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the pins through the centre of its tail, fixing it to a stump. The lizard was bright green, its beady eyes black, and it seemed to be struggling half out of confusion and half out of pain.
    "Cool," I muttered, as if to myself.
    "We just caught it," said Peik. I nodded, and we all stood there looking down at it for a few seconds, silent, the lizard seeming to look back. Then, without taking his eyes off it, Peik reached over and found Mikkel's hand, took a pin from it, and crouched down to the stump. "Watch this," he said. He stuck the pin into one of the lizard's tiny feet, and it reacted by opening its mouth and, oddly enough, biting its own appendage above the pin. And to us, at that moment, absolutely nothing could be funnier in the world. We started giggling, hysterically, almost unable to control ourselves, leaning in on each other, pointing down at it, stamping our feet on the ground. Though I recall that we still had the presence of mind to keep our voices down, as not to be heard.
    As soon as we'd recovered a bit, Mikkel and I each picked up a pin and crouched down to the lizard as well, smothering the stump in shadow, our heads almost touching in a circle. It was all so invigorating, intoxicating; it's hard to believe how formidable a tiny pin can make one feel, how powerful. This was because we could see, with the lizard's head jolting from side to side, that it was terrified, watching us all closing in around it. It had become desperate, trying to squirm free with every bit of energy that it had in its tiny body, wanting to find a nook to hide in, a branch to climb, even some open ground to scurry across or water to jump into - anything. But we weren't going to give it that chance.
    I stuck my pin into one of its legs, Mikkel stuck his into the skin by its ribs, and Peik pinned another of its feet. Of course the lizard kept struggling, kept twisting in pain, biting at its own flesh; and we kept laughing, and then laughed harder, water coming to our eyes, our stomachs eventually becoming sore. It was great fun. At some point, we started competing to see who could be precise enough to pin the smallest appendage, and I remember that Peik won this game, managing to get one of its fingers just below the nail; and when he did so, the lizard held its head up to the canopy and opened its mouth wide, showing a tongue of dull pink. This led to shoving leaves and twigs into its mouth to see if it would bite down on them, and then giggling when it did. We brought our faces down to it as well, seeing how near its mouth we would dare to put our noses, jokingly nudging each other when we were almost close enough to touch it.
    After a long while, the lizard became completely exhausted, its reactions subdued, sluggish; it had stopped squirming altogether, stopped responding. So we prodded it with our fingers, tried piercing parts of its body that we hadn't yet touched, but nothing happened, and it looked like our game was over. Peik, seeming bored, finally picked up a pin and drove it through its skull. It twitched a bit, and then stopped moving forever.
    But the moments after he did this were by far the most poignant. The three of us stayed crouching around the stump, glancing at one another, the smiles that had adorned our faces the whole time slowly, slowly beginning to fade. We all looked down and watched Mikkel's hand reach out to run a slow finger along the lizard's back. When he was finished, he quickly put his arm back at his side and looked out at the trees. Peik, after seeing this, leaned in and began retrieving the pins from the dead creature's body, taking them out of its coarse skin almost gently.
    There was no more laughing. We'd become quiet, sober. Because we knew - we knew that we'd gone too far, that we'd overstepped some kind of boundary, moved something that we couldn't put back in its rightful place. Yet that was all we knew. If we'd had the capacity to understand why we'd done it, what had driven us, I don't