God? Jedediah cried in his ecstasy. Is this God?

BUT NOT GOD, for God remained hidden.

IN THE MOUNTAINS, in those days, there was always music.

Catching at one's soul. Seductive, yearning, frail as girls' voices in the distance. . . . But not God. For God remained hidden. Coy and stubborn and hidden. Oblivious of Jedediah's impassioned plea. Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord. Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt. (For his father's spies prowled the Holy Mountain, despite the danger of God's wrath. Defiling the clear bright cold sky, the snowcap easing downward, downward, one day soon to swallow up the entire world in its frigid cleansing purity. . . . He saw them. If he did not see them, he heard them. Their mocking voices, "echoing" his most secret, most silent prayers.) GOD'S BLESSING IS not always to be distinguished from His wrath. Consequently Jedediah did not know-should he fall to his knees in gratitude to God, that he could hear (and sometimes even feel) the presence of his enemies?-or should he beg God to diminish the power (now grown extraordinary, and frequently painful) of his senses, particularly his sense of hearing?

O give thanks unto the Lord; call upon His name: make known His deeds among the people. Sing unto Him, sing psalms unto Him: talk ye of all His wondrous works. Seek the Lord, and His strength: seek His face evermore.

IN THOSE DAYS there was always music but perhaps it was not always God's music. The voices, for instance. Quarreling and chattering and teasing. God won't show His face, whyever should He!-to a comical wretch like you! (So the dark-eyed girl giggled, lifting the lid off a pot of rabbit stew and flinging it against the wall. And why? Just for meanness. For deviltry.) Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.

A voice, lightly jeering: Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace. . . . But with a false, wicked emphasis: Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God. . . . (As if the spirits were mocking someone of very limited intelligence. Halfwitted or retarded. Brain-damaged. Senile.) IN THE MOUNTAINS, in those days, the gigantic white bird with the naked red-skinned head appeared frequently, as if in response to a thoughtless utterance of Jedediah's. (For just as he could hear so keenly, so could other creatures hear keenly. If he stepped on a twig all of the mountain was alerted. If one of his monstrous coughing attacks overcame him all of the mountain region heard.) A silent gliding bird. Its shadow, deceptively light, scudding across the stony ground. And then, suddenly overhead, its hideous shrieking: so that Jedediah's heart nearly leapt out of his chest: and it was all he could do, to beat the creature away with the hardwood cudgel he carried with him everywhere.

Pray God, beg God, plead with God, Louis's wife teased, pinching at his ribs, and what sails along but that nasty old bird.

The bird gave off a terrible stench-it must have been its breath, fetid as if its very bowels were rotten.

Behold the fowls of the air.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God.

The spirits brushed near, nearer than the bird dared, and pretended to take his side. God isn't listening, God is busy down in the flatland, God has betrayed you. Throw that silly old Bible down into the river!

(Ah, but it was one of the surprises of Jedediah's life, that the Bible was lying some twenty or thirty yards down the cliff. . . . He could not believe it but there it was: someone had thrown it there: and it took him the better part of a morning, and cost him many cruel welts and scratches, to retrieve it. Even so, several pages were ripped away, and many pages were damaged. His bowels writhed with disgust and anger, and could he have laid hands on that bright-eyed spirit, what might he have done to her! I would show no mercy, he whispered, weeping, because you deserve no mercy.) But the outrageous incident had the effect, at least, of loosening his bowels. For poor Jedediah, though he prayed God for relief, suffered cruelly from constipation.

In the winter especially. In the winter, certainly.

He had built a crude little outhouse in a thicket some distance from the cabin, hidden from the cabin. Bodily functions had always disquieted him. Not-to-be-thought-of, so he commonly silenced certain thoughts. Except when the pain overtook him deep in the pit of his belly and he was bent nearly double and even the spirits, aghast, fled his torment.

THE OUTHOUSE, OF skinned pine; and a sturdier chimney; and a pretty little piece of stained glass, about a foot square, in a window facing east (sent up by way of Henofer, along with other unwanted things-a bright turquoise blue with beige and red lines-silly, vain, breakable-but undeniably pretty-and, he supposed, harmless: a gift from his brother's wife down below); a shallow well halfway down the mountain into which spring water ran for several months of the year.

"You're going to stay here forever, are you?" Henofer laughed, rubbing his cracked hands briskly and looking about. "Just like me! Just like me!"

Henofer and his letters, supplies, gossip, news of the War. (To which Jedediah only vaguely listened. For what did God care of the paltry doings of men-their lust for territory, for goods, for dominion over the high seas? Saliva flew from Henofer's lips as he spoke passionately of the surrender of Fort Mackinaw. An allied force of British and Indians had captured it. And there was Fort Dearborn: captured by Indians: and most of the garrison including women and children had been slaughtered. By a general order issued from the War Department the state militia were arranged in two divisions and eight brigades, and thousands of men would soon see battle. The war was necessary; at the same time Henofer did not quite understand its background; nor did he (and naturally Jedediah did not ask, being too courteous) intend to enlist. He was supplying hides to Alexander Macomb and doing quite well. Quite well. Did Jedediah know who Alexander Macomb was? Formerly a partner of John Jacob Astor who was worth (so rumor had it) $10,000,000; could Jedediah comprehend what $10,000,000 was? No? Yes? Of course Macomb was not as wealthy but he was a rich man and perhaps it would interest Jedediah to know that his father Jean-Pierre had had some dealings with Macomb not long ago. There was trouble of some kind: and one of Macomb's trading posts, out near Kittery, had been burnt to the ground. "Lightning was the cause," Henofer said, laughing, wiping his eyes. But then some months later the Innisfail Lodge, which Jean-Pierre had owned, was burnt to the ground as well. However . . . the Innisfail Lodge was said to have been substantially insured. But of course Jedediah knew nothing of such things . . . ?) So he chattered, pulling his filthy woollen cap down low on his forehead. He chewed tobacco and spat onto Jedediah's hearth. Edgy, restless, he could hardly remain seated on the stump before the fire, but kept pulling at his cap and his beard, and looking around the cabin-staring and assessing and memorizing-in preparation for his report to the Bellefleurs down below. For of course he was a paid spy. And of course he knew that Jedediah must have known.

Nevertheless Jedediah remained courteous, for God dwelled with him; or at any rate the promise, the hope, of God dwelled with him. He was a Christian man, humble and soft-spoken and willing to turn the other cheek if necessary. He could not be stirred to anger by Henofer's slovenly presence, or even by the obscene anecdotes he rattled off (a half-breed Mohawk woman raped by a small gang of Bushkill's Ferry men, out by the lumber mill, and turned loose in the snow, naked and bleeding and out of her mind: the Varrells had their fun there, Henofer said, wiping his eyes), or boisterous farfetched tales of the war, which were sometimes meant to inspire mirth and sometimes patriotism. In Sackett's Harbor, it seemed, five British ships with eighty-two guns began an assault against the Oneida. . . . After two hours of firing it was found that most of the shots on both sides had fallen short. Finally a thirty-two-pound ball was fired by the British, and struck the earth harmlessly, ploughing a deep furrow; and a sergeant picked it up and ran to his captain saying, "I've been playing ball with the redcoats. See if the British can catch back again." And the ball was fitted into the American cannon, and fired back at the enemy, with such force that it struck the stern of the flagship of the attacking squadron, raking her completely, and sending splinters high into the air. . . . Fourteen men were killed outright and eighteen were wounded. And so the enemy retreated while a band on shore played, "Yankee Doodle." What, Henofer asked passionately, did Jedediah think of that?

Henofer would not be seeing Jedediah again until the following April. Which was a very long time away. Yet it came quickly: all too quickly. And Henofer returned, cheerful and garrulous as always, with more war news to which Jedediah did not listen. Or perhaps it wasn't the following April but the very next week. Or the previous April. At any rate there was his halloo in the clearing, and his grizzled pitted face with the gap-toothed grin. (No matter that he must have known Jedediah was sabotaging his traps-springing some, opening others to take away the dead or dying or grievously wounded creatures to throw them down into the oblivion of the river.) It might have been the previous April, the April before the pane of stained glass was brought to Jedediah.

Time pleated and rippled. Since God dwelt above time, Jedediah took no heed of time. When he glanced back at his life-his life as Jedediah Amos Bellefleur-he saw how minute that life was, how quickly the mountains with their thousands of lakes swallowed it up.

HENOFER DISAPPEARED, GRUMBLING at Jedediah's silence. He took his revenge by lurking in the woods for days afterward, spying and taking notes. As a prank he left a wolf's skull behind-hardly more than the jawbone, really-on Jedediah's granite ledge, facing the Holy Mountain. Why he had done it Jedediah would never know.

Perhaps God had used Henofer to send a message . . . ?

Jedediah contemplated the thing, which was bleached white, and oddly beautiful. He saw himself snatch it up and throw it off the edge of the mountain-but, later in the day, it was on the stone hearth before his fireplace.

Are you testing me? Jedediah whispered.

Outside the cabin spirits hummed in their nervous high-pitched manner. Jedediah was able to ignore them, as he ignored the girl's fingers poking and prodding inside his trousers.

God? Are you testing me? Are you watching? he called aloud.

The jaws, the clean white-bleached jaws. Ravenous appetite: God's.

Jedediah woke, startled. He had been dreaming of an angry man, a man shouting and waving his fists at God. But the man was himself: he had been shouting.

To do penance he slept outside for several nights, naked, on the granite ledge. Beneath the freezing winking stars. He brought the jawbone with him because it was a sign, it had to do with his sinfulness, though he did not understand it. Why am I here, what have I done, how have I displeased You? he pleaded. But there was no reply. The jawbone was silent.

Fateful Mismatches.

When snow fell from the cavernous sky in angry swirls day upon day, and the sun but feebly rose at midmorning, and the castle-the world itself-was locked in ice that would never melt, then the children slept two or three in a bed, swathed in layers of clothing, with long fluffy angora socks pulled up to their knees; then there were, throughout the day, cups of steaming hot chocolate with marshmallows that, half-melted, stuck wonderfully to the roof of the mouth; afternoons of sledding followed by long lazy hours before the fireplace, listening to stories. What is the curse on the family, one of the children might ask, not for the first time, and the answer might be-depending upon who was there-that there was no curse, such talk was silly; or it might be that the nature of the curse was such (perhaps the nature of all curses is such?) that those who are burdened with it cannot speak of it. Just so, uncle Hiram liked to say, sadly fondling the tips of his mustache (which smelled so strongly of wax!), just so do creatures in nature carry the distinguishing, and sometimes magnificently unique, marks of their species and their sex, without ever seeing them: they pass through their entire lives without seeing themselves.

If uncle Hiram was morose and oblique, others-grandmother Cornelia, for instance, and aunt Aveline, and cousin Vernon, and sometimes even (when his breath smelled sweet with bourbon, and his poor misshapen foot ached so that, stretched out luxuriously before the huge fieldstone fireplace in the parlor, the second-warmest room in the house, he pulled off his shoe and massaged the foot and pushed it daringly close to the fire) grandfather Noel-were surprisingly generous with their words, and seemed to be drawn, perhaps by the high-leaping crackling flames of the birch logs, into disturbing labyrinthian tales the children perhaps should not have been told: wouldn't have been told, surely, by daylight. But only if no other adult were present. Now don't tell anyone about this, now this is a secret and not to be repeated-so the very best of the stories began.

The stories, it seemed, always had to do with "fateful mismatches." (This was the quaint term employed by the older women-they must have inherited from their mothers and grandmothers. But Yolande quite liked it. Fateful mismatches-! Do you think, when we grow up, she whispered to Christabel, giggling and shivering, do you think that might happen to us?) While most Bellefleur marriages were certainly excellent ones, and husband and wife supremely suited for each other, and no one would dare question their love, or the wisdom of their parents in consenting to the marriage, or, in many cases, arranging for it-still-still there were, from time to time, however infrequently, fateful mismatches.

Isn't it strange, people said, that the Bellefleur stories are all about love going wrong?-when of course, most of the time, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, things go perfectly well!

Noel laughed behind clouds of foul pipe smoke. . . . Yes indeed, he said, most of the time things go perfectly well. I've noticed that.

It was Yolande herself, at the precocious age of nine, who said, after having heard a fascinating (and convoluted: for it was necessarily expurgated for the ears of children) story about her father's oldest brother Raoul, her uncle Raoul whom she had never once seen, who clearly lived in one of the strangest imaginable households, and lived in it happily enough-it was pretty little Yolande who exclaimed; "The curse on us is that we can't love right!"

She was immediately hushed up. And cautioned never to say such a bizarre thing again, or even to think it. The very idea! Bellefleurs, after all, prided themselves on the depth and passion and longevity of their love. But to her brother Raphael she whispered, half in fear, "Oh, but what if it's the truth-what if it's the truth-and none of us can love right!" Her distress was such, one could not have said whether it was spontaneous or acquired; for even as a young child Yolande had been fond of exaggeration.

The trouble was, the tragedy was, no one cared to hear about the wonderful marriages. Wife and husband bound together for life, and happily; or at any rate not unhappily; who cared? In the midst of the children's very world, for instance, there was the example of Garth and Little Goldie: forgiven almost at once for their recklessness in eloping, given a handsome little stone-and-stucco cottage on several acres of wooded land in Bellefleur Village, and the promise of as much financial support as Garth wished-though Garth, newly self-confident, and freed for the first time in memory of his waspish ill-temper, declared that he would earn every penny of the salary the family paid him for his help in managing the farms. There they were, two young people in love, handsome Garth and lovely Little Goldie, and everything had turned out well; but what was there to say about them?

By contrast, there was a great deal to say about love gone wrong.

And disagreements too. The children were awed by their elders quarreling among themselves, about who had loved whom most, or first, or why a love affair had gone wrong, whether it had been poisoned from within or without, whether it was part of the curse or just a bad accident. . . . Whether a love had been "tragic" or just plain "shameful . . ."

Everyone knew of the Onondagan Indian woman with whom Jean-Pierre lived for several years, and with whom he died, in Bushkill's Ferry (her name was Antoinette-she had been baptized Catholic, and named for Marie Antoinette whose son, the Dauphin-King Louis XVII-was commonly believed to have escaped to the Chautauqua mountains); the match was considered a wicked one, though not half so wicked as it would have been had the old man actually married the woman. But few people knew of the much more shameful liaison Jean-Pierre began at the time of his wedding to poor Hilda Osborne, many years previously. He may have just returned from his honeymoon at the time (a two-month trip through the South, culminating with a grand ball in the newlyweds' honor at Chapel Hall in Charlottesville, Virginia), or he may in fact have begun the liaison while still an engaged man: but the shame of it was, he took as a mistress a coarse lumber-camp follower named Lucille who had lived with a succession of men in the Lake Noir area, and so alternated his attentions between this woman in the country and his lawful wife Hilda in Manhattan (where they lived, supported by the Osborne's generosity, in the palatial brownstone originally built by George Washington's aide "Baron de Steuben," and lavishly remodeled by the Osbornes), that the two women-so different in quality, in temperament, in beauty, in worth!-were made pregnant by him within the same week. Lucille-"Brown Lucy"-remained a shadowy, enigmatic figure-perhaps "Lucille" was not even her name-and it wasn't known at what point in Jean-Pierre's ambitious career he jettisoned the woman. As late as 1795, when Hilda first attempted to file for divorce, he was said to have been involved with a north country woman, presumably Lucille; there were children now-three or four, at least, all sons-but how (so Jean-Pierre as well as his sympathetic friends asked, laughing), how could one be certain whose sons were whose, when a woman of such promiscuous morals as this "Brown Lucy" was involved-! By the time Jean-Pierre ran for Congress in 1797 the woman had been dropped from his life, for pragmatic reasons. (And then, as he explained, when drunk, to anyone who would listen, even to his son Louis and his daughter-in-law Germaine, he hadn't loved her any more than he had loved the other one, his wife: both women were desperate stratagems to keep him from throwing himself in the river or slashing his throat because the only woman he'd ever loved was lost to him when he was still a young man. . . . ) Of Harlan Bellefleur's women little was known-he was said to have been involved, for a brief while, with the widow of a saloonkeeper somewhere in Ohio, and was said to have had, in unclear succession, not only a full-blooded Chippewa "wife" but a Haitian "wife" as well; and in the crumpled papers found on his person, after his death, there was a scribbled message for his "sole heir" in New Orleans, about whom no one knew anything-except that, as an officer of sorts alongside Jean and Pierre Laffite, in Andrew Jackson's militia (made up of sailors, backwoods riflemen, Creoles, Santo Domingan Negroes, and Baratarian pirates), he had had occasion to spend some time in New Orleans in late 1814 and the early weeks of 1815. But it was doubtful, as Louis's grieving widow said, that Harlan had left a "legitimate" widow, still less a "legitimate" heir.

Then there was Raphael, who sailed to England in order to acquire the right sort of wife: and returned with the frail young woman (eighteen at the time, to Raphael's thirty-one) Violet Odlin, whose neurasthenia deepened with each pregnancy (there were ten in all-though only three live births). Perhaps the marriage was a good one. No one knew, since Raphael and Violet rarely exchanged a word in public; in fact, after some eight or nine years of marriage they were rarely seen together except at the most public, the most social, of events-at which they were extremely courteous to each other, with the graciousness normally reserved for strangers who suspect they will not get along, and who are accordingly all the more congenial. (Judging from the portrait that remained, Violet Odlin possessed a frail, faded, nervously intense kind of beauty, and her wedding dress with its hundreds of pearls and its eight-foot-long veil of Belgian lace had a waist so tiny-seventeen inches-that the young woman who had worn it must have been hardly larger than a child. Indeed, it was the only dress in the family that Christabel could wear for her wedding, and even then they had to squeeze her rather brutally into it.) The tragedy of Samuel Bellefleur's "love match" was well known despite the Bellefleurs' attempts to keep it secret, and to this day a worried adult might wonder aloud whether, when a child was behaving badly, he or she might also go over to the other side. (The crude expression take up with Negroes was sometimes used as well.) Hiram's marriage to unhappy Eliza Perkins lasted hardly more than a year, but could not be said, even initially, to have been a love match; and though Della's ill-fated marriage to Stanton Pym was a love match, on her testimony at least, it came to an abrupt and tragic conclusion, albeit an accidental conclusion, after only a few months. And then there was Raoul, about whom no one dared speak above a whisper.

Most extraordinary of all, however, was the "love match" of poor Hepatica Bellefleur.

Hepatica lived a very long time ago, but her example was often raised when Bellefleur girls behaved in a headstrong manner. You know what happened to Hepatica-! their mothers said. And even the boldest of the girls grew sober.

Hepatica was a very pretty, and very spoiled, young girl of sixteen when she fell in love with the man who called himself Duane Doty Fox. (When, in subsequent years, Jeremiah became acquainted with relatives of the legitimate Duane Doty-the Wisconsin land speculator and circuit judge of some renown-they claimed to have never heard of "Duane Doty Fox." Which was unsurprising.) Sunny, even-tempered, sometimes a little childish, Hepatica had long wavy hair in coloring rather like Yolande's, and a fondness for concocting, as often as the cook would allow, elaborate fanciful dishes of her own invention-a shellfish-and-whipped-cream mousse, an extremely sweet syllabub, a peanut-butter-and-pineapple tart that was a favorite of the children's to this very day; and of course, being a wealthy young Bellefleur heiress, and a strikingly pretty one as well, she had innumerable suitors, among them several very desirable young men (and some no longer young, precisely, but desirable just the same for various practical reasons): but without so much as asking her parents permission, she turned them all rudely down. I don't ever want to get married, she said, making a fastidious little moue; I don't want all that fuss.

But then, one warm April afternoon, while being driven home from the village (where she frequently visited with the rector's daughter-the only girl in the vicinity who was not too embarrassingly a social inferior) she happened to see, working with a small gang of laborers alongside the road, a most unusual young man. He was tall-he was shirtless-he wore a straw hat pulled low over his forehead-and as the Bellefleur two-seater passed he raised his head slowly, with the unhurried calm of a creature so wild, so totally undomesticated, that he had yet to discover pain at the hands of human beings: and stared openly at Hepatica in her yellow polka-dot frock and bonnet. No other man in the area would have dared look at her in quite that way; even small children, living in the vicinity of the castle, were cautioned not to stare.

But how silly he was, Hepatica thought, shirtless, gleaming with perspiration, his chest hair furry and frizzy-how wonderfully hilarious! (For it was extraordinary, the sight of a bare-chested man, particularly along the lakefront road-which was very nearly a private road of the Bellefleurs, though in theory it was open to anyone. Most unusual, Hepatica thought. Most strange.) She saw too that he was handsome, though swarthy-skinned; and bearded (and she was not at all certain that she liked beards). For days afterward she kept seeing him at the side of the road, lowering his pickax to gaze at her, his face strong and broad and deeply tanned, his eyes very dark; dark but gleaming; intensely gleaming-or so she imagined. It did no good to chatter about him and ridicule him, to whoever would listen, for she kept thinking about him, thinking and thinking about him, and at the mere suggestion of a walk to the village, or even down to the lake, her heart fluttered so that she felt almost faint.

Where a more modest (or at least a more prudent) girl would have waited to encounter the young man again by accident, Hepatica, acting with a single-minded impetuosity more suitable, perhaps, in one of her brothers, made inquiries among the servants and the villagers, and soon learned that the young man, new to the area (he had just come down from Canada, it was believed, and had lived for a while previously in Wisconsin), was a blacksmith's assistant and a laborer-for-hire in the village; and his name was Duane Doty Fox.

Did he have any family? shameless Hepatica asked. Did he have a wife?

Evidently he had no one-no one at all. It wasn't even known where, exactly, he lived.

Ah, but didn't he live in the village? Hepatica asked.

He worked in the village but he lived, so far as anyone knew, up in the woods. A strange, quiet, unfriendly man . . . though he was said to be an excellent worker.

And so one fine spring day Hepatica walked to the village, accompanied by a servant girl whom she sent off on an errand of embarrassing flimsiness, and, quite alone, quite fearless, she strode directly to the blacksmith's shop (where her family never did business, since at that time the Bellefleurs employed their own blacksmith), and met with Duane Doty Fox. It isn't known what they talked of, at that first meeting-the conversation must have been awkward and strained-Hepatica must have been somewhat embarrassed-though perhaps (she was a marvelously inventive and imaginative child, and told lies with such a pretty flair that they never seemed serious) she simply prattled on about her favorite pony and his need for new horseshoes. She might have asked him about Canada, what sort of Indians and wild beasts lived there; or about Wisconsin; or what he thought of the new President; or any flibbertigibbet thing that flew into her head.

And so they met, and fell in love. Hepatica Bellefleur and the swarthy stranger known only as Duane Doty Fox: and it was a measure of Hepatica's precocious ingenuity that they contrived to meet some five or six times (always in the woods, or along a little-frequented stretch of Lake Noir; once on the banks of Bloody Run, high above the water) without arousing the family's suspicions. Just when the first of the gossip made its way to the manor, Hepatica, her eyes shining, brought Fox into the castle itself and introduced him-introduced him as her husband-to-be. There was her tiny white hand in his enormous grimy fist-there was her curly wheat-colored hair beside his shoulder. It was not even a question of love, Hepatica said bluntly. It was a question of need. Neither could live without the other and that was that. . . .

The family objected, as one might expect. But Hepatica, perhaps telling the truth and perhaps not, simply whispered something in her mother's ear; something feverish and secret and unsurprising. And so the engagement took place. And then the wedding-a private wedding attended by only a few Bellefleurs, in the old manor chapel.

Are you happy? Hepatica's girl cousins asked enviously.

She had only to smile at them, showing her lovely white teeth, and they knew the answer. But there was something alarming (or so they liked to say, afterward) about the intensity of feeling in her. . . . It was overwrought and exaggerated and unhealthy. Why, just to see that big dark brute squeeze his bride's hand in his, and smile his hesitant but unmistakably sensual smile . . . ! Just to be near the couple, and sense the unrestrained passion of their "love" . . .

The Bellefleurs were generous, however, and gave the couple a small farm up in the foothills, on Mink Creek, with the promise of assistance whenever Fox should request it, and the promise-unstated, but quite tangible-to Hepatica that she might return at any time. (For she wasn't the first Bellefleur to have married impetuously. And she might very well, like some of the others, wake one morning to a realization of her mistake.) Now time passed: weeks and months and part of a year. And the young couple kept to themselves. Though frequently invited to the manor they never came. Hepatica's parents were heartbroken; and then angry; and bewildered; and again heartbroken; but what was to be done? They drove out to the farm as often as they dared (not being invited), and spent an empty hour or so with Hepatica, who looked and behaved much the same as usual, and insisted that she adored being an old-fashioned wife who did her own cooking and baking and housecleaning. (Though the house hardly looked clean. And the coffee cake she offered her parents, along with tea served in Sevres cups already cracked, tasted lardy-not at all the sort of thing she had made at home.) Duane Doty Fox stayed out in the field, working. Or in the barn. Working. Shirtless, with his dirty straw hat set rakishly on his head, in manure-splattered boots. He did no more than wave a pawlike hand at his in-laws, ducking into a doorway, turning away out of shyness or indifference. How crude he was, their new son-in-law! How clumsy, how barely human!

And then one of Hepatica's uncles encountered Fox at a supply store beside the lake, and was astonished at the sight of him: for he hadn't remembered his niece's fiance as quite so dark and hairy. And he was gruff as well: mumbled in so guttural a voice the storekeeper could hardly understand him. His muscular shoulders were somewhat stooped, and his neck was thick, and his beard was tangled and snarled. Worst of all, he barely responded to Hepatica's uncle's courteous greeting. A nasal sound that was part a grunt and part a snarl . . . and that was all.

Imagine, so primitive a man married into the Bellefleur family . . . !

During the long winter they kept to themselves, but soon after the first thaw Hepatica arrived at the manor, unaccompanied-she'd just ridden over for an afternoon's visit, she said, and didn't want anyone to make a fuss. Though she kept up a steady stream of chatter-charming and girlish and entertaining as always-she was obviously unhappy, and there were sad dark dents beneath her eyes. But to every question she replied in the same bright insouciant way, saying only that it was a pity Duane couldn't be talked into coming along-but he was so shy, he was so very shy-he hoped they would understand.

(Was Hepatica pregnant? The question couldn't be asked, and she gave no hints. But she was distressed about something, despite her frivolous conversation.) From time to time Bellefleur men encountered Fox in the area, and it was something of a joke, at first, how coarse and bearish he had become. Hepatica's cooking, perhaps? Or had he always inclined toward stoutness? His beard was no bushier than ever, perhaps, but now hair grew on his throat, and no doubt on his shoulders. There were tufts of thick hair on the backs of his hands. His eyes, which had been of ordinary size in the past, so far as anyone remembered, now looked small and close-set; even rather stupidly cruel. (Was he drinking? Was he drunk when they met him? He always brushed past or turned away, often without even a grunted hello.) They joked of "Fox," saying that he hadn't the comeliness of a red or even a gray fox; he hadn't a fox's intelligent grace. His hair resembled thick dark quills, heavy with oil. And his nose . . . his nose had become somewhat flattened, hadn't it . . . ?

Or were they imagining everything? (For the Bellefleurs, despite their affection for Hepatica, could not resist jests of a coarse nature; and such jests-as the men readily admitted-required a certain distortion of human reality.) Hepatica came to visit her mother more and more frequently, and sometimes she began weeping as soon as she arrived; but she never explained what was wrong. Asked why she was crying she would say lightly, Oh, I just feel sad! or, I'm such a silly girl, wasn't I always a silly girl, don't take any notice of me!

But they noticed that she was thinner (and she had always been a slight, nervous little thing), and that she blinked her eyes rapidly while she spoke, and looked out the window frequently. There were bruises on her wrist and neck. There was an odd long wavering scratch on the back of her left hand. Oh, that's just a cat scratch! she said, laughing. Don't take any notice of it.

One day her mother asked her if she wouldn't like to move back to the manor? Her room was in readiness for her, unchanged; she could at least stay a few nights; and perhaps everything could be discussed. . . .

But there's nothing to be "discussed," she said listlessly. I love my husband and he loves me. There's nothing else.

He loves you-he truly loves you?

Oh, yes.

And you love him?

Well-yes.

You do love him?

Yes.

Hepatica-?

I said yes.

She spoke emphatically but with an air of bewilderment. As if she did not quite know what to say . . . only what ought to be said.

Leaving the manor she turned to her mother, and embraced her, and seemed about to burst into tears; but she restrained herself.

I don't know, Mamma, if anything is wrong. I've never been married before, the poor child whispered.

AFTER THAT SHE stayed away for months. And when her father and one of his brothers drove up to see her, Fox met them in the driveway, and said, or seemed to say (for they could barely understand his slurred words) that Hepatica was "resting" and wasn't "receiving visitors."

Now it was clear that Fox had changed considerably. He could no longer be considered even remotely attractive. His teeth were tobacco-stained, he gave off a fetid, meaty odor, tufts of hair grew alarmingly on the backs of his hands and high on his cheeks, and his eyebrows, which had always been thick and glowering, had gone wild. His hair was greasy, tumbling to his massive, muscle-choked shoulders; his small cruel red-rimmed eyes glared like a beast's. He was a beast. It was suddenly quite clear-both Hepatica's father and her uncle realized the fact, at the same moment-quite clear, that Hepatica had married a beast.

A bear, it was.

A black bear. (Though he was several inches taller than the full-grown black bear. And his mouth hadn't yet lengthened into a snout.) Unwittingly, the poor innocent girl had fallen in love with, and married, a black bear.

They went away, shaken. And returned home where they talked of nothing else. To convince the others (who did not really need convincing, of course) they imitated Hepatica's husband, stooping and grunting as he did, with their arms hanging loose, and their eyes murderously narrowed. They snarled that Hepatica was resting and not receiving visitors; they ran their hands violently through their hair, and fluffed out their beards. It was alarming, how successfully they imitated him-imitated a half-human bear.

For he was a black bear. No matter how improbable, how incredible, it might seem. A black bear who had cynically named himself "Fox"! . . . And what might they do, to rescue poor Hepatica?

("What do you think they did?" the Bellefleur children were asked. At first they did not reply-they stared into the fire, frowning-perhaps frightened-and then one of the girls said in a whisper: "Hunted him down, the nasty thing!") SO INDEED THEY hunted him down; but not immediately.

Not immediately. For they had to be certain. And they didn't want to endanger Hepatica.

She did not return to the manor to visit, however, and as the weeks passed the Bellefleurs (who were obsessed with their girl's tragedy) grew more and more impassioned. Though Hepatica had seemed adamant about loving him, and even more adamant about his loving her, it was clear that something must be done: she couldn't remain married to a beast: she would have to be rescued.

In the end, not quite with her parents' knowledge, a group of young Bellefleur men and their friends rode out one night to the farm, their shotguns across their saddles. They dismounted a quarter-mile from the farmhouse, careful that the wind blew into their faces; they were far more cautious than if they had been hunting an ordinary bear. Even so, the Bear-Man must have sensed their approach, for when they burst into the house he was out of bed, staggering toward them, his teeth exposed in a hideous snarl that rose to a shriek. He was naked, of course-yet covered with thick greasy hair-everywhere, even on the backs of his toes-covered with thick dark greasy hair. They fired at him. But he kept coming. Swatting at them with his great clawed hands-managing to rake one of the men viciously in the cheek-catching another in the eye. Never had they heard such unearthly shrieking, they testified afterward.

In all, they emptied the contents of six double-barreled shotguns into him, two at exceedingly close range, before, it seemed, he finally died.

(AND THE CUB, what of the cub?-what did they do with the cub?

There wasn't any cub, they swore.

But somehow it was disclosed, months or even years later, that there had been a cub; and that they had had to kill it as well. Though the young men involved in the raid always denied it.

There was no cub?

There was no cub.

And what of Hepatica?

She withdrew from the world afterward, and eventually entered a French house of the order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel-much to her parents' distress, for they were bitterly anti-Catholic.)