Sinew snorted.

“You think I couldn’t? You think it because I’ve always been gentle with you for your mother’s sake. It wasn’t like that in my family, believe me. Or in hers either. If you find yourself begging me before shadelow tomorrow,” to emphasize my point, I struck the table with the handle of the knife, “will you admit you were wrong? Are you man enough for that?”

He looked surly and said nothing. He is the oldest of our sons, and although I loved him, I did not like him. Not then, although things were different on Green.

Nor did he like me, I feel certain. (Nettle knows these things, naturally.)

She murmured, “This is worse than anything that they said to us.”

Hoof asked, “What did they say, anyhow?”

Hide seconded him, as Hide often did. “What did they want, Mother?”

It was then, I feel certain, that I passed the slice I had been cutting to you, darling. I remember what it looked like, which I find very odd tonight. I must have known that something enormously significant was happening, and associated it with our haunch of greenbuck. “In a way,” I told you, “you’re quite right. It was our book that brought them, though they were very careful not to say it until I got them in a corner. You, Hoof, are right too. Things are getting harder and hungrier for everybody every year. Why do you think that is?”

He shrugged. The twins are handsome, and to my eyes take after your mother more than either one of us, though I know you pretend to think they look like me. “Bad weather and bad crops. Their seed’s giving out.”

Hide said, “That thin one talked about that. I thought it was kind of interesting.”

I gave Sinew, who had always eaten like a fire in good times and bad, a thick slice with plenty of gristle. “Why is the seed yielding a poorer crop each year?”