She waited the eternal instant that women wait when a horror jumps out at them. It is an instant that men do not use for waiting, an instant that opens a door to life or death. Women look through the opening because something might be alive in there.

The lullaby had the kind of tune everyone thinks they've heard before but can't remember where. A tune like that floats in the air all the time and now and then you catch it.

The hawk had possibly seen with its own eyes what it happened and knew better than Treadway how much Derek Warford deserved to be sunk with the stone to the bottom of a bottomless body of water. But the hawk did not recognize any of this. It did not swoop down . . . but it hovered. It hovered in front of him and it reminded him of the same words over and over again, from the books of Deuteronomy and Romans and also the book of Hebrews in the Bible Treadway kept in his trapper’s hut: Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

“When?” asked Treadway. “When is the Lord planning on getting around to it? Because I can have it done by this time tomorrow.”

But the hawk used an argument Treadway had used many times himself when Jacinta had asked him to explain or justify a decision he had made. The hawk used the argument of one loan proclamation followed by silence, and in that silence, Treadway knew, he could protest all he liked, but he would not win the argument.