The pine woods creaked lazily in the slightest of breezes as I returned to the cabin. Wood pigeons and songbirds cooed and twittered above my head, no doubt enjoying the afternoon sun as much as I did. It crossed my mind to sit down under the trees and join them for an hour or two, but I had the latest box of samples under my arm, and more than enough work to get through before the pickup scheduled for the end of the week.

I’d been alone in the woods for three long weeks and had spent nearly all of that collecting data for the university study. My daily routine went something like this:

I’d rise at seven when the early summer sun falling through the cabin windows and reached my face. After a quick visit to the outside toilet, I’d make my breakfast — powdered egg, and toast — on the Primus stove left behind by the fire watchers who usually used the hut. By nine I’d be out in the woods, doing the rounds of the static cameras. The point of the study is to track the hunting patterns and eating habits of the woodland owls. The cameras help answer the first part, but they don’t have long range transmitters, hence the need to tour them daily, swapping out the memory cards for new ones.

By mid-morning, I’d be ready to address the second part of the study, by searching the woods for owl pellets, which involved rooting through pine needles and dirt for little grey parcels of owl vomit — not my favourite part of the job. That would take me through to lunchtime, and back to the cabin.

Today had been no different, except that I’d headed into the tangled thickets of dry trees at the bottom of the valley. The forest there was choked with webs of dead wood, carried downslope by years of wind and gravity. I’d avoided it up till now, assuming that it would be a bad place for owls, and a bad place for me; but the usual areas had given me slim pickings, and I couldn’t leave an empty patch on my survey map forever. In any case, I was interested to know if the owls living in the bottom of the valley might be eating something different from those up on the heights.

The terrain turned out to be even worse than I’d guessed: dark, tangled, encrusted with flaking grey scales of lichen. The ground was invisible under a blanket of shed needles and bone-dry branches; it was easy to imagine that no human had ever set foot there before me. Nevertheless, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching me, so much so that I stopped and looked around, expecting to see a hiker, or perhaps a ranger, but there was no one. There was evidence of owls though; dark grey pellets almost invisible amongst the pine needles. I put them in my sample case and got out of there.

Back to the cabin. The fire-watchers’ hut was equipped with a single small table, in addition to the sturdy bunk beds, the black wood-burning stove, a small generator, and three mismatched chairs. With the doors open, the table was practically outside, sharing the narrow strip of rain-worn porch with the firewood stack and the tank of generator oil. Like the porch, the table top had bleached silver grey.

I laid out my finds on the table ready to start the second part of my routine: cataloguing. Owl pellets are the regurgitated remains of everything that an owl eats but can’t digest, due to their unusually weak stomach acid. Mostly that means fur and bones. By teasing them apart and examining their contents you can see what the owls are eating.

In the university, owl pellets are sterilised in a steam oven before being dismantled in an agitator. Out here, I have to do it all by hand, extracting the minute bones with the aid of a steel point and a pair of tweezers. It is slow and painstaking work, separating each bone by type — ribs from radii, femurs from jawbones — and then by species. Over the weeks I’d become expert in distinguishing wood mice from voles, and voles from shrews, counting teeth with the aid of a powerful hand lens when I wasn’t sure.

By the end of each day, I tried to have the samples cleaned, sorted, and recorded on my laptop database so that I’d be ready for the next day’s work. It was routine work by now, probably boring for most people, but I’d found that it suited me. I’d start the cataloguing in the afternoon sunlight, finish it by lamplight, and then go to bed.

I set to work, breaking the pellets apart with my fingers before deploying my tools for the finer work. There was no sound other than the creaking of the trees and the distant melody of the birds. When I first arrived in the forest I’d tried to alleviate the silence by playing songs on my laptop, but the tinny music, and the rattle of the generator, seemed sacrilegious — an odd word for a rationalist like me to use — so now I left the power and the music off, and let my thoughts wander into the silence. There were no people within fifty miles of me, now there was a thought. No human structures either. I was in one of the most isolated forests in the world, with nothing but owl bones for company. I suppose being so far from other people should have made me nervous, but it never had, until that moment in the thickets at least. In fact, I’d never felt so at peace, a strange feeling for a city boy like me. I’d even begun to toy with the idea of finding a place out here after the study was over. I’d grow a beard, become a ranger, decorate my house with deer antlers — something like that.

My mind wandered on in this fashion for perhaps an hour, until my fingers encountered something unexpected, a bone that didn’t feel right. I stopped daydreaming and focused. I was holding a jawbone between my fingers, a human jawbone.

I dropped it like I’d been burnt, and did a double-take. The bone was only a centimetre across, less than the width of the tip of my thumb, but unmistakably human, or human-like, with a rounded front, and flat grinding teeth. It looked nothing like a mouse, or a vole, or a shrew, nothing at all — but it had to be. It had to be a mutation; perhaps a deformation caused by injury. What else could it be?

Hesitantly I reached for the rest of the pellet. If this bone was really what it looked like, then I should be able to find the rest of the skull. Skulls are strong, they almost always survive being eaten. As soon as I found the rest of the skull I’d be able to see that this was actually the jaw of some sort of misshapen rodent, and everything would be fine again.

I pulled the pellet apart with incautious haste, tugging out the tufts of dark grey fur that concealed each bone: a shrew femur, a rib, a shard of rodent jaw, and then: the skull. My fingers trembled as I rubbed away the dark coating of fur; there could be no mistake — I could clearly make out the front-facing eye sockets, the tiny upper teeth, the rising dome of the frontal bone. Human.

I jumped out of my seat and found myself on the porch. I was convinced that someone was there. I was looking everywhere for Sven, or Emil, whichever members of the support team were playing this joke on me; because it had to be a trick, nothing else made sense. It was a toy, a model. They’d planted it for me to find, or snuck it into my sample case while I was occupied in the outhouse. I didn’t know why they would drive fifty miles to play a trick on me, or how they’d got near without me hearing their car, but I circled the hut, shouting their names till I was hoarse and silent.

There was no one there.

I’d went around the cabin three times at least, waiting for someone to jump out and shout ‘Tricked you!’ but no one did. The sun had slunk behind the trees; the sky was growing cold; the birds had fallen still. Only the restless creaking of branches broke the silence. Whatever I’d found, it was no practical joke.

I flopped back into my seat, exhausted and shaking. After a while I turned my attention back to the bones, holding them up to catch the evening sunlight where it shone across the table. The skull was so small. Not even a foetal skull would be this tiny, even if I was willing to entertain the thought of one somehow ending up in an owl’s gullet. I had to be rational, and I decided that meant looking for the rest of the skeleton, whatever I could find of it.

I put the skull carefully to one side, took up my tweezers and my steel point, and began the painstaking process of extracting every single fragment of bone from what was left of the pellet. Normally I’d roughly separate the bones dry, then soak them in water till the fur became saturated and easy to remove, but I couldn’t wait. Instead, I scraped at the fur like a man possessed, lining each one up next to the skull: radius, ulna, pelvic arch, clavicle, small enough that you might have mistaken them for a scatter of pine needles.

I worked till the skeleton was complete, or as complete as it was going to be; the smallest bones — toes, fingers, vertebrae — never survive. There was still most of a skeleton in what remained. When I pushed them roughly into position they formed a figure about three inches tall, it was hard to tell exactly without feet or a backbone. Male or female, I had no idea.

Get the camera. Turn on the light. I knew that I needed to light my lamp, fire up the generator, get this thing documented on the computer before something happened to it, and then pack everything away in sample containers. In the morning I could radio down to home base and get someone up in the Land Rover to pick me up. This skeleton would be the scientific find of the decade, of the century, of the millennium! It would make my career! Forget the Flores halflings! I’d be famous; employed for life; my photo would be on the front cover of Nature. It would change our understanding of life forever.

Only …

Only, these weren’t just the bones of a mouse or a shrew. Not just an animal. It would have been easier if I could think of them like that, cruel as that sounds, but I couldn’t.

Fairies, call them; it was as good a name as any. Folklore was full of them. If I admitted that they existed, then somehow they’d managed to escape the gaze of the modern age. That couldn’t be chance. They weren’t stupid; they hadn’t appeared on any of the camera traps I’d set for the owls. They were smart enough to avoid them.

I imagined them fleeing to the depths of the forest, as far from people as it was possible to get. Then I imagined what would happen if I took these bones back to civilisation. Scientists, officials, tourists, trophy hunters: they would rip these woods apart. They would catch these creatures and take them away for study. They would destroy them. It wouldn’t matter how well-meaning I, or my colleagues, might be; it would get out of their hands, out of everyone’s hands.

I leaned back in my chair and stared through the open cabin doors. The arch of sky overhead was as dark as slate, with the single point of Jupiter glimmering above the blank shadows of the trees. Somewhere out in the forest, the breathless cry of a little owl surfaced from the rush of leaves. Behind me, the inside of the cabin had vanished into the deepest black. There were bats swooping through the columns of insects I could hear but not see. Was I really prepared to unleash a storm of people on this place?

I looked at the tiny bones arranged on the table before me, only just visible in the gloom, and the answer seemed suddenly clear — whoever this creature had been, it deserved better than what the world would give it. I remembered the feeling of being watched I’d had when I’d found the pellets, and again on the porch, and I was convinced that they were watching me now, waiting to see what I was going to do. Waiting for me to do the right thing. And really, it wasn’t a choice at all. I would take the remains back where they belonged, back to the valley bottom.

I reached for one of my sample jars and then stopped. Not like that. Instead, I felt my way through the gloom of the cabin until I found my wind up lantern, then went through the trash to get a little cardboard biscuit box I’d emptied a few days before.

I put the lantern and the box on the table and painstakingly arranged the bones inside with the tweezers. It wasn’t much of a coffin, but it was the best I could do.

I had barely finished when I heard the flutter of wings over my head. I reached up to brush away what I thought was a moth and touched something heavy instead. A moment later the first of them landed on the table — a little man. He was wearing a mouse-fur coat, almost as dark as the night he had flown out of, and a tall hat of the same material. His hair was cut in an old-fashioned style, like a page boy, and was as dark as the coat he wore. On his back were a pair of moth’s wings, silver in the lamplight — couldn’t tell that from the bones. I stared at him, stupefied, wondering if he was going to speak, if he could speak, or if I should say something.

Another creature joined the first, landing with the slightest of taps on the table top — a tiny woman dressed in cobwebs and lichen, with a sliver of mouse bone pinning up her hair. Then another, and another — a funeral procession of palm-sized figures. I wanted to ask them questions. I wanted to demand answers. But instead I sat and watched in silence as they paid their respects to the bones in the box.

At last, the first to arrive turned to look at me directly. He regarded me for a time with grave grey eyes. Then he seemed to come to some decision; he took off his mouse-fur hat and bowed low towards me as if to say: ‘Thank you.’ Then, one fairy on each corner, they lifted the box between them and took off into the owl infested night.