I was hanging laundry behind the cellar when he came at me. I want to be clear: he was already not himself. The eyes were wrong. There is a particular cloudy white you only see in milk that has turned, or in a squirrel that has died and then, somehow, decided not to stay that way.

He was small, no bigger than a soldier's mess tin. But he came sideways, the way no living squirrel does, and he came fast. By the time I had dropped the trousers I was hanging he had already taken hold of my left foot.

What I lost that afternoon was not, strictly, a whole toe. The doctors at Tirlemont measured it carefully and assured me it was four-tenths of one. A respectable fraction, they said, "for what was clearly a small animal in poor health." I am not bitter about the fraction. I am bitter about the squirrel.

His name, as I would later discover from his small and very tidy notebook, was Bartholomew. He had been someone's pet before the war. He had had opinions about cheese.