly is tight under his soft skin, glabrous, like stone wrapped in chamois leather.

Rachel misses the funeral. She does not send a wreath. She does not supply words of remembrance for the service. Communication has ceased between her and Lawrence, that is to say, between her and Emily, who has assumed control of the proceedings, and after a huge argument on the phone about duty and emotional incapacity, excludes her. She is now

The main door of the hall is a dense medieval affair, shot through with bolts: siege-proof. On either side sit two stone lions, lichen mottling their manes. It seems wrong to use such an entrance, but there is no other way, no tradesman’s signpost. She pushes the bell and a ferrous donging sounds within.

They continue on, into the mountains, sedately, like some kind of royal procession, the diplomatic arrival of a crowned couple. And it is historic, she thinks. It’s five hundred years since their extermination on the island. They are a distant memory, a mythical thing. Britain has altered radically, as has her iconography of wilderness, her totems.

She would like to believe there will be a place, again, where the streetlights end and wilderness begins. The wolf border. And if this is where it has to begin in England, she thinks, this rich, disqualifying plot, with its private sponsorship and antiquated hierarchy, so be it. The ends justify the means.

The casualness of the outcome is surprising to her. There are no handshakes. No signature of transferred ownership has been required, though there will be paperwork, stamps, scheduled legislature, she knows, wilderness being as bureaucratic as anywhere else.

Please don’t, Rachel. Don’t. I’ll be no good around a baby. I don’t want to fuck that up, too. Please don’t make me. She does not understand. Only later will she understand.

It will not take them long to be restored, she thinks. Their unbelonging, reversed. Nothing of history will matter to them; land is land, articulate, informative; soon they will dominate Annerdale. Wherever they are released, the world over, their geomorphic evolution is remarkably swift.