index

The Maghreb was exactly as Claire had been led to expect. She was picked up at the airport by Hein, a solemn Dutch WWF official, who drove her to a concrete bungalow in the desert. The three rooms contained one bed, one table and one shower. A small portable fridge and three saucepans completed the kitchen equipment, and Hein unloaded a box of crockery and cutlery from the back of his Land Rover.
‘When you leave, pack it up and bring it with you – the saucepans too. I’m surprised they are still here,’ he said.
She was given coffee, flour, rice and sugar, tinned beans and canisters of tinned margarine.
‘No meat?’ She was testing the space, such a small place to call home, and yet she knew when he’d gone she would find it empty.
‘Don’t worry – they will be here soon to sell you meat and cloth, cushions, silver jewellery, and drugs.’ He tipped his head to one side. ‘Don’t buy drugs. They will be police officers trying to trap you. If you need ...’
She waved a hand to cut him off.
‘Will you be okay on your own?’
She wondered what would happen if she said no. Would they take her back to the airport and send her home? She couldn’t tell if Hein was Project or not.
‘I’ll be fine. Just fine. Anyway, it’s only for three days, isn’t it? Until somebody comes to check on me, I mean.’
He nodded again, looking around the bare concrete shell as though it was something rare and strange. ‘Three days and Tiljad will visit. We work with the Berbers here because they’ve got a better handle on migratory species than Moroccan Arabs.’
‘And he calls by twice a week?’
‘Yes. He brings letters and food from town to everybody working out here. Five organisations pay his wages: us, FAO, Save the Maghreb, Planetary Tree and Lynx Trust. So he knows everything and everyone and he’s pretty trustworthy.’
‘Only ‘pretty’ trustworthy?’
Hein gave her a long look. ‘There are problems. Not just political. You have to understand – if you sleep with a native here, they will lose all respect for you. It seems unfair to women. It is. But that is how it works.’
She nodded. ‘So he’ll offer to keep me company at night and if I say yes, he’ll exploit me – is that it?’
‘Yes,’ his relief was palpable, he relaxed, his face falling into softer lines. ‘I never know what to say to women who come here to do fieldwork. You know, I’ve been here nearly fifteen years. Things change – here they have changed a lot. The Muslim world is hard to deal with, but the battle here is complicated. Moroccan people and Berbers are both supposed to be Muslim – but the Arabic speakers have carried out Jihad against the Berbers in the past. This is a chaotic time; all outsiders must step carefully, but especially women.’
Claire began to put the food on the narrow shelves that were high on the wall to evade ants and termites. She turned her back on Hein so he wouldn’t be able to read her expression. This was a test – a Project test. She was being assessed and it felt good to know that she was about to be measured.
He continued, ‘There’s another woman out here. Maggie Grieve; a veterinarian. She specialises in ungulates – she’ll be over to see you soon enough. People drop in all the time, believe it or not, even though you’ve been placed out here to try and get data that isn’t influenced by human impact. But you know all this.’
She nodded, still with her back to him. She wanted to own this space, make it her home, and she couldn’t do that until he left.
He hefted the bag he was holding. ‘In the shed behind the kitchen there’s a generator that Tiljad takes care of. You can plug in your computer, but there is no internet. Here is your radio, because there is no telephone. I’ll show you how to use it. Tiljad will bring you a cell phone if you ask; this thing is only for emergencies. He slapped the radio casing. ‘It’s not so friendly.’
She wondered what that meant; desert raves, hash parties or perhaps just people wanting to talk without half Morocco listening in. They practised with the radiophone for ten minutes. He drove away and she stood in the cement cell, feeling the heat reaching for her from the desert. She was beginning her training at last.

Hein had been right about visitors. Tiljad arrived with a mobile phone and a handful of prepaid phone cards as if he’d known she’d want them. He showed her the workings of the generator and how to check the level in the water tank. He spoke Arabic, Berber, French and English, making her feel inadequate and parochial.
‘Where is your Jeep?’
‘My Jeep?’
‘Bird Land Jeep. Where is it?’
‘I don’t know. Nobody mentioned it to me.’ Apart from her tickets and visa, and her folder on bird recognition, she’d been told almost nothing; all Ansel had said was that she needed to break her ties with England, distance herself from her old friends - and that wasn’t any hardship.
Day after day she came back from her desert hide; an overturned canvas pot that boiled her alive, to find some stranger sitting on her step, drinking her beer. If they were European they brought their own beer too – blood-warm bottles of froth that they stacked in her fridge to replace the chilled ones they’d drunk. Arabs came empty-handed but sent gifts later: goat meat, cheese, and for her, because she refused alcohol, cans of soft drink scented with melon and tasting of sugar and plastic. It was a strange peripatetic party that was carried on by Jeep and Land Rover, bodies in motion across the desert, transmitting gossip via bumpy journeys that made beer fizz and heads ache. She’d thought that without a vehicle she would be stranded, a Crusoe in a sea of sand, but at least every other night she was invited into some Jeep to go and meet somebody who was doing something somewhere else. Travel seemed to be its own purpose, as though you could catch nomadic behaviour from the landscape.
In that first fortnight she watched the stars from a swaying seat as the driver cursed ruts and rocks. Often they were heading for a film crew, some or other epic being shot in the desert and requiring a night scene. Ouarzazate was a popular location for thrillers and spy movies, and Hein seemed to have a radar for the nights they were out, or maybe he owned some piece of equipment that tracked their huge trailers and cameras as they rolled slowly through the desert. Night shooting meant catering and that meant roast meats, more beer, a crowd of Berber onlookers who were so used to being recruited as extras they came with their own camels, guns, and knives. Often the camels were decanted from lorries – you didn’t ride a racing camel to a shoot and expect it to perform well. She got used to standing in the cold, because the desert chilled as soon as the sun left, clutching a greasy tinfoil package of lamb and beans to her chest and eating with her fingers, watching a villain or a hero bouncing around in some 4 x 4 while Berbers curvetted around on camels and yelled threats, waving old rifles that they fired into the air one-handed.
She had too her gun. She had thought transporting a weapon to Morocco would be difficult, but it wasn’t. The gun had been offered for sale through the Rifle Association and a copy of their newsletter, with it highlighted, had been posted to her anonymously, along with eight one hundred pound notes. She’d rung the owner straight away. Her club had signed one set of forms, her local police sergeant another, and she’d been shown how to lock her gun in a box, her ammunition to be stored safely separate. The rifle was beautiful. A walnut-stocked Browning Micra with A bolt action, scaled for ‘smaller hunters’ it said in the literature. She could have carried it every day of her life without tiring, and it slid into her shoulder like a small child needing a cuddle.
She met Maggie over a spitted lamb. The film crew were on a break, slicing the roast; handing out polystyrene boxes of the rich meat topped with sauce and a dollop of couscous, when a bellowing horde of camels whirled into the film site. Wild ululations filled the air with strident terror and the film camels began to kick and wheeze, pulling at their tethers. The crew ran for cameras that had been left in position for the next shot, hauling dollies back by hand and screaming insults at the arrivals as dust filled the scene.
Hein was juggling a can of beer and three lamb boxes, dumped in his arms by panicking camera operators. He squinted into the dust, blown gold in the lights. ‘Maggie,’ he said.
Claire was prepared to dislike her even before she picked out the large blondeness of her, like a heifer among greyhounds. The woman slid from her camel and made for the fire, surrounded by the wiry Berbers.
‘Maggie Grieve,’ she held out her hand and Claire shook, trying to set aside her immediate prejudice. The other woman’s grip was strong, unnecessarily so. As Claire felt her knuckles grate under the pressure she allowed her hand to become limp. She locked out her shoulder, then elbow, then wrist, transferring power down her arm until she snapped it through her hand, flexing the first knuckles apart in stepping motion, spreading the width of her hand so that more of Maggie’s palm was against hers. Then she transferred the force into her grip, powering the compression until Maggie winced.
‘Claire Benson.’
Hein moved forward, trying to hand them both meat boxes, defusing the situation.
‘You’ve upset them again, Maggie.’
She nodded, scooping meat into her mouth. When she spoke her voice was ripe with Middle England, private school inflections overlaid with some unidentifiable twang. ‘So what? They hire clapped-out camels and treat them like shit. Shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. Now they’ve seen how well healthy animals can perform, they might pay decent rates for a change.’
She turned, checking for something in the dark desert. Claire couldn’t pick out what she was focused on. She swung back, ‘You’re the bird woman, right?’
‘Only temporarily. I’m a geographer ...’
‘Yeah, right. The guy you took over from’s gone home to try and fix his marriage. You single?’
Claire nodded.
‘Me too. Stupid to try and do this kind of work and keep a relationship together. You ringing ‘em?’
‘Just tallying,’ Claire wondered if Maggie usually spoke like this.
‘Good. Tell you what, come with me next Thursday, we’re doing a roundup – need all the bodies we can get. You too,’ she waved her box at Hein.
‘I don’t think so, Maggie; last time half-killed me. I’m simply a bureaucrat after all, not a ...’ His words trailed away, Claire listened, fascinated, wanting to know what he could possibly call this woman who seemed incapable of normal behaviour. Instead he smiled and gestured towards the camels.
Maggie turned back to Claire. ‘You bottling out as well?’
Claire shook her head.
‘Good. Then you’ll learn something. You’ll have to take a day off bloody bird counting though – we leave an hour after dawn. Tell Tiljad to bring you.’ She headed for her camel, handing the box of food to one of the crew before she mounted it. The Berbers followed, tipping back their heads to finish soft drinks and spitting until the clay around the camels was dark and wet.
‘Jesus,’ Claire breathed, amazed at their arrogance.
Hein folded closed the lid of his box and dropped it into the fire where it flamed green and stank like a chemical spill. ‘Like Lawrence of Arabia,’ he said. ‘She gets results – the Berbers respect her, but yes, Jesus, she is hard to bear.’
Claire watched the dark sockets of his eyes, moving like weed in the firelight. It must be painful to be out-toughed by a woman, especially in the desert. A lesson to be learnt here. Men were fragile, and in harsh environments it would be a good idea to give them scope to feel good about themselves. She tucked the thought away, smiled at Hein. ‘So what can I expect on Thursday?’
‘Oh, she knows everything about ungulates. If you want to understand anything with hooves, she’s the expert. Expect to be impressed.’ His face flickered. ‘And in pain,’ he added.
Claire nodded, turning back to observe the film crew. She intended to ensure that pain was not an issue. Maggie wouldn’t find her easy to impress either.

The next morning, in the false dawn, she walked down to the hide, a thermos of water at her side, rifle over her shoulder, flat bread in her free hand. Once she was settled in the hide there would be half an hour of dark, during which she chewed the bread and swallowed water, waking slowly, as though she’d walked in her sleep. The birds came in two big waves; dawn and dusk, to sip and scratch at the rocky trough of a spring that rose in the desert some thirty miles from Ouarzazate. The water was undrinkable – she’d dipped her fingers in it to see what it was like, and it smelt of salt and dank skin, like a frog. It was ripe with mineral salts, but the birds still sought it out.
As the light arrived she counted them in, using the blue clicker for non-predators and the red clicker for hawks and wondered how difficult it would be to shoot birds on the wing. Not that she wanted to; she hadn’t aimed at a living target since that first symbolic shoot with Eleanor, but as a theoretical exercise she’d developed a fascination with the movement of the birds, their different styles of flight. She saw deeper into them as a potential hunter than she ever had as an observer, she realised.
At around eight she went back to the hut, sleeping through the heat of the day and waking at two and returning to the hide, spending the afternoon and early evening watching the creatures around the waterhole until the small birds came back - or maybe a different group swept through, she couldn’t tell as none were ringed - to paddle in the seep of moisture as the sun crept away.
The predatory birds arrived more variously. A pair of Montagu’s Harriers came over around half an hour after dawn, while Buzzards swept over throughout the day, and she had twice seen a Pharoah’s Eagle Owl - a juvenile bird she was pretty sure - squatting in the rock cover at dusk. The warblers and larks spotted it too, and both times it left hungry. She saw the Harriers preying on small rodents in the broken rocks and once a buzzard took a Little Swift right off the water margin in front of her eyes. One moment there had been a black and white form, neat and compact against the beige stones and then a blur, like a handful of cinnamon thrown down - and the thump. She heard the noise, a fist-sized sound, but her mind told her that she heard it after the hawk had lifted away, the black and white corpse twisted in its grip. The illusion persisted no matter how often the reviewed the moment. The sound had lagged after the death, happening once the strike was over and both birds were back in the air – one dead, the other triumphant.
She found that smells were different in the desert. The action of heat on stone changed their nature and their action; there was no vegetation to capture them, so every odour was a column reaching into the air, heated to stretch rather than spread, and because evaporation was almost instantaneous there were none of the normal smells of humanity. Fires burnt up into the sky carrying nothing but shimmering power. Sweat fled the body and left nothing but its mineral smell because bacteria were annihilated by the arid heat. At night the desert threw back heat to the sky and while the stars blazed so close Claire sometimes felt they would crash into each other, any trace of odour was jettisoned with the day’s warmth, so that the desert was as crisp and scentless as a frost.
Water could be smelt, when you were almost on top of it. The scent of it stood in the air like an invisible wall – when a camel hit the smell of water it turned as though it had mashed its nose on brick and walked along the odour until the source was found. She learnt this from Maggie.

		The Small Press Review
		A magazine devoted to the English language small presses.


		Gatekeeper Kay Sexton kay@charybdis.freeserve.co.uk
		In Gatekeeper, a young woman faces the challenges of balancing her personal life and her belief in environmental activism when a wolf pack is covertly released in the Scottish Highlands. The novel has been about two years in the writing, although I had the first idea many years before that. As a charity Chief Executive I struggled to think of ways to motivate the general public to change their behaviour towards the environment and the novel was born from that frustration. My knowledge of Animal Rights activism, gained through years working alongside both the big beasts, like WWF, and the fringe, like the Animal Liberation Front, gave me unparalleled insight into what makes young people take the path of extremism and I’ve travelled around the UK and Europe, meeting wolves in a variety of forms of captivity and spent many hours in pubs listening to people planning (but very rarely carrying out) extremist acts to get the background for this story.
		The Maghreb was exactly as Claire had been led to expect. She was picked up at the airport by Hein, a solemn Dutch WWF official, who drove her to a concrete bungalow in the desert. The three rooms contained one bed, one table and one shower. A small portable fridge and three saucepans completed the kitchen equipment, and Hein unloaded a box of crockery and cutlery from the back of his Land Rover. ‘When you leave, pack it up and bring it with you – the saucepans too. I’m surprised they are still here,’ he said. She was given coffee, flour, rice and sugar, tinned beans and canisters of tinned margarine. ‘No meat?’ She was testing the space, such a small place to call home, and yet she knew when he’d gone she would find it empty. ‘Don’t worry – they will be here soon to sell you meat and cloth, cushions, silver jewellery, and drugs.’ He tipped his head to one side. ‘Don’t buy drugs. They will be police officers trying to trap you. If you need ...’ She waved a hand to cut him off. ‘Will you be okay on your own?’ She wondered what would happen if she said no. Would they take her back to the airport and send her home? She couldn’t tell if Hein was Project or not. ‘I’ll be fine. Just fine. Anyway, it’s only for three days, isn’t it? Until somebody comes to check on me, I mean.’ He nodded again, looking around the bare concrete shell as though it was something rare and strange. ‘Three days and Tiljad will visit. We work with the Berbers here because they’ve got a better handle on migratory species than Moroccan Arabs.’ ‘And he calls by twice a week?’ ‘Yes. He brings letters and food from town to everybody working out here. Five organisations pay his wages: us, FAO, Save the Maghreb, Planetary Tree and Lynx Trust. So he knows everything and everyone and he’s pretty trustworthy.’ ‘Only ‘pretty’ trustworthy?’ Hein gave her a long look. ‘There are problems. Not just political. You have to understand – if you sleep with a native here, they will lose all respect for you. It seems unfair to women. It is. But that is how it works.’ She nodded. ‘So he’ll offer to keep me company at night and if I say yes, he’ll exploit me – is that it?’ ‘Yes,’ his relief was palpable, he relaxed, his face falling into softer lines. ‘I never know what to say to women who come here to do fieldwork. You know, I’ve been here nearly fifteen years. Things change – here they have changed a lot. The Muslim world is hard to deal with, but the battle here is complicated. Moroccan people and Berbers are both supposed to be Muslim – but the Arabic speakers have carried out Jihad against the Berbers in the past. This is a chaotic time; all outsiders must step carefully, but especially women.’ Claire began to put the food on the narrow shelves that were high on the wall to evade ants and termites. She turned her back on Hein so he wouldn’t be able to read her expression. This was a test – a Project test. She was being assessed and it felt good to know that she was about to be measured. He continued, ‘There’s another woman out here. Maggie Grieve; a veterinarian. She specialises in ungulates – she’ll be over to see you soon enough. People drop in all the time, believe it or not, even though you’ve been placed out here to try and get data that isn’t influenced by human impact. But you know all this.’ She nodded, still with her back to him. She wanted to own this space, make it her home, and she couldn’t do that until he left. He hefted the bag he was holding. ‘In the shed behind the kitchen there’s a generator that Tiljad takes care of. You can plug in your computer, but there is no internet. Here is your radio, because there is no telephone. I’ll show you how to use it. Tiljad will bring you a cell phone if you ask; this thing is only for emergencies. He slapped the radio casing. ‘It’s not so friendly.’ She wondered what that meant; desert raves, hash parties or perhaps just people wanting to talk without half Morocco listening in. They practised with the radiophone for ten minutes. He drove away and she stood in the cement cell, feeling the heat reaching for her from the desert. She was beginning her training at last. Hein had been right about visitors. Tiljad arrived with a mobile phone and a handful of prepaid phone cards as if he’d known she’d want them. He showed her the workings of the generator and how to check the level in the water tank. He spoke Arabic, Berber, French and English, making her feel inadequate and parochial. ‘Where is your Jeep?’ ‘My Jeep?’ ‘Bird Land Jeep. Where is it?’ ‘I don’t know. Nobody mentioned it to me.’ Apart from her tickets and visa, and her folder on bird recognition, she’d been told almost nothing; all Ansel had said was that she needed to break her ties with England, distance herself from her old friends - and that wasn’t any hardship. Day after day she came back from her desert hide; an overturned canvas pot that boiled her alive, to find some stranger sitting on her step, drinking her beer. If they were European they brought their own beer too – blood-warm bottles of froth that they stacked in her fridge to replace the chilled ones they’d drunk. Arabs came empty-handed but sent gifts later: goat meat, cheese, and for her, because she refused alcohol, cans of soft drink scented with melon and tasting of sugar and plastic. It was a strange peripatetic party that was carried on by Jeep and Land Rover, bodies in motion across the desert, transmitting gossip via bumpy journeys that made beer fizz and heads ache. She’d thought that without a vehicle she would be stranded, a Crusoe in a sea of sand, but at least every other night she was invited into some Jeep to go and meet somebody who was doing something somewhere else. Travel seemed to be its own purpose, as though you could catch nomadic behaviour from the landscape. In that first fortnight she watched the stars from a swaying seat as the driver cursed ruts and rocks. Often they were heading for a film crew, some or other epic being shot in the desert and requiring a night scene. Ouarzazate was a popular location for thrillers and spy movies, and Hein seemed to have a radar for the nights they were out, or maybe he owned some piece of equipment that tracked their huge trailers and cameras as they rolled slowly through the desert. Night shooting meant catering and that meant roast meats, more beer, a crowd of Berber onlookers who were so used to being recruited as extras they came with their own camels, guns, and knives. Often the camels were decanted from lorries – you didn’t ride a racing camel to a shoot and expect it to perform well. She got used to standing in the cold, because the desert chilled as soon as the sun left, clutching a greasy tinfoil package of lamb and beans to her chest and eating with her fingers, watching a villain or a hero bouncing around in some 4 x 4 while Berbers curvetted around on camels and yelled threats, waving old rifles that they fired into the air one-handed. She had too her gun. She had thought transporting a weapon to Morocco would be difficult, but it wasn’t. The gun had been offered for sale through the Rifle Association and a copy of their newsletter, with it highlighted, had been posted to her anonymously, along with eight one hundred pound notes. She’d rung the owner straight away. Her club had signed one set of forms, her local police sergeant another, and she’d been shown how to lock her gun in a box, her ammunition to be stored safely separate. The rifle was beautiful. A walnut-stocked Browning Micra with A bolt action, scaled for ‘smaller hunters’ it said in the literature. She could have carried it every day of her life without tiring, and it slid into her shoulder like a small child needing a cuddle. She met Maggie over a spitted lamb. The film crew were on a break, slicing the roast; handing out polystyrene boxes of the rich meat topped with sauce and a dollop of couscous, when a bellowing horde of camels whirled into the film site. Wild ululations filled the air with strident terror and the film camels began to kick and wheeze, pulling at their tethers. The crew ran for cameras that had been left in position for the next shot, hauling dollies back by hand and screaming insults at the arrivals as dust filled the scene. Hein was juggling a can of beer and three lamb boxes, dumped in his arms by panicking camera operators. He squinted into the dust, blown gold in the lights. ‘Maggie,’ he said. Claire was prepared to dislike her even before she picked out the large blondeness of her, like a heifer among greyhounds. The woman slid from her camel and made for the fire, surrounded by the wiry Berbers. ‘Maggie Grieve,’ she held out her hand and Claire shook, trying to set aside her immediate prejudice. The other woman’s grip was strong, unnecessarily so. As Claire felt her knuckles grate under the pressure she allowed her hand to become limp. She locked out her shoulder, then elbow, then wrist, transferring power down her arm until she snapped it through her hand, flexing the first knuckles apart in stepping motion, spreading the width of her hand so that more of Maggie’s palm was against hers. Then she transferred the force into her grip, powering the compression until Maggie winced. ‘Claire Benson.’ Hein moved forward, trying to hand them both meat boxes, defusing the situation. ‘You’ve upset them again, Maggie.’ She nodded, scooping meat into her mouth. When she spoke her voice was ripe with Middle England, private school inflections overlaid with some unidentifiable twang. ‘So what? They hire clapped-out camels and treat them like shit. Shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. Now they’ve seen how well healthy animals can perform, they might pay decent rates for a change.’ She turned, checking for something in the dark desert. Claire couldn’t pick out what she was focused on. She swung back, ‘You’re the bird woman, right?’ ‘Only temporarily. I’m a geographer ...’ ‘Yeah, right. The guy you took over from’s gone home to try and fix his marriage. You single?’ Claire nodded. ‘Me too. Stupid to try and do this kind of work and keep a relationship together. You ringing ‘em?’ ‘Just tallying,’ Claire wondered if Maggie usually spoke like this. ‘Good. Tell you what, come with me next Thursday, we’re doing a roundup – need all the bodies we can get. You too,’ she waved her box at Hein. ‘I don’t think so, Maggie; last time half-killed me. I’m simply a bureaucrat after all, not a ...’ His words trailed away, Claire listened, fascinated, wanting to know what he could possibly call this woman who seemed incapable of normal behaviour. Instead he smiled and gestured towards the camels. Maggie turned back to Claire. ‘You bottling out as well?’ Claire shook her head. ‘Good. Then you’ll learn something. You’ll have to take a day off bloody bird counting though – we leave an hour after dawn. Tell Tiljad to bring you.’ She headed for her camel, handing the box of food to one of the crew before she mounted it. The Berbers followed, tipping back their heads to finish soft drinks and spitting until the clay around the camels was dark and wet. ‘Jesus,’ Claire breathed, amazed at their arrogance. Hein folded closed the lid of his box and dropped it into the fire where it flamed green and stank like a chemical spill. ‘Like Lawrence of Arabia,’ he said. ‘She gets results – the Berbers respect her, but yes, Jesus, she is hard to bear.’ Claire watched the dark sockets of his eyes, moving like weed in the firelight. It must be painful to be out-toughed by a woman, especially in the desert. A lesson to be learnt here. Men were fragile, and in harsh environments it would be a good idea to give them scope to feel good about themselves. She tucked the thought away, smiled at Hein. ‘So what can I expect on Thursday?’ ‘Oh, she knows everything about ungulates. If you want to understand anything with hooves, she’s the expert. Expect to be impressed.’ His face flickered. ‘And in pain,’ he added. Claire nodded, turning back to observe the film crew. She intended to ensure that pain was not an issue. Maggie wouldn’t find her easy to impress either. The next morning, in the false dawn, she walked down to the hide, a thermos of water at her side, rifle over her shoulder, flat bread in her free hand. Once she was settled in the hide there would be half an hour of dark, during which she chewed the bread and swallowed water, waking slowly, as though she’d walked in her sleep. The birds came in two big waves; dawn and dusk, to sip and scratch at the rocky trough of a spring that rose in the desert some thirty miles from Ouarzazate. The water was undrinkable – she’d dipped her fingers in it to see what it was like, and it smelt of salt and dank skin, like a frog. It was ripe with mineral salts, but the birds still sought it out. As the light arrived she counted them in, using the blue clicker for non-predators and the red clicker for hawks and wondered how difficult it would be to shoot birds on the wing. Not that she wanted to; she hadn’t aimed at a living target since that first symbolic shoot with Eleanor, but as a theoretical exercise she’d developed a fascination with the movement of the birds, their different styles of flight. She saw deeper into them as a potential hunter than she ever had as an observer, she realised. At around eight she went back to the hut, sleeping through the heat of the day and waking at two and returning to the hide, spending the afternoon and early evening watching the creatures around the waterhole until the small birds came back - or maybe a different group swept through, she couldn’t tell as none were ringed - to paddle in the seep of moisture as the sun crept away. The predatory birds arrived more variously. A pair of Montagu’s Harriers came over around half an hour after dawn, while Buzzards swept over throughout the day, and she had twice seen a Pharoah’s Eagle Owl - a juvenile bird she was pretty sure - squatting in the rock cover at dusk. The warblers and larks spotted it too, and both times it left hungry. She saw the Harriers preying on small rodents in the broken rocks and once a buzzard took a Little Swift right off the water margin in front of her eyes. One moment there had been a black and white form, neat and compact against the beige stones and then a blur, like a handful of cinnamon thrown down - and the thump. She heard the noise, a fist-sized sound, but her mind told her that she heard it after the hawk had lifted away, the black and white corpse twisted in its grip. The illusion persisted no matter how often the reviewed the moment. The sound had lagged after the death, happening once the strike was over and both birds were back in the air – one dead, the other triumphant. She found that smells were different in the desert. The action of heat on stone changed their nature and their action; there was no vegetation to capture them, so every odour was a column reaching into the air, heated to stretch rather than spread, and because evaporation was almost instantaneous there were none of the normal smells of humanity. Fires burnt up into the sky carrying nothing but shimmering power. Sweat fled the body and left nothing but its mineral smell because bacteria were annihilated by the arid heat. At night the desert threw back heat to the sky and while the stars blazed so close Claire sometimes felt they would crash into each other, any trace of odour was jettisoned with the day’s warmth, so that the desert was as crisp and scentless as a frost. Water could be smelt, when you were almost on top of it. The scent of it stood in the air like an invisible wall – when a camel hit the smell of water it turned as though it had mashed its nose on brick and walked along the odour until the source was found. She learnt this from Maggie.