At the edge of the landscaped park, where the gravel of the road broke off abruptly into a carpet of conifers, stood a wooden house with a porch and a crooked bell. By day it smelled of resin, wet earth and baked bread, and at night, when the wind rustled the spruce trees, distant calls could be heard that could not be mistaken for anything else. There were voices in it: the heavy stomping of elk, the wings of owls cutting through the darkness silently, the once quiet, once clear barks of foxes, and that long, spacey tone after which the skin itself folded into a goose: the wail of wolves. Mira was seventeen, her eyes as dark as a night pond and her hands perpetually smelling of grease and needles. She knew the forest like an astringent: the soft hollows where mist gathered, the sandy dunes devoured by heather, the paths used by animals, not man. Her grandfather, Tadeusz, was a forester. He taught her that, in the forest, the most important thing is to listen more carefully than you speak. That evening, in the woodshed smelling of freshly broken woodchips, Mira was leaning over an old radiotelemeter. A checkered notebook, a red torch, a map with a network of blue lines and a dirty plume of feathers lay side by side on the table. The feathers belonged to a raven named Frost. He was bigger than he should have been, as if the whole forest had thickened and settled into his feathers. He flew to them in winter, with a cut skin under his wing, and stayed. In the summer he started to return to the wild, but every morning he would sit on the roof and tap on the gutter, as if checking that the house was still standing. Frost now perched on the railing, tilted his head and flashed an eye in which Mira could see her own reflection. In his beak he held something shiny. He dropped a metal disc on the table in front of her with a number stamped on the edge. - Where did you find this? - Mira took the disc in her fingers. It was cold and strangely heavy. It looked like a marker that foresters sometimes put on chains to measure trees, but here there was no chain. She saw clear numbers and letters in the torchlight, and a short arrow-shaped scratch underneath them. A radio hissed on the table. The old telemeter came alive with a forced hoarseness. Mira slipped the headphones on. Two beeps, short, aborted - like a drip where someone had accelerated the drip. Then silence. Then again: two signals. She made notes in her notebook, unconsciously biting her lower lip. An eloquent howl came from the distance; it was answered by a second voice, then a third, lower, as if gouged into a trunk. From the end of the courtyard came the clatter of a bucket: her grandfather was pouring water into a vat by the smokehouse. - Grandfather! - Mira opened the door. It smelled of cold smoke and wet net. - Do you hear? Those two punctuations on the radio. They're repeating themselves. Like a code. Thaddeus hung up the bucket, wiped his hands on his trousers and looked towards the dark forest. - The forest talks in its own way,' he muttered. - And people like to hear what they know in it. But we can check tomorrow. Tomorrow, not today. You have school and I have morning measurements. Frost tapped the puck with his beak, as if impatient at the thought of 'tomorrow'. After a moment, as if for a change, he jumped off the railing and ran a small distance across the table, leaving invisible footprints behind him. He ran over to the map and hooked the corner of the sheet with his claw, dragging it so that the outline of a deep valley and a small oval clearing called Peak Glade by the locals lit up under the torchlight. Where a fire tower once stood - an iron truss, closed for years. Mira looked at the map, at the puck, at the headphones, which hummed again. Two short beeps, a longer pause, two short beeps. The chart in the notebook was beginning to look like a drawing of a snake devouring its own tail. A new sound came from the distance - a harsh, dry crackle, like a branch snapping under its weight. Late birds swooped down with a clatter, like a buried avalanche of wings. Mira glanced at her watch. Twenty-one twenty. - 'Tomorrow,' her grandfather repeated, but his voice sounded more like a wish than a decision. Mira nodded, turned away, and extinguished the lamp in the woodshed. Before she closed the door, however, she slipped the disc into the pocket of her blouse. At home she left a note on the table: I went to the shed for five minutes. Everything OK. - And she knew it was half-true, but better than nothing. Night crawled onto the porch like a cool cat. Shreds of clouds trailed over the roof, with stars twinkling between them, sparse and distant. The road became empty and quiet, as if the air had held its breath. The frost spread its wings and took to the air with a loud clap. Mira lifted her jacket from its hanger, pushed her cap into her hair and walked out, closing the door behind her so that the lock didn't rattle. She knew every creak of the porch boards; she knew which ones to avoid. The forest welcomed her like a corridor. Deeper and deeper, softer and softer, darker and darker. An owl crept over her head; she didn't even see it, just felt the air move. The fence by the forest nursery ended and old beech trees began, their trunks looking like muscle in the light of the black torch. Frost led the way, squatting on every other tree, chasing her with short squawks. From above, a flared point flashed again and again - the eyes of a deer, turned in stillness, alert as a string. At the edge of the Peak Glade, Mira stopped. The tall grass rubbed against her trousers, leaving damp streaks. She concentrated on the sounds: she heard her own breathing, too fast; she heard a metallic sound, quiet as a purr, but too even to be natural. It was accompanied, as if arranged in response, by distant, extended tones. Wolves. Frost squatted on an old fence post and rasped his beak. Mira crouched down, pushed the grass away with her fingers and saw something in the middle of the clearing that shouldn't have been there. A black rectangular shape, like a toolbox, connected by cables to a narrow vertical mast. At the top of the mast shone a thin, round plate, and below it was attached a mesh box like a loudspeaker. On the ground was a piece of rubber hose used to secure the cables. The device flashed a red dot, even, persistent. The dot pulsed twice. A shuddering sound rolled over the clearing, not of the kind the sun carries through the leaves. It was something felt in the chest rather than the ears: a heavy wave, every half-second, like the pounding of a membrane. Mira held her breath. Her phone in her pocket trembled as if a new message had passed through the metal tissues of the world. There was a rustling from the left. A deer came out, cautious, with a sudden hesitation in its movement. Behind it flitted a low silhouette gouged in the shadows. A wolf. His muzzle was raised, his nostrils flared. Behind it, two more shadows, silent, pressed to the ground. They were not attacking. They were listening. Mira swallowed her saliva. Instinct screamed to her to retreat and melt into the green, but something in the way they stood - not facing each other, but side by side, like spectators - kept her there. Frost was now tapping on the metal of the pole, as if trying to beat out a rhythm that mattered only to him. Then he jumped down, spread his wings and swooped low, hitting the cable with his wing. The dot on the device blinked faster, as if responding to the touch. Mira knew she should call her grandfather. That she should take a picture, collect evidence, come back. But alongside the fear there was another feeling, hard to name. She felt that she was standing in a place where the paths of creatures who don't ask for help because they don't know the category; they just live. If someone here had changed something, plugged their own tune into the forest, she could not pretend not to hear. A metal disc fell out of her pocket. It hit a stone once, silently, and rolled, leaving a thin, shiny furrow on the damp ground. The wolf raised its head. Its eyes, yellow and bright, stopped on Mira. Frost blinked and dodged to the side. The sound intensified for a moment. The device blinked rapidly, three times, and seemed to pull the air into itself. The forest stopped completely - even the grasses stopped moving. In this silence, she heard something new: the growing murmur of tyres on gravel, from the direction of an old access road that no one had used for years. A rectangle of light flashed in the darkness, then another. Headlights, stark white, cut across the edge of the clearing and stopped in the middle, flooding the mast, the box, the grass and the sight of the animals with glare. The engine was still running, low, uneven. The door swung open, someone who Mira didn't know, but who knew the road inside out, was getting out. Frost scrambled warningly, briefly, like a spell to break the night. The wolf took a step forward and stopped. Mira tightened her fingers on the cool disc and felt something decide inside. The car door slammed loudly. There was a flash of a metal key in the headlights, a raised hand, and then - even before she had time to step back - someone turned straight towards her