He quickly found even the isolation of the settlement wasn’t enough. The words ‘neighbour’ and ‘community’, bandied about everywhere, sickened him. He found a piece of land miles to the north, more isolated, on which to subsist and raise his daughter. The years passed. In time of course, with the onset of spring, single men came sniffing around. Whenever he caught one he’d kill it and hang it from the barbed wire fence as a deterrent to others. 

Every Sunday, instead of church, in the late afternoon, he would walk his daughter along the side of the fence and show her the objects fastened there in various states of decay, thinned at times by predation from a lone wolf whose smell his daughter was instinctively alert to. As they followed the fence’s course their dramatically defined shadows flowed out in front of them across the uneven shallow dirt – and with the blackthorn walking staff he’d carved at nights while sitting bolt upright on a hard wooden chair as his daughter slept curled into herself as he guarded her – he would wack the pieces of flesh and bone dangling from the wire with such force that clouds of flies flew up into the air and a sickly cloying smell was released so that he clamped his hands over his nose and mouth while his daughter leant against him unaffected.  

His daughter, brought up to this life, never asked any questions. This was all she knew. This was simply the way things were. Her father had delivered her and they’d lived alone together. She’d never seen her mother, who’d died giving birth to her. Her father burnt her mother’s body while it was still warm then dug the remains as deep into the ground as he could.

He was a good father, not unaware of his duties. He would be dead one day and his daughter couldn’t exist here on her own. Eventually she would need a mate, and to breed from him. Then would be the time to build the second wolf trap.