squirrel lying there, head bleeding.

He understood. She hadn't been trying to kill him. She had seen the squirrel, and gotten it.

He decided to kill her anyway. For the squirrel.

"No, little boy—"

He hesitated.

"Friends, little boy...."

After a moment he rolled off her.

She sat up, cheeks tear-streaked. She pointed at the squirrel, then at Steven, and shook her head violently.

Knife threatening her, he reached out to pick up the squirrel.

Mine, the knife said.

At that point the squirrel, which had been only momentarily stunned by her blow, shook itself and scrambled for the bushes. His hand missed it by inches. He lunged for it, flat on his belly, and caught its tail with one hand.

As another squirrel's tail had done long ago, this one broke off.

He lay there for a moment, snarling, the tail in his hand; and when he turned over, the girl had her knife in her hand and her teeth were bared at him.

Blue eyes blazing, he got to his feet, expecting her to attack any second. He dropped the tail. He crouched to fight.

She didn't attack.

Nor, for some reason, did he.

The way her chapped lips were stretched back over her teeth disturbed him ... or rather it unsettled him, because it didn't disturb him. At least not the way a snarl did. It didn't put him on guard, every muscle tense; it didn't make him feel that he had to fight. She didn't look angry or eager to have anything he had or ready to kill ... he didn't know the word for how she looked.

She weighed her knife in her hand. Then she struck it in her belt, 

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