Snarling bear head with ornate linework

The crate was pine, sealed with a wax disc stamped with a bear. Inside, wrapped in grey blankets, was a board the size of a tea tray: a bear's head, snarling, its jaw open so wide the teeth nearly met the edge of the wood. Every inch of the rest was scrolls, leaves and stepped triangles, cut with a knife working in grooves finer than a hair. My colleague Ivo wanted to stamp it and go for tea. I held my torch low across the grain instead, the way my father taught me to read a barn door for rot, and the hatching lit up. The lines were not random. Under the raking light they broke into short strokes that repeated in threes: a village name, a person's name, a number.

I knew the village. Harrow Dene, emptied when the drift mine flooded in 1961. The numbers were the men who did not come up, forty-one of them, each name cut into the fur along the bear's cheek where a hunter would least expect to find it. The driver had not known. He stood in the snow with his hands in his pockets and said the carver had been paid by the metre.

I signed the form with the hotel's name on it and wrote the board's true contents in the margin, which would cost someone their week. Then I carried the panel back to the crate myself. The bear looked up at me through the straw, mouth open, saying nothing a customs officer could enter on a manifest, and I let it through.