Around him, the initially picturesque snowfall had become a full-scale blizzard. The density of flakes was making it hard to see anything, and the snow was quickly covering up all of the traces on the ground.

Amy hunched in her duffel coat with the hood up so that it framed her face like a funnel. Samewell and Bel were watching them from the edge of the clearing, out of earshot. Bel was stricken with concern. Samewell was trying to keep her calm.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘I don’t know. I hope it isn’t.’

‘We can’t stay out here much longer,’ said Amy, feeling the obvious needed to be stated at fairly regular intervals lest it slipped the Doctor’s mind.

‘I know we can’t,’ he said.

‘Doctor, is it what you thought it was? This…

influence you referred to?’

‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s the thing. This is odd. It doesn’t fit. My hunch was clearly wrong. I mis-hunched. I’ve got to go back and start again.’

‘So you’re attempting a re-hunch?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Maybe it is just a glitch, after all?’

‘No, Pond. A glitch, no matter how big, doesn’t rip something apart and shower blood everywhere.’

‘At least there isn’t a body,’ said Amy, encouragingly.

‘There doesn’t have to be,’ said the Doctor.

‘Whatever bled here, it bled enough to be dead. A body could be lying close by and we’d never see it.’

He stood up quickly, snowflakes in his hair and eyelashes.

‘Don’t let Arabel look around,’ he whispered to Amy.

‘Keep her calm and keep her here. I don’t want her…

finding her sister.’

Amy nodded. Arabel was close by, a phantom in the falling snow, standing under one of the trees, lost in thought.

‘Try to keep her occupied. Don’t let her imagine the worst,’ said the Doctor.

‘I’ll see if she knows anywhere in the area we could shelter,’ said Amy.

‘Good idea.’

Amy went over to Arabel. The Doctor continued to pace around the clearing, scrutinising signs and traces, as though he was in a laboratory where it just happened to be snowing.

Samewell came up to him. ‘I found these over there,’

he said quietly. He had some grisly objects in his hand, and he furtively showed them to the Doctor. They were almost black, like chunks of coal.

They weren’t chunks of coal. They were pieces of bone, caked in blood.

‘Oh dear,’ said the Doctor.

‘It’s all right,’ said Samewell. ‘It’s not Vesta. These are bits of backbone from a sheep.’

The Doctor took one of the sticky lumps out of Samewell’s hand and examined it closely.

‘I think you’re right, Samewell. Vertebrae. Ovine.’

‘I know sheep. It’s my labour to watch the flocks and rear them.’

‘It was a sheep,’ murmured the Doctor, relieved.

‘It was a sheep what was killed here,’ agreed Samewell. ‘Like the other livestock this winter. We think it’s a dog run wild, Guide help us.’

‘It’s been eaten,’ said the Doctor. ‘Devoured.

Reduced to a few bones.’

‘A dog would do that,’ said Samewell. ‘A hungry dog.’

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘But in just a few hours? This is fresh. It’s happened since last night, because the stains are still in the snow. Can even a big, hungry dog eat an entire sheep in that time?’

Samewell regarded the question with some alarm.

He was also beginning to look blue around the edges.

‘We need to shelter somewhere,’ said the Doctor.

‘This weather’s getting worse by the minute.’

‘There’s a vent,’ Samewell told him. ‘It’s about a mile from here on the skirt of Would Be.’

‘A vent?’

‘A herder’s hut. For when we take the flocks up past the woods onto Moreland in summer. Guide knows it’s closer to us than Beside.’

‘OK, good. We’d better get moving,’ said the Doctor.

They started walking, heads down into the blow.

The snow was in their faces, hard and prickling.

Samewell knew the way.

As they trudged along, the Doctor thought about the word Samewell had used. Vent. Another Morphan neologism, presumably derived from the word for wind, as in a place where a herdsman could shelter from that elemental force. In Australia, they called them watch boxes, and in Norway they called them seters. On Umonalis Quadok where, admittedly, they herded ungulate ruminant thwentilopes rather than sheep, they called them Bimbemberabemhamshighans, which the Doctor had always thought was a rather ostentatious label for a one-room shack. In the highlands of Scotland, they called them bothies.

Snow always reminded the Doctor of Scotland. It was a place he was very fond of. Many years away -

not necessarily ago, because ‘ago’ was a clumsy concept to an inveterate time traveller - many years away, in a sideways direction that led to another part of his curiously structured life, the Doctor had visited Scotland and made a good friend there, a highlander called Jamie McCrimmon. Jamie had travelled with the Doctor for a while. They’d been to some places, and done some things, and on several occasions they had ended up in deep snow and deeper trouble. The thought of snow, and Jamie, took the Doctor back to his original, uneasy hunch. It was hard to shake, even though the evidence was no longer adding up.

‘We should keep looking,’ said Arabel.

‘I can’t even see my hands in front of my face in this,’ said Samewell.

‘She’ll freeze,’ said Arabel.

Samewell had his arm around her, leading her along and shielding her with his coat. ‘Guide knows we won’t be no use to her if we freeze first,’ he said.

The Doctor stopped.

‘What is it?’ asked Amy. She was keeping her jaw clenched so her teeth wouldn’t chatter.

‘Something,’ said the Doctor. He looked around.

‘There’s something nearby.’

It was hard to see for any distance. It was still snowing hard, and flurrying too, and Amy had a feeling evening had set in and taken over the responsibility for making things dark from the snowstorm. Constellations of snowflakes moving against the black trunks of nearby trees was about all she could make out.

‘I don’t see anything,’ she said, wiping snow off her nose.

‘Neither do I, but I feel it,’ said the Doctor.

‘What, like a sixth sense?’

‘Much vaguer. Much, much vaguer. A ninth or tenth sense at best.’

He rotated on the spot again, flipped out his sonic screwdriver, scanned and then switched it off. He tapped the end of the screwdriver against his pursed lips as he thought.

‘We should keep moving,’ said Amy.

‘We should keep moving,’ agreed the Doctor.

‘Samewell?’

‘It’s up this way, a bit further yet,’ Samewell replied.

‘We’re close to the edge of Moreland now.’

There was a break in the trees, a thinning out where the snow was deeper on the ground. The snow was beginning to drift.

The Doctor stopped again and took another look around. He divined with his warbling screwdriver again. ‘Let’s liven things up by walking a little faster,’

he said, smiling.

The smile did nothing to take Amy’s chill away.

‘Hang on!’ Rory said, sitting up.

Of course, it’s far too late to say ‘hang on!’ once you’ve already been struck around the head with a blunt object and knocked unconscious. He said it nevertheless, and then groaned as the intense throbbing in his head introduced itself and let him know it would be staying for a few days.

‘Ow,’ he said, resting his forehead in his hand. ‘Ow.

Also, owww-www.’

‘Don’t move,’ a voice warned him.

‘Fine. I really haven’t got much planned except sitting here and experiencing pain for the moment,’ he replied. He shook his head in an effort to dispel the pain, and it worked in exactly the same way that shaking a snow globe makes it easier to see the scene inside.