The Hunger Beyond the Pines

I was restocking the compass display when the bell above the door chimed and three men walked into Calder and Brae Outdoor Supplies as if they owned the place. The way they carried themselves - shoulders back, eyes taking stock of everything - told me they had money before I noticed the expensive gear they wore.

The first through the door was tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a costly waxed field coat over tailored moleskin trousers. His immaculate country boots struck the wooden floor with each measured step. They were the sort of boots designed to suggest long days on a grouse moor, though I doubted they had ever sunk into peat.

He looked like English landed wealth, from the cut of his clothes to the way he surveyed the shop as if calculating its value.

"MacRae?" His upper-class accent confirmed the rest of the impression.

"That's me."

I set down the box of compasses and wiped my hands on my trousers.

"You're the group who rang about the extended wilderness package?"

"Sebastian Harcourt." He offered his hand, his grip firm and deliberate. "Everyone calls me Major."

The nickname suited his polished former-officer manner. Behind him stood a man with a permanent grin spread across his face. It was not the sort of smile you wanted to meet in a dark lane. Too wide, too fixed, as if someone had carved it there.

His eyes kept darting around the shop, examining everything with a concentration that made my skin prickle.

"Gideon Vale," the smiling man said, his voice much too cheerful. "Friends call me Smiler."

The third man stepped forward with a slight nod. His skin was weathered by the sun and his hands were rough from outdoor work, unlike those of his companions. When he spoke, his Australian accent was unmistakable.

"Callum Fraser. Most people call me Ringer. I manage a cattle station back home. Scottish family, a few generations back."

I shook hands with each of them, noticing their expensive watches and the easy assurance with which they occupied the room. Wealthy hunters were nothing unusual in Inverness. Plenty passed through on their way to sporting estates, hoping to shoot a great stag and take the antlers home. But something about these three felt different. Wrong, perhaps.

"What exactly are you looking to hunt?" I asked, leading them towards the back of the shop, where I kept the detailed Ordnance Survey maps.

Major and Ringer exchanged a glance while Smiler's grin somehow widened. The silence lasted long enough to become uncomfortable before Major reached into his coat and produced a thick buff folder.

"This may sound a little unconventional," he said, placing it on my counter.

I opened it and immediately wished I had not.

Newspaper cuttings about missing walkers covered the top of the stack. There were headlines from The Press and Journal and small Highland weekly papers, some going back decades.

"Experienced hillwalker vanishes without trace."

"Search abandoned for missing family."

"Stalker's remains discovered after two years."

Beneath the cuttings were photographs. Blurred, badly lit images that could have shown almost anything: shadows between trees, odd figures in the distance, streaks of movement caught by trail cameras. Yet there was something about them that raised the hair along my arms.

"We're not after a stag," Ringer said, as matter-of-factly as if discussing the weather. "We're after bigger game."

I went through more papers. There were copied pages from old estate records, accounts of recurring disappearances that had apparently been suppressed to protect reputations and sporting income, and statements from guides and stalkers, several of whom I recognised. Men who had spent their lives on those hills described things they had seen but could not explain: humanlike tracks far too large to belong to any person, sounds absent from every field guide, and the stink of rotting flesh where no carcass could be found.

"You want to hunt the Winter Hunger."

The words came out flat. It was not a question.

Smiler gave a little giggle that set my teeth on edge.

"Clever man."

My late grandaunt Mairi's voice sounded in my memory. She had preserved warnings learnt from Gaelic-speaking crofters and tradition-bearers in Assynt, testimony passed down alongside accounts of people who had vanished from isolated glens. An t-Acras Geamhraidh, they called it - the Winter Hunger. It was not an animal and never had been. It brought a silence no living landscape should know and a cold that burnt like fire. It consumed people, and sometimes spared a witness so the warning would travel.

Those were not fireside tales invented to frighten children. They were instructions for staying alive.

"The Winter Hunger isn't a trophy animal," I said, closing the folder and pushing it across the counter. "It isn't something you hunt."

Major took out his wallet and counted banknotes onto the counter, more cash than I usually saw in a month.

"We've done our research, MacRae. We know what we're asking."

"No, you don't."

I stared at the money without touching it. I had grown up hearing Mairi's warnings, and later heard fragments of the same testimony from people who knew better than to seek trouble beyond the settled glens.

"The Winter Hunger isn't just a local legend."

"It's a creature," Ringer interrupted. "Which means it'll have weaknesses we can exploit. We've hunted buffalo in Namibia, wild boar in the Balkans and saltwater crocodiles in Australia's Northern Territory. This is another predator."

The casual certainty in his voice turned my stomach. These men saw everything as something to kill, mount and display. They had no understanding of what they were asking me to help them find.

Smiler leant towards me, still grinning.

"We're prepared to pay three times your usual rate."

Three times. It was serious money, enough to cover months of overdue business loans and equipment finance, with something left to carry me through the winter. My account was nearly empty, bills were piling up and the quiet season was approaching. Winter was always lean for guides, and the commission would keep Calder and Brae afloat until the spring bookings began.

But leading these men to the Winter Hunger felt like taking them to their deaths. Worse, it felt like a betrayal of everything Mairi had taught me about the old warnings and the things that claimed the wild places.

"Where exactly do you want to go?" I heard myself ask.

Major smiled and produced a GPS receiver with waypoints already entered.

"West and north, beyond Assynt. Past the last inhabited properties, where the estate roads and forestry tracks give way to an abandoned hydro access track. We need somewhere sufficiently remote that we won't be interrupted."

I examined the coordinates. I knew the district, though I had not visited that particular tract for years. It belonged to a fictional-sounding patchwork of private holdings locals simply called the Braigh Fuar estate: open peat cut by burns and rocky ridges, pockets of old Caledonian pine and birch, and dark commercial plantations of Sitka spruce.

In places the trees stood so densely that a person could walk six metres from a track and vanish. There was no reliable mobile coverage and nowhere safe for a helicopter to land beneath the plantations. If anything went wrong, help would be a long time coming.

"That's Winter Hunger country," I said, returning the GPS.

"Exactly."

Smiler's giggle climbed in pitch.

The money remained on the counter between us. I knew I should have refused, told them to find another guide or, better still, to go home to England and Australia and forget about hunting old warnings. But the loans were overdue, winter was coming and my judgement bent beneath the weight of both.

"We leave at dawn," I said, picking up the cash. "One week. No extensions. If I say we're turning back, we turn back. No arguments."

Major nodded and shook my hand again.

"A pleasure doing business with you, MacRae."

As they headed for the door, Smiler looked back. That dreadful smile had not shifted.

"This is going to be fun."

The bell chimed as they left, and I stood alone among the ordinary tools of wilderness survival: compasses, maps, first-aid kits and emergency shelters. Things that worked in the rational world, where predators obeyed biological rules and dangerous situations had logical solutions.

I locked their folder in my desk and tried not to think about what I had agreed to do.

I gripped the steering wheel too tightly as we left Inverness at dawn, the braked equipment trailer jolting behind my ageing pickup. We had hours of driving ahead, west on the A-roads before turning north, and I was already questioning my decision to accept their money.

Sebastian sat in the passenger seat, repeatedly adjusting the GPS receiver mounted on the dashboard and making notes in a leather-bound journal. In the back, Gideon and Callum had topographical maps spread between them and were discussing possible approach routes.

"Ever hunted anything that fights back, MacRae?" Callum asked, looking up from a map.

"Boar on the Continent. Wounded red deer can be dangerous, especially in the rut."

I kept my attention on the road as the outskirts of Inverness gave way to open country and distant hills.

"Nothing that deliberately goes looking for trouble in the way you're describing."

Sebastian laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.

"That's the difference between pest control and real hunting. Real hunting requires the quarry to have a fair chance of winning."

"More than fair, sometimes," Gideon said in the same unsettlingly cheerful tone he had used in the shop. "In Namibia I followed a wounded buffalo for three days through thorn scrub. When we finally came upon it, it turned and looked straight at me. A vast old bull. It had already decided which of us it meant to kill."

"What happened?" I asked, although I was not sure I wanted the answer.

Gideon's grin stretched wider in the rear-view mirror.

"I put a .375 H&H round through its heart. It dropped almost at once. But for perhaps ten seconds before I fired, I couldn't tell which of us was the hunter and which was the prey."

Callum nodded appreciatively.

"Had something similar with a saltwater crocodile near Darwin. Six metres long, or close enough, and taking cattle from a station. Spent a fortnight in a hide waiting for the right shot. When it surfaced, those eyes looked ancient. Intelligent, almost. As though it knew exactly what I was planning."

"And you killed it anyway," I said.

"Course I did. That's what separates us from prey animals, mate. We don't back down when something dangerous looks us in the eye."

Sebastian took out his mobile and scrolled through photographs, angling the screen towards me while I kept my eyes mainly on the road. There he was beside a buffalo, a heavy Balkan boar and a large red stag, smiling with a proprietorial satisfaction beside each dead animal.

"This beauty gave me the fight of my life," he said, stopping at the buffalo photograph. "Charged from forty-five metres. I had to wait until it was close enough to see its eyelashes before I could be certain of a clean brain shot. One mistake and it would have trampled me into paste."

The ease with which they spoke of killing made my stomach tighten. They were not hunting for food or managing deer numbers. They were wealthy men who travelled the world looking for dangerous things to kill and display in trophy rooms.

We stopped in Ullapool for fuel and last supplies. It was the final substantial place before the single-track roads and rough estate routes ahead. While I filled the pickup, the three men stretched their legs and checked the locked firearm cases in the trailer.

Once we were away from public view and preparing to leave the road, Sebastian took out a costly straight-pull sporting rifle with a large scope, configured within British firearms law. Callum carried a more traditional bolt-action stalking rifle, its metalwork engraved. Gideon surprised me most by assembling a modern carbon-fibre crossbow.

"I thought you'd want more stopping power," I said, nodding towards it.

Gideon's fingers traced the frame with disturbing tenderness.

"Sometimes the old methods are best. And it's quiet. We don't want gunfire frightening our quarry away."

The thought of approaching close enough to use a crossbow on the Winter Hunger turned my blood cold. I said nothing and secured the remaining equipment.

The next several hours took us into country few visitors ever saw. The A-road narrowed to single track, then gave way to an estate road and rough forestry tracks. Beyond the last gate we followed an abandoned hydro access track, deeply rutted and choked with grass. I slowed to protect the pickup's suspension and the trailer's hitch.

Caledonian pine, birch and rowan covered the more open slopes, while commercial Sitka spruce crowded both sides of the track in dense, gloomy ranks. Their branches scraped the windows as we passed. Mobile coverage vanished completely, cutting us off from the ordinary world.

"Perfect," Sebastian said, consulting his GPS as we lurched through another pothole. "No distractions, no interference. Just us and the wilderness."

We reached the chosen site as the afternoon light began to fade: a reed-fringed lochan enclosed by pine and plantation, accessible only by a hydro track that could not have been maintained in years. The clearing beside the water was barely large enough for camp, with tall trees forming a natural barrier on three sides.

Unloading the trailer took most of an hour. They had brought enough equipment for a month: expedition tents, a compact petrol generator, a battery bank, a satellite terminal and rugged cases filled with cameras and electronics.

Their weapons and ammunition were no less carefully organised. In addition to their principal firearms and Gideon's crossbow, they had brought several boxes of lawful sporting ammunition selected for different quarry.

"Planning for every contingency," Callum explained as he unpacked the cartridges. "You never know what sort of stopping power you'll need until you're facing the target."

I pitched my own tent at the edge of the clearing, as far from their elaborate camp as the available ground allowed. Years of guiding had taught me to keep a little distance from clients, especially those who made me uneasy.

As I drove in the final peg, I noticed how silent the woodland was.

There were no bird calls among the trees. No pine marten disturbed the undergrowth. No red deer barked from the slopes, and even the insects had fallen quiet. The absence of sound was so complete that it seemed to press against my eardrums. In all my years in the Highlands, I had never known anything like it.

"Have you noticed how quiet it is?" I asked Sebastian as he tested the satellite terminal.

He paused to listen, then shrugged.

"Peaceful. That's why we're here."

"It isn't peaceful. It's wrong. There should be hooded crows, at least. Ravens. At this time of year, there ought to be movement everywhere."

Gideon looked up from arranging his equipment, his fixed grin stretching across his face.

"Perhaps they know something is coming."

The way he said it made my skin crawl, but Sebastian and Callum laughed.

"Animals have instincts," Callum said. "They sense predators. That's probably why this is the perfect spot for what we're after."

I wanted to tell him that ordinary predators did not silence an entire landscape. Wolves, eagles and people might make animals wary, but life did not simply cease around them. It felt as though everything capable of fleeing had already gone.

They had paid me to guide them, however, not to lecture them. I finished arranging my camp and tried to ignore the silence surrounding us.

After dark, we gathered around their camp stove for supper. The three clients were excited, discussing their plans for the morning and exchanging more hunting stories. I ate and listened while the lochan and woodland remained unnaturally still.

Gideon sat slightly apart from us, glancing between the conversation and the trees. He kept smiling, but his eyes never stopped moving. Every few minutes he tilted his head, as though trying to hear something beyond the range of the rest of us.

"Something wrong, Smiler?" Sebastian asked, following his stare towards the trees.

"Only eager to begin," Gideon replied, his voice carrying the same strained cheerfulness. "I can feel it out there, watching us."

Callum checked his watch and yawned.

"Whatever's out there can wait until morning. We need to be sharp tomorrow."

While the others prepared for sleep, I sat beside the dying stove and listened. No owl called from the dark. No branch shifted beneath a nocturnal animal. The surface of the lochan was perfectly still.

Gideon was the last to enter his tent. I could see his silhouette moving inside long after Sebastian and Callum had settled. From time to time, muffled laughter came from his direction: soft giggles that continued far longer than any joke could explain.

I pulled my sleeping bag closer and tried not to imagine what morning might bring.

We were up early. The others did not strike the base camp, since we intended to return, but they packed the equipment for an overnight excursion while I checked my kit and slung my well-used, licensed .308 bolt-action stalking rifle over my shoulder. Something about the day felt wrong before it had properly begun.

Sebastian placed the GPS receiver and satellite messenger in a tough waterproof case, then latched it. Callum strapped his hunting knife securely to his belt and checked his engraved stalking rifle. Gideon stood at the camp's edge, gazing into the trees with that peculiar smile.

"Ready to make history, MacRae?" Sebastian asked, lifting his straight-pull rifle with practised ease.

I nodded and led them towards a faint deer path I had noticed the previous evening. It was little more than a break through the vegetation, worn over years by red deer and other animals seeking the easiest passage between bog and woodland.

We went in single file through birch and native pine before entering ranks of Sitka spruce that appeared to thicken with every step. Wet branches crowded us on either side, heavy with the previous day's mist. I had to duck beneath low limbs and push through sprays of needles that caught at our clothing.

The silence that had troubled me at camp grew worse as we went deeper. No pine martens stirred the undergrowth. The ravens and hooded crows that often shadowed people in the hills, hoping for scraps, were absent. Even our footfalls seemed smothered by the ground.

"Christ, it's quiet," Callum muttered after an hour.

"Good for hunting," Sebastian replied, although his voice was quieter than usual. "The animals won't hear us coming."

Gideon gave one of his disturbing giggles.

"Perhaps they already know we're here."

I kept silent and concentrated on the route.

Years of mountain and wilderness guiding told me that something was profoundly wrong with the place. There was no wildlife anywhere, and the air felt dense, as if each breath required effort. The three clients repeatedly checked their GPS receivers, marked positions and updated their maps with the concentration of men conducting an operation.

Callum scanned the route ahead with binoculars while Sebastian photographed anything unusual: broken branches, disturbed soil and even ordinary deer slots crossing the path.

"How much farther before we begin finding signs?" Sebastian asked when we stopped beside a narrow burn.

"They could be anywhere," I said, filling my bottle through a filter. "The Winter Hunger doesn't follow patterns people understand."

"Everything follows patterns," Callum said, adjusting his rucksack straps. "You just have to learn how to read them."

Gideon crouched beside the burn, smiling at the current curling around moss-covered stones. His reflection warped in the moving water, making his grin appear wider than it was.

We pressed farther into the plantation as the morning passed, following the path through ground that became steadily thicker and harder to cross. The canopy shut out most of the sky, leaving the forest in a false twilight although the sun was nearing noon.

At about midday, we found the tree.

It stood slightly apart from the rest, an old Caledonian pine at the edge of the plantation. Something had raked the trunk from high above our heads down towards the base. The gouges cut through the bark into the pale wood beneath, extending for nearly 2.5 metres, with their lowest ends stopping just above shoulder height.

Callum approached with open excitement and ran his fingers beside the damaged bark.

"Look at the spacing. Whatever made these marks had claws at least fifteen centimetres long."

Sebastian circled the pine with his camera, photographing the scars from every angle and checking the screen after each image. Its electronic bleeps sounded unnaturally loud.

"Fresh," Callum said, examining the chips of wood scattered around the roots. "A week old, perhaps two."

Gideon stood three metres from us, his head inclined as though listening to something we could not hear. His smile had widened again, dragging at the corners of his mouth until it looked painful.

I studied the marks and remembered Mairi's warnings. She had described trees scored in just this fashion: territorial boundaries cut higher and deeper than any bear, boar or stag could manage.

Signs of the Winter Hunger, she had called them. Warnings to turn back.

"We should return to camp," I said, settling my rifle against my shoulder and stepping towards the path. "This isn't something you interfere with."

All three men laughed.

"You cannot be serious," Sebastian said. He lowered his camera and stared at me as if I had proposed walking away from buried treasure. "This is precisely what we came to find. We have our first physical evidence and you want to retreat?"

"It isn't retreat. It's sense. Whatever made those marks has been killing people here for generations."

Callum took out his GPS receiver and recorded the tree's position.

"MacRae, mate, this is why we hired you: to bring us close to the quarry. Well, we're close."

Gideon's giggle sharpened as he stared at the trunk. His fingers twitched at his sides as though he longed to touch the gouges but could not make himself do it.

"We continue," Sebastian said, checking the action of his rifle with precise, familiar movements. "We follow the route until we find more signs. Then we establish a hide and wait."

The afternoon darkened long before sunset. The temperature had scarcely altered, yet the failing light made the forest seem colder, more remote and more dangerous.

I looked back at the scarred pine once before following the others. We were walking towards something for which none of us was prepared.

I quickened my pace as we continued along the deer path, leaving the marked tree behind. The men followed, still discussing the gouges and photographing anything remotely unusual. Every few minutes one stopped to inspect a snapped branch or a patch of disturbed earth. They treated the journey like a scientific expedition, not an intrusion into a place that had already ordered us away.

The path curved through thicker plantation before emerging into a patch of open peat beside another remote lochan. A reed-fringed bog extended roughly forty-five metres across, with sedges crowding the black pools around its margins. It was the kind of place where deer came to drink and feed. Soft ground meant tracks, and the open space offered a defensible site if the men insisted on continuing.

"This will do," I said, lowering my rucksack beside a group of birches at the clearing's edge. "Clear sight lines, water nearby and soft ground to show whether anything has passed through."

Sebastian immediately began unpacking equipment while Callum surveyed the bog with his binoculars. Gideon walked to the centre of the clearing and slowly turned in a circle, taking in every part of it. His smile seemed broader than ever.

"Excellent choice, MacRae," Sebastian said, setting the satellite terminal and battery unit on a flat stone. "It has tactical advantages: an open field of fire, several withdrawal routes and natural barriers on three sides."

I watched him organise the equipment with military precision and wondered again about the lives these men led at home. Their kit was too specialised and their tactical habits too ingrained for ordinary sporting clients, however rich.

Callum moved around the clearing's perimeter, examining the damp peat near the water with the attention of an experienced tracker. He advanced carefully, pausing every few paces to study the mud and vegetation.

"MacRae, come and look at this," he called from the far side of the bog.

I crossed the clearing and found him kneeling beside a print pressed into the soft ground at the water's edge. It was enormous, almost forty-five centimetres long, and roughly shaped like a human foot, although stretched into proportions that made no anatomical sense. The toes were elongated, each ending in a puncture that resembled the mark of a claw.

"Jesus," I whispered, crouching beside him.

Callum traced the outline in the air without touching it.

"Look at the depth. Whatever made this weighed at least a hundred and eighty kilograms, probably more. See the marks at the ends of the toes? The claws weren't dragging. They drove into the peat for purchase."

More prints led away from the water, each sunk deeply into the boggy earth. I followed their direction and felt my stomach drop. They ran straight towards a crude shelter made from snapped branches, moss and torn turf.

"Found something else."

Gideon's voice carried across the clearing, higher than usual with excitement. He stood beside the shelter, stirring with his boot among a scatter of white objects in the sedge.

As we approached, I saw bones of many sizes. Some belonged to red deer. Others came from smaller animals I could not immediately identify. Most had been split for marrow, and many bore the tooth marks of a large predator.

Then Gideon bent down and picked up a human femur.

Terror clenched through me the instant I recognised it. The bone was unmistakably human and scored with tooth marks unlike those of any animal I knew. Gideon's grin became grotesquely wide as he raised it, the corners of his mouth pulled upwards until they appeared ready to split.

He began to giggle. The noise climbed higher and higher until it became almost hysterical laughter.

"Look at this," he managed between fits. "Look at the marks. Something has been gnawing on people out here."

I crossed the space between us in three strides and snatched the femur from him. It felt heavier than it should have. Contact with it sent a revulsion through me deeper than the ordinary horror of handling human remains.

"We're leaving," I said, looking from one client to another. "Now. Pack your equipment. We're going back to the pickup."

They stared as though I had proposed abandoning a fortune.

"Have you lost your mind?" Sebastian lowered his camera and stepped closer. "This is exactly what we came for. Physical evidence that our quarry exists."

"It isn't proof. It's a warning. Whatever lives here killed people and arranged their bones around its shelter. You don't hunt something like that. You run from it."

Callum shook his head and reached for his GPS receiver.

"MacRae, mate, we've paid you a considerable sum to guide us to our target. This is closer than anyone has come to documented contact."

"I don't care about the money. I care about getting out alive."

Gideon's laughter had diminished to intermittent bursts, but his grin remained fixed in that agonised stretch. He stared at the femur as though he wanted to tear it from my hands.

Sebastian opened a rugged case and began removing small electronic units. They were motion-triggered trail cameras.

"We're staying," he said with the finality of an order. "We'll establish a camera perimeter and see what approaches during the night."

"You don't understand what you're dealing with."

The words sounded weak even to me. These men had travelled a long way and spent a great deal to reach this place. No warning from a Highland guide would persuade them to turn around now.

I watched Sebastian position the cameras around the clearing, concealing each one and aiming it towards a different approach. The units bleeped softly as he tested their motion sensors and infrared settings.

The sun was sinking. As darkness drew nearer, the silence that had followed us all day seemed to deepen.

Gideon helped with the cameras, although his efforts were erratic and interrupted by bursts of laughter. Every few minutes he stopped to stare either at the scattered bones or at the enormous prints by the water. Each time, his smile widened.

By full dark, his behaviour had become stranger still. He broke into laughter without any apparent cause, the sound travelling over the bog and into the trees. Between outbursts, he muttered to himself in what sounded like no language I had ever heard: harsh, scraping syllables that caught in his throat.

I pitched my tent as far from the others as the clearing allowed. Before settling, I wrapped the femur in a spare dry-bag and placed it beside my sleeping mat as evidence. Gideon watched every movement. Whenever I shifted the bag, his eyes followed it, and he occasionally giggled and nodded as if agreeing with a voice only he could hear.

Sebastian used the satellite messenger to send a scheduled position update reporting our coordinates and the discovery of tracks. Ordinary mobile coverage had vanished hours ago. Callum cleaned his rifle, checked his knife and inspected the rest of his equipment with care, but as the darkness thickened I noticed him glancing more frequently towards the tree line.

Even his confidence appeared to be weakening beneath the absolute silence around camp.

I lay in my sleeping bag listening to the night, or rather to the total absence of it. No owl called. No small animal moved through the branches. Even the insects were silent. The quiet felt less like a lack of sound than a presence in its own right.

Gideon's outbursts broke it like shots. His laughter would begin without warning, rise towards hysteria and stop just as abruptly. Between those fits, I heard the strange words rasping across the clearing.

Sleep seemed impossible. Whenever I began to drift, another burst of laughter dragged me awake. Worse was the pressure of the silence surrounding us.

The scarred pine had been a warning. The tracks and gnawed bones confirmed it. We had entered the territory of something that killed without mercy and left human remains among the evidence of its feeding.

The three clients saw only an opportunity: another prize for their collections, another tale for a dinner table. They could not accept that some things were not quarry.

Gideon's laughter rang over the peat again, longer and less human than before. I drew my sleeping bag tightly around myself and stared through the gap in the canopy at a sky crowded with stars.

His laughter continued for most of the night, breaking the unnatural quiet in bursts that crawled beneath my skin. The dry-bag containing the yellowed femur remained beside me. I knew I would not sleep properly.

The temperature had fallen, though not enough to explain the savage cold that worked its way through my sleeping bag. Callum had stopped moving in his tent hours earlier. I occasionally heard Sebastian shift position, probably as wakeful as I was. Gideon continued muttering those harsh sounds between fits of laughter, his voice carrying across the clearing as though he were speaking to the darkness itself.

I must have dozed sometime after 03:00, because the bleeping of Sebastian's receiver woke me. The sky was grey with the dim light before sunrise.

"Motion alert," Sebastian called, his voice cutting through the predawn silence. "Camera three."

I heard his tent zip open, then his boots crossing the wet sedge towards the equipment. Callum emerged seconds later with his rifle in hand, scanning the tree line with the practised caution of a man accustomed to dangerous country.

Gideon's tent rustled, followed by that dreadful giggle. His laughter had changed during the night. It was sharper now and came more often, erupting in sudden spasms.

I rolled out of my sleeping bag, took up my .308 and checked it quickly. After watching the clients dismiss every warning and ignore every sign, I could not imagine what use a rifle would be against something that had haunted these hills for generations.

Sebastian crouched over the camera receiver, scrolling through an image on its small screen. Blue light washed his face, and even from across the clearing I could see his excitement.

"We've got it," he said, raising the receiver. "The camera captured one frame before the unit went offline."

Callum crossed in quick strides, his boots sucking at the wet peat. Gideon followed, but his movements were erratic, as if he were struggling to control his legs. Giggles escaped him in short bursts and his hands were trembling.

I joined them around the screen, dreading what I would see but unable to turn away.

The image made Mairi's warnings seem mild beside the reality staring back at us.

The creature stood between two pines at the edge of the clearing, caught in the trail camera's infrared illumination. It was roughly 2.7 metres tall and impossibly thin, as though a human form had been stretched until it could scarcely hold together. It was not wholly solid. Parts of its outline appeared to merge with the darkness behind it.

A mottled grey covering clung to a skeletal frame, drawn tightly over bones and joints arranged at subtly impossible angles. Its arms were far too long, hanging below where its knees should have been, and its hands ended in hooked, claw-like fingers. Its face resembled a bare skull. In place of ordinary eyes, two yellow lights pulsed within deep sockets, bright enough to burn through the digital image.

"Beautiful," Gideon whispered, his voice pitched unnaturally high.

His giggling began again, but this time it did not stop. It rose in volume and pitch until he sounded as though he were choking on the laughter.

Sebastian enlarged the image and studied details that made the creature seem more malformed with every second: the elongated limbs, the rearranged joints, the patchy grey surface and the edges of its body dissolving into the trees.

"Camera's dead," Callum said, checking the network status on the receiver. "Whatever did this knew exactly where the unit was concealed."

Gideon doubled over, laughing towards the ground. The sound echoed across the water and returned from the plantation. When he straightened, his face was flushed and his eyes shone with feverish brightness.

"Hunger," he said between fits of giggling. "Endless winter. Always hungry. Never enough. Never enough meat."

The words poured out among fragments of the harsh speech he had muttered through the night. I understood none of those other sounds, but their rhythm was wrong. He did not sound like a man forming sentences. He sounded like someone repeating words whispered into him from the dark.

Sebastian lowered the receiver and took up his rifle. He checked the magazine and worked the straight-pull action with the ease of long practice. The mechanical clack was far too loud in the dead morning.

"This is it," he said. "This is what we came for."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to seize the three of them and drag them back to the pickup by force, but Gideon's behaviour was worsening by the minute. His laughter had risen to a fever pitch, coming in waves that made him stumble as he walked. The words pouring from him came faster now, overlapping with the giggling until I could no longer tell where one sound ended and the other began.

I checked my rifle again, making certain the safety was off and a round was chambered.

Mairi's stories had prepared me, as much as any story could, for the possibility that An t-Acras Geamhraidh - the Winter Hunger - existed. They had not prepared me for what it would feel like to stand in its territory and know it was coming.

The smell reached us first.

It was overwhelming. My eyes watered and my stomach clenched. Rotting meat was the strongest part of it, but beneath that lay the stink of wet animal fur mingled with the sickly sweetness of decay. It was the sort of smell that lodged in the nose and throat and would not leave, making every breath taste of death.

Gideon's laughter became impossibly loud. It rolled across the peat bog and the still water of the lochan, seeming to return from several directions at once. He spun in place with his arms outstretched, as if embracing the grey morning, while those harsh words spilled from him in a language that hurt to hear.

The Winter Hunger emerged from the trees.

It stood roughly 2.7 metres tall, exactly like the figure in the trail-camera image and yet infinitely worse in the flesh. If flesh was what covered it. Its mottled grey surface looked diseased, stretched tight over a skeletal frame that appeared too frail to support its own height. Its face resembled a bare skull. Sickly yellow lights pulsed inside the hollow sockets, and its open mouth revealed rows of yellowed teeth sharpened to points.

Its arms were far too long, hanging below its knees and ending in claw-like hands. Its legs bent at angles no human or animal body should have possessed, as though the joints had been taken apart and rearranged by something that did not understand how living bodies worked.

Sebastian raised his costly straight-pull rifle and fired three rapid shots. I saw the muzzle flashes and watched the spent brass eject into the wet grass. The rounds struck the creature in the centre of its chest, where a heart ought to have been, but passed through without any visible effect.

There was no blood. No impact. No reaction at all.

Gideon charged it at once, still laughing hysterically, his arms pumping as he ran across the uneven peat. The crossbow he had trusted against anything with blood and bone was no more use than Sebastian's rifle. The creature crossed the distance in two elongated strides that bore no resemblance to normal movement. One instant it was beside the trees. The next it was beside Gideon.

Its claws closed around his torso and lifted him clear of the ground.

His laughter became screaming.

The Winter Hunger opened Gideon's chest as easily as someone unfastening a coat. The sound was wet and horribly precise, nothing like the ragged tearing I would have expected from an animal attack.

Blood burst from him in a spray that reached the reeds at the edge of the bog, striping the morning grass with darkness beneath the grey sky. Gideon's screams stopped so suddenly that the silence afterwards struck me like a physical blow.

His body fell into the mud in pieces. His arms lay apart from his torso, and his legs had twisted into impossible positions. Somehow, his face remained intact.

That dreadful smile still stretched across it even after his eyes had gone blank.

I stood as though my boots had rooted themselves in the peat. I could not make sense of what I had seen. The scent of fresh blood mixed with the rotting stench of the creature until my throat tightened and tears streamed from my eyes.

Sebastian kept firing. The rifle cracked across the clearing as he worked its action with practised speed, retreating towards the plantation while swearing in a steady, furious stream.

"Callum!" he shouted between shots, his upper-class composure gone and his voice higher than I had ever heard it. "Get behind the bloody thing! Circle round!"

Callum had already drawn the large hunting knife from his belt. He moved through the tall grass near the water's edge, crouching low and sweeping wide to come at the Winter Hunger from behind.

But the creature was impossibly fast.

One moment it stood over what remained of Gideon. The next it was directly behind Callum, without appearing to cross the ground between them. It had not run. There had been no motion I could follow.

It had simply appeared, and trying to understand the movement made my eyes ache.

Callum spun and drove his knife forwards. The blade should have entered the creature's back and passed through its chest. Instead, it slipped through the mottled grey covering as if through smoke, causing no injury at all.

The Winter Hunger swept its claws across Callum's back. They sliced through his jacket and the flesh beneath it. Blood spread across the torn cloth as he pitched forwards and landed face down in the mud at the bog's edge.

I wanted to move. I wanted to run, shoot or do anything that might help him, but my legs refused to obey. Every instinct demanded that I intervene. Another part of my mind - the part that had listened to Mairi repeating the warnings she had learnt from the crofters and Gaelic tradition-bearers of Assynt - understood that stepping forwards would merely add my body to the others.

The Winter Hunger killed Callum quickly and with dreadful care.

It took his head between both clawed hands and twisted. The crack carried across the water. Callum's body went limp at once, his neck broken.

Sebastian's rifle clicked empty.

The tiny mechanical sound seemed unnaturally loud. His hands shook as he struggled to pull another magazine from his vest, letting the empty one fall into the wet grass.

The Winter Hunger turned towards him with an almost playful air. It drifted slowly across the clearing, taking its time while Sebastian tried to reload. The yellow lights inside its empty sockets brightened as it approached.

Sebastian seated the fresh magazine and worked the rifle. He raised it and fired five quick shots, each one placed well enough to kill any ordinary creature. The bullets passed through the Winter Hunger without resistance, exactly as the others had done.

It stood still and allowed him to shoot it.

When the rifle clicked empty once more, the creature rushed him.

The distance vanished in an instant.

Sebastian turned to run. His immaculate country boots slipped in the mud as he dropped his rifle and sprinted towards the trees. He covered scarcely 6 metres before the Winter Hunger's claws caught him across the back.

I heard his spine break. The wet crack was worse than the sound Callum's neck had made.

Sebastian fell forwards and slid through the soaked grass. His legs no longer worked. For several seconds his arms continued clawing at the ground, trying to drag the useless lower half of his body towards the trees. Then his arms stopped as well.

The Winter Hunger stood over him and looked directly at me.

The yellow lights within its skull fixed upon my face with an intelligence that was recognisably human and completely wrong. It did not regard me as a hungry animal might regard prey. It watched me with the calm awareness of something that knew precisely what it had done and what it meant to do next.

All three clients were dead or dying.

Gideon had been torn apart. Callum's neck had been broken. Sebastian lay paralysed in the wet grass, conscious but unable to move. Their equipment was strewn across the clearing: rifles, rucksacks, cameras, the crossbow, satellite equipment and navigation devices. Not one item had helped them against something that did not obey the ordinary rules of the world.

I stood with my well-used .308 bolt-action stalking rifle in my hands, knowing it would be no more effective than throwing stones.

The creature Mairi had warned me about, the ancient hunger from the wild ground that consumed people, had shown me why the old testimony said it could not be hunted or stopped.

Sebastian's breathing grew shallower. His eyes moved, the only parts of him he could still control, following the Winter Hunger as it surveyed the clearing and what it had done.

The creature seemed pleased by the deaths.

I knew I was next.

I waited for its claws to enter my chest, for those impossible hands to pull me apart as they had Gideon. My rifle hung uselessly at my side while I stared into the hollow sockets and watched their yellow light pulse in the darkness.

The Winter Hunger approached me slowly, just as it had approached Sebastian. It made no sound while crossing the wet grass. Only then did I realise that its feet were not quite touching the ground. It floated rather than walked, drawing closer with the certainty of something that knew I had nowhere to go.

It stopped within arm's reach.

I could have touched its mottled grey covering. At that distance I saw that what I had mistaken for skin was moving and changing, slipping over the shape beneath it like something only partly solid.

Its stench brought fresh tears to my eyes and closed my throat. Rotting meat dominated it, but beneath that was something sharp and unnatural. The hollow sockets remained fixed upon me. Their yellow lights blinked and pulsed, and I understood that they were not eyes.

They were points of hunger that could somehow see.

When the creature spoke, its voice came from all around me. The words did not merely enter through my ears. They forced themselves straight into my mind, making me feel small, helpless and terrified.

"Tell the others never to come back."

The breath accompanying the words made me gag. It carried the stink of putrefaction and death, and beneath that lay a cold from places where sunlight had never reached and nothing had ever grown.

The Winter Hunger studied me with those pulsing lights. I felt as though it were measuring me, deciding whether I was capable of performing the task it had chosen for me. I could not tell whether we stood like that for seconds or for hours. My legs went numb, but I could neither move nor look away.

Then it was gone.

It did not run or retreat. It simply ceased to be there, as if erased from the clearing between one breath and the next.

The weight in the air lifted. Only the morning silence remained, along with the smell of blood sinking into the peat.

I stood frozen, my rifle still half raised, staring at the empty place where it had been. My mind could not contain what had happened.

The creature had spared me.

It had spoken to me.

My legs gave way and I fell heavily into the wet grass beside Gideon's remains. His torn coat was saturated with blood that appeared black in the early light. That hideous smile remained on his face, while his lifeless eyes stared at nothing.

I forced myself to look away and check the others.

Sebastian was still breathing, though only just. His eyes followed me as I knelt beside him, and I saw the question in them. He wanted to know whether I could help.

There was no help I could give.

I had seen enough mountain accidents to recognise catastrophic spinal damage. Whatever the Winter Hunger had done to him had destroyed something vital. Sebastian might live for a few more minutes, perhaps longer, but he was never leaving that clearing under his own power. I could not remain there and watch him die, not with the creature somewhere beyond sight and its command still echoing inside my skull.

My hands shook as I retrieved my rucksack from beside the birches. The GPS receiver clipped to my belt had become my most important possession. Without it I would be lost in the plantation, bog and broken hill ground until I ended like the three clients.

Everything else could remain. Their costly firearms, camera cases, satellite terminal, phones and specialised equipment had all failed when they were needed.

I shoved my sleeping bag into the rucksack, checked my water and food, and made certain the spare dry-bag containing the human femur was still secured as evidence. Then I started back along the route we had followed into the clearing.

The woodland felt altered.

The unnatural quiet remained, but something else now moved beneath it: the certainty that I was being watched. The attention did not feel immediately threatening. It felt supervisory, as though the Winter Hunger were making certain its messenger truly left.

I travelled too quickly across ground that demanded care. Branches snagged my jacket and hidden roots sent me stumbling, but I would not slow down. The route that had seemed clear on our way in now appeared to divide and change. Narrow openings showed themselves between the trees where I remembered none, drawing away towards darker sections of Sitka spruce.

The GPS became essential. I checked it every few minutes, ensuring that I was still moving towards our base camp beside the lochan. The small arrow pointing towards safety was the only thing preventing complete panic.

Hours blurred into Caledonian pine, birch, rowan, dense blocks of Sitka spruce and waist-high wet growth. I stopped only when my body forced me to, leaning against trunks, drinking water and swallowing handfuls of trail mix while my legs trembled.

During one halt I realised that I had been moving for most of the day and had covered barely half the distance to camp. The journey in had taken hours because we had stopped to examine signs and place equipment. The return became a brutal forced march through dense forestry and open peat. I was no longer young, and shock made the loaded rucksack feel heavier with every mile.

Darkness caught me while I was still far from the pickup.

I used my head torch only when necessary, just enough to avoid walking into trunks or plunging into hidden holes. Every faint noise made me stop and listen for footsteps too quiet to belong to anything living, or breathing from a chest too large to imagine.

But the Winter Hunger had delivered its message. It seemed to have no wish to repeat itself.

The forest remained silent except for my own clumsy progress through the undergrowth.

I alternated walking with brief, exhausted rests throughout the night and into the following day. Sometimes I sat against a tree for minutes at a time without knowing whether I had slept. Then the words would sound inside my head again - tell the others never to come back - and I would force myself upright.

I reached base camp about 18 hours after fleeing the killing ground. The light was sinking over the lochan when the tents appeared through the trees.

My ageing pickup stood where we had left it, with the braked equipment trailer still attached. At that moment it looked like the finest thing I had ever seen: solid metal, heated seats, a working radio and an engine that belonged to the ordinary world.

My hands shook so violently that it took four attempts to put the key into the ignition.

When the engine started, the familiar sound was so normal and safe that I nearly broke down in the driver's seat.

The journey back towards Inverness came in fragments. I followed the abandoned hydro access track to the estate road, then the rough forestry tracks and single-track roads towards Ullapool. At petrol stations and service areas I bought coffee I could not taste and sandwiches I could not eat. I sat in car parks staring at myself in the mirrors and saw a man who appeared to have aged ten years in two days.

Once mobile reception returned outside Ullapool, I took out my phone and began dialling 999. My thumb hovered over the final digit while panic tightened my chest. I could not imagine what I would say if the control-room operator answered.

How could I explain that three clients were dead because they had found exactly what they had gone looking for? How could I tell Police Scotland that bullets, a knife and a crossbow had passed harmlessly through a creature preserved in warnings that respectable people regarded as folklore?

I ended the call before it connected, went inside the petrol station and bought another coffee I never drank.

Then I returned to the pickup and continued towards a conversation I was not ready to have with people who would never believe me.

The A-roads ran through hills and woodland that looked safe beneath my headlamps, but I knew better. Somewhere beyond Assynt, in that nameless tract of peat, lochans and dark plantation, a thing made of endless hunger waited for the next people arrogant enough to hunt the impossible.

I was the only person left to deliver its warning.

I parked outside Burnett Road Police Station in Inverness at 03:00 and remained in the pickup for twenty minutes, trying to decide how to begin. The building looked solid and bureaucratic beneath the car park lights, the sort of place equipped to deal with assaults, drink-driving and domestic disturbances, not creatures that should not exist.

My hands still shook when I reached for the door. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw Gideon's chest opening and heard the wet crack of Callum's neck.

The smell of rotten meat seemed to cling to me despite changing my shirt twice during the drive.

Police Sergeant Iain Brodie looked up as I entered through the glass doors. His practised gaze took in my mud-stained jacket, exhausted face and hollow expression. I must have resembled a drunk, or someone emerging from a three-day binge.

"Can I help you?"

"I need to report three deaths. Two Englishmen and an Australian." My voice sounded flat and mechanical, as though I were reading prepared words. "I was their guide."

Brodie's expression sharpened. He picked up a pen, opened an incident form and indicated a plastic chair beside the desk.

"Names?"

"Sebastian Harcourt. Gideon Vale. Callum Fraser."

I spelt each name while he wrote in careful block capitals.

"They're dead," I said.

"Killed by what?"

The answer lodged in my throat.

"An animal attack. Something on a remote estate beyond Assynt."

His questions came steadily. When had it happened? Where exactly? What sort of animal? Had I witnessed the attack? How had I escaped? Why had I not recovered the bodies?

I answered as honestly as I could without naming the Winter Hunger. I described an unidentified predator of unprecedented size, moving too quickly for me to see clearly. I said it had killed the three men before I could react. I had run when the opportunity came and walked back through the night.

Police Sergeant Brodie contacted CID. Detective Sergeant Morag Sutherland arrived looking like someone had dragged her from bed, though the tiredness did not soften her attention.

DS Sutherland asked the same questions again. She recorded my answers in a notebook while studying my face for signs of deception.

"You said you were their licensed guide," she said. "What were they hunting?"

I had rehearsed my response during the drive, but it still sounded feeble.

"They were investigating unusual signs and recurring disappearances. They said it was research. They had cameras, GPS equipment and old estate records."

Sutherland raised an eyebrow. "What sort of researchers carry stalking rifles and a crossbow?"

"They wanted to be prepared. They said they were documenting the behaviour of an unknown large predator in remote country."

"And you believed that?"

I met her gaze and nodded.

She wrote something else in her notebook, probably a note explaining that my account had collapsed under the first obvious question.

They kept me in an interview room for six hours, returning to the same details while different officers tried variations of the same questions. Where had we camped? What were the precise coordinates? Could I draw our route on a map? Had there been arguments? Did any of the men have enemies? Were there disputes over money?

By the time they allowed me to leave, I understood that Sutherland and the others believed I had either killed the three clients or led them into lethal danger through gross professional negligence.

Their sympathetic tone was the one people used for someone plainly disturbed who had not yet given them enough grounds for arrest.

"We'll send officers and Mountain Rescue to the coordinates you've provided," Sutherland said as she escorted me towards the exit. "If we find anything, we'll contact you."

The search began two days later. Police Scotland worked with volunteer Mountain Rescue teams, search dogs and a Coastguard helicopter.

I followed the news from my cramped one-bedroom flat in Merkinch, watching aerial footage of the remote lochan and interviews with Mountain Rescue team leader Alasdair Gunn. He stood before the cameras and explained that teams were searching the surrounding forestry, peat bogs, burns and ridges.

They found our abandoned base camp exactly where I had said it would be. The expensive tents remained standing. The clients' belongings lay around the site: sleeping bags, cooking equipment, rugged camera cases, the compact petrol generator, battery bank, satellite terminal and other equipment worth many thousands of pounds. It was more property than any sensible criminal would have abandoned.

But the searchers found no bodies.

There was nothing at the coordinates I had supplied for the reed-fringed bog, and nothing across a radius of roughly 16 kilometres around the camp. The shelter made from human bones had vanished. So had the femur I had wrapped in the dry-bag and left at base camp when I drove away. The enormous humanlike tracks were gone.

The scarred tree had disappeared as evidence as well. Searchers found only ordinary bark, untouched and unmarked. The trail cameras and any images they might have contained were never recovered.

Sutherland called me back to the station after the search ended.

This time her questions concerned my mental state. Had I consumed alcohol or taken drugs during the expedition? Had I experienced hallucinations? Memory problems? Periods of lost time?

"Look, Euan," she said after an hour of careful enquiries into my psychological health, "we found blood evidence at a location roughly matching your description. There were dark stains on vegetation which may be human. But without bodies, reliable images or another witness, this remains a missing-person inquiry."

"What about their families?"

Her expression hardened.

"Their families are asking questions we can't answer. Three wealthy men with no recorded history of serious mental illness disappear in remote Highland country, and you're the only surviving witness. You say they were killed by an unidentified animal, but we've found no bodies and no trace of the animal you described."

I sat staring at my hands while she explained that the inquiry would remain open. The three clients were officially missing, not confirmed dead. I was recorded as the sole witness to an alleged animal attack that could neither be verified nor disproved.

The families employed private investigators within a week. Men and women in costly suits arrived with different questions and less patience. They had been hired to find somebody responsible, and they examined every part of my life accordingly.

They investigated my finances, my work as a guide and the condition of Calder and Brae Outdoor Supplies. They spoke to former clients and inspected my business records for evidence of recklessness or criminal behaviour. They found the overdue loans, the equipment finance and a business close to failure. They established that I had needed money badly enough to take three strangers into restricted country without a proper support plan.

Their report portrayed me as an unstable guide who had probably panicked during a genuine animal attack and abandoned his clients to save himself. It suggested that I had invented details of the deaths to conceal my cowardice and professional negligence.

The families instructed Scottish solicitors and pursued a civil negligence claim. They also pressed insurers, Police Scotland and prosecutors for action.

No single authority formally ended my career. They did it together.

Police retained my firearms during the inquiry, including my licensed .308 stalking rifle. The estate withdrew my commercial access permission. My professional guiding accreditation was suspended, and without it no insurer would provide the liability cover required by my booking agency. The accusations spread through the small Highland outdoor community, and the remaining clients disappeared.

Calder and Brae Outdoor Supplies failed soon afterwards.

Meanwhile, insurers delayed the families' presumed-death claims while the investigation continued. Without bodies or conclusive evidence, the relatives remained trapped in legal uncertainty. Any declaration of presumed death would have to proceed under Scottish law, and none of it would happen quickly.

I sold the pickup and most of my remaining equipment to pay solicitors who could do little beyond explain the position. The safeguards meant to protect guides from groundless claims were not built for a case in which three wealthy clients vanished and the only survivor told an evasive story about an unidentified predator.

Without guiding income or the shop, I could no longer afford anything better than the cramped Merkinch flat. Its walls were thin. Neighbours played music too loudly and argued about money late into the night.

A builders' merchant on Harbour Road hired me part-time to work in the warehouse, loading delivery vans and sorting stock. The pay was poor and the job required little contact with customers, which suited me. I could not manage conversations about stalking, hillwalking or outdoor equipment without my hands beginning to tremble.

Sleep became something I feared.

Every night brought the same images: Gideon's chest opening, Callum's head twisting, Sebastian paralysed in the wet grass.

The sounds were worse than the pictures. The precise wet tearing of claws through flesh. The crack of broken vertebrae. Gideon's mad laughter mingled with words no human throat should have been capable of making.

I tried over-the-counter sleep aids from a chemist, but they only postponed the nightmares until morning. I would wake on the sofa at midday, confused and drenched in sweat, after dreaming of hollow sockets filled with yellow light watching from the foot of my bed.

Six months passed before I stopped checking The Press and Journal and the small Highland weekly newspapers for reports of missing walkers or unexplained deaths beyond Assynt.

Part of me hoped another guide would encounter the Winter Hunger and survive, because then someone might confirm my account. A greater part of me hoped nobody else would be foolish enough to search for a thing that every warning said should be left alone.

I worked my shifts at the builders' merchant, stacking tools and supplies that reminded me of all I had lost. Displays of compasses tightened my stomach. Ordnance Survey maps brought back the sight of Sebastian, Gideon and Callum studying routes and coordinates, convinced that wealth and technology could solve any problem.

Customers sometimes discovered that I had been a wilderness guide and asked about remote camps or difficult Highland routes. I learnt to divert those conversations quickly, suggesting another outfitter or directing them to the local VisitScotland iCentre.

DS Morag Sutherland came into the builders' merchant one afternoon in late autumn. She pretended to be buying screws for a repair at home, but she was really checking how I was managing. She asked casual questions about my adjustment to ordinary work, and whether I had suffered further episodes, hallucinations or memory loss.

"The case is still open," she said while I put her purchase through the till. "Sometimes remains appear years later, especially in country like that. Animals scatter them. Weather shifts things. You never know."

I gave her the receipt and nodded, but we both knew those bodies would not be found.

Whatever the Winter Hunger had done, it had erased the dead and almost every trace of itself more completely than any natural process could explain.

That night I dreamt of hollow sockets filled with pulsing yellow light.

The Winter Hunger stood at the foot of my bed. Its tall, skeletal shape was not wholly solid, and its arms hung below its rearranged knees. When it spoke, its voice sounded dry and rustling, like winter wind moving through dead grass.

"Tell the others never to come back."

I woke knowing that somewhere beyond Assynt, among the pines, peat and black water, the creature was still waiting.

It was waiting for the next hunters who believed they could kill death itself, and my warning - even if anyone chose to believe it - would never be enough to stop them.