When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tea… - Kathleen Winter

They can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either.

He had to remind himself that the work of a surgeon is poetry of a kind, in which blood is the meaning and flesh is the text.

Summer sky swallowed colour, but the sky of late August made colour ricochet back to earth, and there were sharp edges on all the buildings and curbs and even on the leaves of the trees and on the impatiens in the flowerbeds of all the towns through which Wayne travelled to reach Wally Michelin.

The hawk had possibly seen with its own eyes what it happened and knew better than Treadway how much Derek Warford deserved to be sunk with the stone to the bottom of a bottomless body of water. But the hawk did not recognize any of this. It did not swoop down . . . but it hovered. It hovered in front of him and it reminded him of the same words over and over again, from the books of Deuteronomy and Romans and also the book of Hebrews in the Bible Treadway kept in his trapper’s hut: Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

“When?” asked Treadway. “When is the Lord planning on getting around to it? Because I can have it done by this time tomorrow.”

But the hawk used an argument Treadway had used many times himself when Jacinta had asked him to explain or justify a decision he had made. The hawk used the argument of one loan proclamation followed by silence, and in that silence, Treadway knew, he could protest all he liked, but he would not win the argument.