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It also costs about two hours a day in stone selection, because the wrong rock explodes, and a river rock in this country has spent ten thousand years filling itself with water and will come apart in the fire like a small unhappy grenade. Ghorlan lost one at eleven o'clock and a piece of it went past my ear at a speed I have chosen not to dwell on.

So now we harvest from a scree slope forty minutes up the hill, which is dry rock, and that is two extra miles a day, and the two miles cost calories we are not getting, and that is the burden.

Nobody on the far end of that lens will get any of it.

They will get a pot taken and two people managing, and the managing will be forty seconds of a big man dropping hot stones into bark with tongs, and it will look competent and charming and free.

By four in the afternoon my hands have been in cold water so many times that the skin at my fingertips has gone soft and white and split at the pads.

Neve sets the stool at five. Bear angles in. The red light.

She pulls the card.

Talk about the moment the pot was taken. Take your time.

There it is again. Take your time. Nobody tells you to take your time unless they want you somewhere specific and are willing to wait for you to walk there.

"It's a pot," I say.

Neve waits.

"I mean it's a pot, right, it's a piece of aluminum. Four dollars. You could buy eleven of them for what that tote cost." My hands are on my knees. Flat. Chosen. "So we did rock boiling instead. It's actually an incredibly old technique, you can do it in bark, you can do it in a hide, you can do it in a hole in the ground with a hide over it, which is the coolest thing I have ever encountered."

Nothing.

"He had it cold. Just, immediately, no discussion. Went and got bark."

Nothing.

And here is where I make the mistake, and I want to be honest about the mechanism, because the mechanism matters.

I am tired. I have been awake since three. There is a split in my finger pad that has been on fire since noon and I have eaten four hundred calories in a day for three days and my body has started doing this thing where it forgets to hold my face.

And forty minutes of nothing is a very long time. Silence is the oldest tool at any table. You leave a hole and the person across from you fills it, and I have used that on grown men with money in front of them, and I have not been on the other end of it while cold.

"The thing is," comes out of me, "he doesn't ask. That's the part. He doesn't ask me if I can do anything. He just does it and leaves a piece of it out where I can get at it, and it took me two days to work out that he's doing that on purpose, and I have no idea how to be around it. Because I've spent nine years making sure nobody ever gets to find out what I can't do, and he's just going to keep handing me things until I have to say it out loud, and when he does I'm going to have to tell him about the elk and the whole thing is going to come down like a"

Stop.

Full stop, mid-sentence, with my mouth still open.

The rain goes on doing what it does. The red light stays on.

Neve does not move.

Every muscle in my back has locked up and there is a taste in the back of my throat like a coin, and somewhere under the panic a very cold part of my brain is doing the only useful thing available, which is counting.

Nineteen words past the point of safety. Maybe twenty-one. The elk got named. It did not get explained. Named, though.

Named is enough. Named is a thread and a thread is all anybody needs.

I get my face back on. It takes longer than it should.

"Sorry," I say, brisk. "Long day. Anyway, rock boiling. Genuinely recommend it."

And Neve raises the card again.

Same card. She has not swapped it. Talk about the moment the pot was taken. Take your time.