Black blood wells from a clean heart wound, and the lips are pulled back from the teeth in an ugly rictus. The fox is as dead as a shot fox can be.

It is over. Benedict is jolted and more than a little disturbed. His shoulder aches from the rifle’s kick, and he feels as though he has woken up somewhere unfamiliar. He is not sure what he expected but there is a disorienting sense of anticlimax, of a struggle that has not run its course. He has not begun anything resembling a quest, a hunt, the vast drama that God has staged for him. He has ridden into the hills and shot a fox. God has not been forced to turn and face him. God has said nothing, has shown him nothing.

His mouth is dry. His heart thumps, sibilant inside his clothes. For a moment he sees clearly that he has been rattled, jangled, for months and months, but only now can he feel it for what it is. Everything that seemed big is small. Including Lucie; including the fox. Matthias and his mother.

But the moment dissolves, corrodes in his mind.

Maybe this is not his fox, he thinks: there are, after all, other foxes that are not God.

He knows that it is his fox. The voice of God, murmuring constantly alongside the shudder and thump of his heart, is gone. He felt it leave with the thunderclap of the gun.

Some profound mistake lurks in everything. And there is something about his fox knocking at his mind, trying to get in.

He stares down at her.

The fox, his fox, is a vixen. He kneels and parts her cooling belly hair. Her dugs are still sticky, saliva-polished.

He reels. It has all been some colossal error. What of the dreams, of the voices? What did they signify? A madman only? What of Matthias and Ada? Why why why? Was Matthias mad, is it all just this only? Has he too been some madman, for months and months? A year?

His struggle with God is not ended with this violence and rage. Where can he turn for an accounting? Who can he confront?

Pastor Helfgott’s koala? Pastor Helfgott? Such a gulf stretches now, between the pastor’s belief and his own.

The only thing ended is a vixen.

She is a fox, a mother, shot through the heart. He has killed her, left some orphan cubs somewhere. He loads the gun again and backtracks around the kangaroo thorn, frantic now. He pokes around, looks for tracks, widens his search. He cannot leave them to struggle, leave them to grow, leave them to suffer. He must find them and kill them before they get hungry, before they miss their mother, before they die slowly, alone. Benedict is all compassion, weeping in frustration now, but slowly he winds down to a standstill.

What is the point? His steps return to the dead fox and he sits down by her side. He cradles the gun and stares at his own hands as the light winks from white to gold around him. He feels utterly and totally abandoned.

What can it all mean? Now, this very now, the sunken sun upon him, he must be able to think. He begins to thump his temple with his palm, striking himself with increasing force, as if to dislodge some impediment that has crept in and made his head its home. He must think it all through.

This is a dead fox. It is as dead as all the dead things that have ever died, and, on top of that infinite mountain of corpses, there are Matthias and Ada and Lucie and the fox. God, and love. Oh God! Love. Ada’s arms around him; Matthias’s arms around her. The Orions: all he had ever known, or needed. He is smacking his head hard, now, but something has woken and is raging back at him.

Now he must be able to think.

He forces his mind back over the past seasons, back over all his derangement, almost back to the beginning point of his adult life. He skips that, and goes back further, just a little way, to Ada and Matthias alive and loving their son. It involves a lot of yelling: Ada yelling at him with such delightful rage; Matthias yelling at him to hurry up saddling his pony. Such yelling. Such lost and yearned-for voices, falling on the ears of the boy he once was.

What criminal naivety. What a wealth of foolishness he has lived since then, what intolerable shameful delusions were his.

The wave is upon him, within him, and he is suddenly strong with purpose. He knows! Oh, he knows. He stops hitting himself.

His hands are deft and steady. He places the barrel in his mouth, braces his legs, reaches, only to find that he cannot reach the trigger of the Emily, or, if he can, all she will manage to do is shoot a big hole in his cheek. He rests the butt against his left boot, and unlaces his right, removing a smelly sock. He wriggles into position, supporting the barrel with both hands, reaching inexpertly with his big toe. As he does this, his distracted glance falls on the fox. Her eyes are open, catching the last light. The yellow glare is so alive he doubts for a moment. He closes his eyes, and he feels himself slide into that world of whispers and innuendo, fate and the preordained pattern of birth, suffering and death: and then he almost feels her rise again, almost hears her slink away to the cubs he couldn’t find and almost hears her now longed-for voice ask him to follow her.

His eyelids peel open, and her body is lying as it was, eyes dimming, blood black in the gloom. The only gaze upon him is Melba’s, mysterious and starlit; the only sound is the susurration of the contracting earth under its detritus; and the only thing to see is a fool with one bare and one booted foot.

Benedict, without feeling amused at all, begins to laugh.

He laughs and laughs, until he is sick into the kangaroo thorn.

He wipes the vomit from his mouth and forces himself to see it all, because now he really must.

He opens the door with a firm hand and walks into the room. In the second he sees it he knows exactly what is there before him. The slack legs, the one bare foot. The mess over the wingback of the sateen armchair. The rucked-up, blood-soaked pinafore below the clean heartshot.

Her pale face and vacant eyes. His shocking utter facelessness.

This happened. This all really happened. He saw it then; he sees it now.

Maybe if Matthias had counted to ten, as Ada always told him he should, if Matthias had seen himself in the eyes of a dead fox, a horse, or for that matter a koala—any god would do—if he had let the wave of whatever pain, guilt or madness pass…

Benedict slowly dresses his foot, then stares up through the branches of the young widow maker. There they are still: red Betelgeuse, blue Meissa and white Saiph—Matthias, Ada, Benedict, shining as they have since his father first named them for a sleepless three-year-old. Shining as they have for aeons before they were named, shining as they will for more-than-counting seasons after his own name is forgotten. They are a graveyard too of sorts, ancient lights reaching through the luminiferous aether, reaching the world, the farm and his eyes. There is the eternally scattered spoor of the Hunter.

He can feel the tug of a different constellation. Ada and Matthias in their separate graves, forever equidistant; and himself, here, a third, but alive and free and above ground.

He feels a dead calm in his heart. For the first time since Matthias died in so destructive a manner, Benedict feels the tears rise up, flood through him and roll from his cheeks. He weeps, not for himself, but for his stupid father. He knows the clarity he feels will fade—see, it is fading now!—but he marks it. From this point, he must do all he planned. The harvest. The horses. Helene.

Most of all Helene.

He scoops up the fox’s body. It too must be buried, to bow blind-eyed over colourless weeds.

Melba’s eyes are living black pools. She won’t stargaze with him. She is hungry. She snorts as the fox is slung over her haunches, flares her nostrils at death, blood and fox stink, and then sighs. He swings into the saddle, pats the mare’s sleek neck and turns her head for home, feeling her footfalls reverberate in the world of the dead.