Finneus Lark finds the man nestled inside of the abdominal cavity of a doe, his skin so pale that his veins are like spiderwebs. Slick with visceral fluid, leaves and petals cling to the man’s bird-boned wrists. His face, haloed by damp curls and crowned by the doe’s diaphragm, is so peaceful he might as well have been asleep.

Lark assumes that the doe is not a doe at all. It must be an elaborate costume, and when he shot it, his bullet went straight into the man beneath the pelt.

In this moment, he is a murderer. He’s sure of it. He closes his eyes and repeats this statement until the words sound like nonsense and his heart stops thundering.

Then, he grabs the corpse by the shoulders and pulls it onto a bed of twigs.

The corpse is clothed in scattered oak leaves. A line of rabbit’s fur, cottony and silver, runs from stomach to pubis. There is no blood.

In the doe, where the man once was, atrophied guts contract erratically. They can’t trick Lark. He’s shot enough deer to know how their insides still go this way and that, sometimes for minutes after death. With a knife, he pries the bullet out of the doe’s skull, right above the eye. Gray matter clings to the metal, cooked into a crust by the heat.

He cuts more. Beneath the cutaneous fat, moss and slime molds wrap around the bones where muscle ought to be. In the chest cavity, two hairless fawns lie curled beneath a crushed heart.

Lark amends his initial assumption: this doe is not a doe at all. The man is likewise not a man.

He’s heard the stories before. Long, sunless winters make for a superstitious town full of superstitious hunters. Tie your dogs outside with iron collars, they say, lest the fairies steal them in the night. Leave milk and honey in the fields so they have something sweeter than the flesh of your children to eat.

He has never heard of one wearing a doe as a coat.

Straddling the man—the fairy—Lark peels open his mouth. He has small, pearly teeth and too many canines. The pink lips and pink gums remind Lark of a lily pressed between the pages of a book.

He isn’t breathing, nor does he have a pulse, but his tongue, split at the tip, is startlingly warm.

What is he supposed to do with this man who is not a man, with this corpse that is not quite dead? A week ago, he cloaked himself with the forest’s nettles intending to return to his house with a season’s worth of venison. Steak for himself, offal for the dogs.

He can’t feed his pack moss and moldy fawns. He can’t go home with this at his back, the fairy-scent trailing him, their shark’s teeth gnashing at the edges of the woods, waiting, waiting, waiting for the hunter who stole their doe.

He levels his knife with the man’s—no, no, not a man . . . the corpse’s, the parasite’s, the fairy’s—rib cage. But he can’t stop looking at his face. He will be haunted by this face. He opens one of the eyes: a cat’s eye, yellow and slitted, whose pupil constricts in the light.

Cursing under his breath, he takes off his wolf hide coat. Already shivering, he wraps it around the fairy.

Here, he waits. Bristling hackles obscure most of the fairy’s face.

“That’s gotten me through ten winters,” Lark says, “and you won’t even give me a ‘thank you,’ huh?”

But the sun is setting, so he begins the cold, hair-bristling walk back to his campsite. With each footstep, the forest echoes behind him.

There is a quickening in his stomach; he has brought something back with him, inside him, as if a tapeworm has turned his gut into a womb. But when he looks over his shoulder, he finds nothing. Not even a circle of raptors in the distance.

Lark presses on. As his tent rises between the firs, he sees a shadowy man lingering beside it. The shape, tall and lithe, reminds Lark of someone he knew long ago, but as the man walks into the orange sunlight, his silhouette becomes that of a wolf trailed by two pups. It opens its mouth, and the fairy’s tongue unravels.

“You are the wolf,” the fairy says. Rising, he places his paws on Lark’s shoulders, his teeth around Lark’s neck, and Lark holds him there by the waist. “Not me, never me. Find me a doe.”