even though most of them had forgotten it, if ever they had remembered it at all, since they only came at night. He wondered how the wind tasted, if the wind tasted like a salt ocean; and yet he supposed it probably didn't, not really. He could smell water here and there in his mind, the way things must smell when they were first drowned in water, he supposed. He thought of fish in dirty streams, and of wet dog smells. There was a sharpness to the air now, cutting against the wind, and it was the smell of burning. He put his hand to his mouth, but thought better of it, and lay still instead. A few feet from him, half buried in a drift, he saw a charred log. Just as the fire was dying down he saw something else, that had been hidden under the snow—a stone. It was a smooth white stone, about a fist's length long, with straight edges and an unbroken curve. He could not read the markings, but he saw the shape of it at a glance. It was very cold in his mind. The feeling was quite different from when the fire was burning; but he wondered, could the cold come from the stone as well? Or from the stone and the cold? He did not know. He thought, for a moment, of cutting it into pieces and going to tell his father about it, but there seemed to be no point in doing so. He lay on his stomach and began scraping away at the snow, the top layer of which was freezing and sticking to his clothes. Once he had a good six or eight inches of the log uncovered he reached out with both hands and lifted it up. It was covered in snow on the bottom. He tried to lift it, but it was too heavy; then he tried to drag it to him. When he had shifted it to a more accessible place, he lay down again and put the stone between his knees. He dug into the snow again, and dug as hard as he could. When he stood up again, he looked to where the stone had been, and saw what he had not seen before. There were white footprints, not many but some, that were quite big. The prints made him think of his mother and he wondered whether she had come up in the night and left him a message. He reached out to touch one of the prints, but did not feel that his fingers were reaching through time and space. He leaned down again, and lifted up the white rock, and wondered whether he ought to put it back where it had been before. Then he went to the log again. He was very tired, now, and very cold. When he saw the snow, again, sliding down his own arm, he saw something more—a black spot on the white snow. It was a large black spot, like a pool of water, but he could see it from where he was. The spot was on a little low rise, and not too far from the base of the stone. He worked at the snow until he was clear of it again, and then he turned around. There was a woman, just across the rise and a few feet away, leaning over the dead fire. She wore a brown dress and a scarf wound around her head. When she lifted her head, he saw her white hair caught in the scarf. She did not speak, but she held out her arms to him. He walked, shivering a little, up the rise and towards her. She stepped back, out of the circle of heat from the fire, and he took her in his arms. The fire was growing, growing up from the hearth. It was as if he were walking in a circle. The fire came up to his waist as he sat on the stones. It grew beyond his head, and then rose higher. He saw a blue sky, and a blue band of water that seemed to go on forever. The stones were beneath him, and the ground was cold and hard. The sky turned grey, and the waters grew still. The fire was dying now, as if it were a thing of some size, like a house. All the rest were black stones and bare earth. He could not imagine a fire that would not die. He did not know why he was remembering this, and he looked around him at the stones as if he might be able to find the answer somewhere. There were no words, there was nothing but whiteness and water and the dead fires. The water grew still, and then it began to retreat, and it was black and muddy and fast, and then he could see what he had not been able to see before—what the white stones were. They were bones, tangled in the black mud. They had been human bones, with the meat rotted off and the muscles scattered, and he had mistaken them for stones. Now he understood why the earth was so cold. He looked towards the sea, and saw the shore again, beyond the line of dead trees. There was another fire, with his father beside it. It was larger than the other fires, and he thought it must have been lit to bring them back from the dead. He could see the fires' ashes and the blackened stones. But there was the fire, too, and his father was sitting there and there was the stone. He could see his father lifting his hand, but he did not see his hand. Now his father was bending down to bring out a piece of the wood, and he began to cry, for he did not see his father doing so. He cried out, and the sound of it did not fill him. He looked at the wood, the smoke swirling up from it, and the blue water beside it. The water was growing still, for a moment, and then it began to move again, back and forth, back and forth. He remembered that there was no pain, as the blue waves came back and forth. He could not understand how they had come so far away from home. He thought he must have gone back, and brought the others, too, for he did not see them here with him now. The shore was dark and cold. His father had his hand in the water and he was lifting something out of it. It seemed very small, as if it could have been a child's face or a doll. But it was a head, and a pair of arms and legs, and it was growing larger. The body grew bigger and bigger. It grew so large that it was no longer in the water. It looked up at him as he watched it, but he looked past it, to where it had been, and there were no bones. He heard a sound of shouting. His father was running away down the shore, and he could hear the sound of the trees as they were falling, as he went off into the darkness. It was the sound of stone falling from the sky. The sky grew black, and the black water was turning white. There were thousands of dead fires in the snow, and his father was out there somewhere. He could hear his father crying out. He could hear his mother crying out. The stones were flying from the sky. They were cutting through the stones to see what was inside. They flew through the air and crashed into the ground. They began to fall like rain. His father was on the ground, and he could see him better now, for he was clear of the fire, which had grown even bigger and blacker. His father tried to move towards it. He could not get up. They were all out of the stones now, and the stones were falling faster. There was nothing but water on the ground, and the fire was going out and it was black and it was cold. It was a dark wall of stones, and his father was not there. The stones were falling like rain. He could hear his father still calling out. He tried to run back to him but his feet would not move. The stones were falling like rain. They made a sound like the noise of water running. The black stones smashed him against the rocks. He could not see his mother now, but she was back there, under a stone. It was white with white fire and so cold. He walked to the place where he had left her, but he did not find her. He found that he could not see her anywhere, and he ran after the stone. The others were already looking for their own. He could not see them, either, for he could not go back and look for them. He ran after his mother and his father. There were others there, too. They were all chasing after the stones. The stones were flying through the air. They were falling like rain. They saw the people falling, the way a rock falls when it is pulled off a cliff. He knew that he would see the people falling. He did not want to see the people fall, but there was no place that he could go back to. There was nothing to do but watch as the stones fell from the sky. The stone that fell beside him broke into pieces and his mother screamed as it cut into her. His father fell down as the stone split his father in half, and then split him again, and again and again and again, until there was nothing left but rocks and rocks and rocks, as if there had been no people there at all. He saw the birds flying up in the