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In the morning, steam rises off the river, freshly baked from the night before. Silvery minnows dart between glimmering ripples, miniature waves moving and breaking the current’s mosaic in flits, teasing the tree-filtered daylight.

Upriver, a fox plods around the half-spine buried in banked silt to snarl a frog between its teeth. The stale scent of wolves and deer perfumes, mixed with churned earth from the worms. It follows the water and sniffs a wall of damp, rough stone.

Mushrooms grow on the sill of the cottage, and lichen grows on the bones inside. The animals can smell them from the river, but know there’s no more to be scavenged by slipping between the door’s split wood. The bones were once a woman, who strung up deer and rabbits and drained them into buckets, and spread their blood on trays left to bake in the sun, and ground the dried-up residue with spices that she sprinkled in the garden.

The garden remains — crisped mint, and flowered onions, and sunflowers that grow back year after year. The soil still smells of blood and slaughter, different from decay of hunted carcass, unnatural and sour, and keeps the animals at bay. Only the wild creeps in: the moss and lichen and brown rot that eats away the planter wood. The fox won’t claim the territory, among the smell of death and danger. It whines and scurries off, panicked, deep into the trees.