You crash.

Ferns whip. Your breath becomes a saw. The Pale One is faster than guilt. It hits the cart road in a clatter of hooves-on-packed-earth and then it is on the far side, white against the wrong country: fenced pasture, open glare, a dog beginning a career as a problem.

The road is a wall that pretends to be a path. A wide-ranging animal does not need a hunter if you give it a seam it cannot recross without breaking its nerve. The hallway it used this morning is now two woods that cannot touch.

You stop at the ruts. Thorn of the hollow does not shout. Thorn’s disappointment is quiet and worse.

“Tomorrow,” Thorn says, already tying a scrap of pale cloth to a post, “we mark a gap. We ask Cole for a gate. We do not call this a victory.”

Mira stands beside you, sleeve still squeaking from when this day began. The mill’s tax term is still a mouth. The hart is still alive—you did not do that worst thing—but the wood is thinner by one vanishing path.

You will dream of cloven prints that turn and turn and do not find a hallway.

THE END

What you learned: a road can be a wall. Wildlife corridors are the hallways animals actually use; break them and a wide-ranging creature is trapped in a postage stamp. Chasing a “unicorn” teaches it that people are a kind of weather worth fleeing.