III

It had always been Steep’s preference, when he was about the business of slaughtering mating couples, to kill the male first. If he was dealing with the last of a species, of course—which was his great and glorious labor—the dispatch of both genders was academic. All he needed to do was kill one to insure that the line was ended. But he liked to be able to kill both, for neatness’ sake, starting with the male. He had a number of practical reasons for this. In most species the male was the more aggressive of the sexes, and for his own protection it made sense to incapacitate the husband before the wife. He’d also observed that females were more likely to demonstrate grief at the demise of their mates, in the throes of which they could be readily killed. The male, by contrast, became vengeful. All but two of the serious injuries he’d sustained over the years had come from males that he had unwisely left to kill after the female and which had thrown themselves upon him with suicidal abandon. A century and a half since the extinction of the great auk on the cliffs of St. Kilda, he still bore the scar on his forearm where the male had opened him up. And in cold weather there was still an ache in his thigh where a blaubok had kicked him, seeing its lady bleeding to death before its eyes.

Both were painful lessons. But more painful than either the scars or the ill-knit bones was the memory of those males who had, through some failing of his, outmaneuvered him and escaped. It had happened seldom, but when it had he had mounted heroic searches for the escape, driving Rosa to distraction with his doggedness. Let the brute go, she’d tell him, ever the pragmatist, just let him die of loneliness.

Oh, but that was what haunted him. The thought of a rogue animal out in the wild, circling its territory, looking for something that was its like and coming back at last to the place where its mate had perished, seeking a vestige of her being—a scent, a feather, a shard of bone—was almost unbearable. He had caught fugitives several times under such circumstances, waiting for them to return to that fatal place, and murdering them on the spot where they mourned. But there were some animals that escaped him completely, whose final hours were not his to have dominion over, and these were a source of great distress to him.

He dreamed and imagined them for months after. Saw them wandering in his mind’s eye; growing ragged, growing rogue. And then, when a season or two had passed, and they had not encountered any of their own species, losing the will to live; fleabitten and bony-shanked, becoming phantoms of veldt or forest or ice floe, until they finally gave up all hope and died.

He would always know when this finally happened, or such was his conviction. He would feel the animal’s passing in his gut, as though a physical procedure as real as digestion had come to its inevitable end. Another dinning thing had gone into memory (and into his journal) never to be known again.

This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this . . .

It was no accident that his thoughts turned to these rogues as he traveled north. He felt like one of their pitiful number now. Like a creature without hope, returning to its ancestral ground. In his case, of course, he was not looking for signs of his lady wife.

Rosa was still alive (it was her trail he was following, after all), and he would certainly not mope over her remains when she passed away. Yet for all his eagerness to be rid of her, the prospect left him lonely.

The night had not gone well for him. The car he’d stolen in Burnt Yarley had broken down a few miles outside Glasgow, and he had abandoned it, planning to steal a more reliable vehicle at the next service station. It turned out to be quite a trek, two hours walking beside the highway, while a cold drizzle fell. He’d make sure he stole a Japanese car next time, he thought. He liked the Japanese, an enthusiasm he’d shared with Rosa. She’d liked their delicacy and their artifice; he liked their cars and their cruelty. They had a nice indifference to the censure of hypocrites, which he admired. They needed shark fins for their soup? They took them, and dumped the rest of the carcasses back in the sea.

They wanted whale oil for the lamps? Damn it, they’d hunt the whales, and tell the bleeding hearts to go sob on someone else’s doorstep.

He found a shining new Mitsubishi at the next service station and, well pleased with his acquisition, went on his way through the night. But his melancholy thoughts would not be banished; they returned again to memories of murder. There was a simple reason he kept his mind circling on these grim images; it kept an even grimmer memory at bay. But that memory refused to be dispatched to the bay of his skull. Though he filled his head with blood and despair, the thought returned and returned—

Will had kissed him. Oh God in Heaven, the queer had kissed him and lived to boast about it. How was that possible? How?

And why, though he’d wiped his hand back and forth across his mouth until his lips were raw, did they only remember the touch better with each assault? Was there some shameful part of him that had taken pleasure in the violation?

No, no, there was no such part. In others maybe, in weaker men, but not in him. He had simply been taken by surprise, expecting a blow and getting filth instead. A lesser man might have spat the kiss in his violator’s face. But for a man as pure as he, unmoved by doubt or ambiguity, the kiss had been worse than any blow. Was it any wonder he felt it still? And would continue to feel it, no doubt, until he had the slivers of his enemy’s lips between his fingers, pared from his face.

By six in the morning he had reached Dumbarton, and the sky was brightening in the east. Another day beginning, another round of trivialities for the human herd. He saw the morning rituals underway in the street through which he drove. Drapes drawn back to waken the children, milk collected off the doorsteps for the morning tea, a few early commuters trudging to the bus stop or the train station, still half in dreams. They had no idea what their world was coming to, nor, if they’d been told, would they have cared or understood. They just wanted to get through their day and have the bus or the train deliver them home again, safe and sound.

His mood lightened watching them. They were such clowns. How could he not be amused? On through Helensburgh and Garelochhead he drove, the narrow road becoming heavily trafficked as the day proceeded, until at length he reached the town he’d long ago realized was his destination: Oban. It was seven forty-five. The ferry, he was told, had sailed on time.