Vernon stared down at the black ledger on his knees as if he had never seen it before. He was clearly rattled, and Leah suddenly wished him away. Oh, for God's sake get out of here! Get out of my drawing room! Let me gorge myself on nuts, let me drink ale until I drop off, why the hell are you sitting there like a fool! I don't love you, no woman could possibly love you, you're a clown, a scarecrow, you aren't even a man, why don't you gather up your asinine verse and get out of here.

He jumped to his feet so abruptly that he hadn't time even to grab the ledger.

His expression-stricken, withered, deeply wounded-cut Leah to the heart.

"I-I-I'll leave," he said in a faint, broken voice. "I won't bother you again."

"But, Vernon-"

He backed away, blinking rapidly. Now not even his good eye had the power to keep her in focus.

"But, Vernon, what on earth is wrong- What is wrong-" Leah said guiltily.

He backed away, stepping onto the children's checkerboard, so that both Christabel and Raphael exclaimed irritably, and then he nearly staggered into the firescreen, all the while mumbling a disjointed apology, and assuring Leah that he would never bother her again.

"But, Vernon, I never said a word," Leah cried.

In her distress she managed to get to her feet, shifting her weight forward. For a moment she swayed as if she were about to fall. But her thick, strong legs held, and by leaning slightly backward she regained her balance. But by this time Vernon had fled to the door.

"Vernon, my dear- Vernon- Oh, I didn't mean it, I didn't say it-"

But he fled, shutting the door behind him.

Leah began to cry, it was all so unfortunate, such a misunderstanding, she had been unconscionably rude, and to a man who clearly adored her-who adored her, unlike Gideon, without any hope of possessing her- "Aunt Leah, why are you crying?" Raphael asked, astonished.

Her own little girl was staring at her too. "Mamma-?"

Ah, she was becoming eccentric like the rest! The children would soon be giggling over her, whispering about her behind her back. Yet she could not stop crying. The child in her womb gave one of his little nudges, squeezing her bladder.

"I'm not crying," she said angrily.

When Gideon came home she was to say in the lightest possible voice that she had badly hurt poor Vernon's feelings; but Gideon, exhausted from his trip, and deeply discouraged by the negotiations, mumbled a near-inaudible reply. He was lying flat on his back, fully clothed, one arm over his forehead. Leah was to say, again lightly, that she had had an uncanny experience the night before: she had hurt Vernon's feelings- "Yes. You said," Gideon murmured.

-had hurt his feelings without saying a word. As if, somehow, her thoughts had had the power to travel to him, to communicate themselves to him. Which was of course impossible.

"Yes. It's impossible," Gideon said, without taking his arm from his face.

IT WAS IN early April, when the sky had been overcast for nearly a week, and a harsh percussive rain hardened suddenly into hail, and rang out against the castle's innumerable windows, that Bromwell got to his feet at the conclusion of a gin rummy game, and, taking a small notepad out of his pocket, read off figures and statistics in a rapid voice, so excitedly that Leah could not follow. "Bromwell, what is this?" She laughed.

The other children, who must have known what Bromwell was about, watched Leah closely. Christabel had shoved three or four fingers into her mouth. Raphael, the oldest of the children in the drawing room, stared at his aunt without smiling; his expression was guarded. (For some months now Raphael had been behaving peculiarly. No one could say what precisely was wrong, not even his mother was comfortable enough with him to inquire, and even Ewan was in the habit of staring at him with a barely concealed shudder: for there was something uncanny about his stealthy manner, his great dark bruised-looking eyes, his air of gazing at the others as if he were in another element, distant from them, undersea, inaccessible.) Jasper and Morna giggled in the same furtive high-pitched way, which Leah found quite exasperating.

"What is going on?" Leah cried.

"For a while, Mamma, we were certain you were cheating," Bromwell said. Though still a very small child-Christabel had begun now to outgrow him, and he would never catch up-he had the air of an adult man, standing with one forefinger upraised. The thick lenses of his glasses distorted his eyes subtly, and Leah, staring at him, could not have said what color his eyes were; it struck her dizzily that this pompous child was no one she even knew. ". . . must admit that I was of that party, at first. But then I made it a point to observe closely. To observe at each game. Beginning, as I've said-" and here he glanced at the notepad again-"on New Year's Day. So I have a complete record, up to the present time. You must have noticed, Mamma, how often you've been winning games with us?"

"Have I?"

"You've won nearly every game. Gin rummy, checkers, Parcheesi, war. Hasn't it struck you as odd?"

"But I've been playing with children, dear."

"That has nothing to do with it, Mamma," Bromwell said emphatically. "I can beat Uncle Hiram at chess three games out of five now."

"You can? Really? But since when, Bromwell?"

"Mamma, don't distract us. The issue is-are you aware, Mamma, that you have powers?"

"That I have-what?"

"Powers."

Leah stared from one child to another. Her little girl had closed her eyes tight and squinched up her face, and Raphael smiled a tiny embarrassed smile. ". . . Powers?" Leah said faintly.

"You direct the cards. No matter who shuffles and deals, no matter how assiduously we try to prevent it-you direct the cards. They fly out to you. I mean, the good cards, the desirable cards."

"Oh, Bromwell, what nonsense!" Leah said.

"But it's true, Mamma."

"It certainly isn't true!"

"Bromwell is right, Aunt Leah," Raphael said softly. "The cards seem to . . . jerk out of my fingers when I deal. Certain cards. If I try to keep them back they cut me, their edges are very sharp. . . ."

"Raphael, that isn't true," Leah said, biting her lips. She threw herself back on the couch and clasped her hands over her stomach, as if to hold it in place; though it was quite difficult, she brought her ankles together and pressed her feet hard against the floor. The nasty little children would not get at her. "You're just . . . you're just spinning tales. Because you play games poorly, and you think that if someone beats you consistently it's because she is cheating. . . ."

"Not cheating, Mamma," Bromwell said quickly. "No one has accused you of cheating."

"The cards fly to me, you said. . . . Ah, what utter nonsense! What insulting nonsense!"

Christabel began to cry, without opening her eyes. "Mamma, don't be mad," she said. "Don't be mad."

"My own children accusing me of cheating!" Leah shouted.

Grandmother Cornelia entered the room, her white hair curled and impeccable about her cheerful, malicious, red-withered-apple of a face. Quite clearly she had been eavesdropping in the corridor. "What's this, Leah, dear? What's this?"

"The children say that I cheat, because I win all the games," Leah said contemptuously. Her skin fairly glowed with indignation: the firelight cast bronze and gold upon it, so that even the near-invisible white lines about her enormous eyes were illuminated. "They accuse me of influencing the cards."

"And the checkers too, Aunt Leah," Morna said daringly. "And the dice."

"But it isn't cheating, Mamma," Bromwell said. He tried to take her hand but she drew away, and then slapped at him. "Mamma, please, you're so emotional, didn't I explain it all? My statistics, and the odds against your winning, which are incredibly multiplied with each new game-and yet you continue to win. Look, I've made up a graph. It's possibly a little too complicated but I felt the need to superimpose graphs of the others' games too, and the ratio of your winning to their losing in terms of points, and all of it in relationship to the frequency of playing itself-see, Mamma? It's all perfectly objective, there's no room for prejudice or emotion, really! No one is accusing you of-"

Grandmother Cornelia took the notepad from the child's fingers and peered at it through her bifocals. ". . . accusing Leah of cheating . . . ?" she muttered.

Leah snatched the notepad away and threw it into the fire.

"Why, Leah!" Grandmother Cornelia said. "Of all the rude behavior . . ."

"I could wish you all in hell," Leah said, clutching at her belly, tears now streaming down her plump cheeks. "I could wish the nasty lot of you in this very fireplace, in these very flames!"

"Mamma, no!" Bromwell shouted.

"Mamma, no! Mamma, no!" Leah said in a mocking voice.

"But no one has accused you of-"

"You don't love me," she said, weeping freely. "Not you or your father or anyone. You don't love me, you're jealous of the baby, you know he's going to be so beautiful, so strong, he won't have weak eyes and he won't be disloyal to his mother-"

Lily appeared, poking her head through the doorway. And behind her was Aveline, in a woollen dressing gown. And there was Della, awakened from her afternoon nap, her gunmetal-gray hair lying flat and thin on her head. "Is it her time? Is she having contractions?" Della asked. Leah could not determine if her mother was annoyed, or merely excited.

"Oh, go to hell, the lot of you!" Leah screamed.

She shut her eyes tight, and rocked on the chaise longue, gripping her belly, gripping the child in her womb, who quivered with life-with wild, elastic life-and in that instant she saw, behind her eyelids, the orangish-green flames of hell that licked joyously at everything within their reach. Yes. To hell. No. Not yet. Yes. I hate them all. . . . But no. No. No.

And when she opened her eyes there they were, still: Della and Cornelia and Aveline and Lily and the children, staring at her, unharmed.

The River.

Thousands of feet up in the mountains the Nautauga River begins, beyond Mount Blanc, beyond Mount Beulah, above Tahawaus Pass in the northwestern range, in a nameless glacier lake scooped smoothly out of granite, no more than forty feet at its widest.

Here, the river springs down out of the lake, five feet wide, only a few inches deep, transparent, plummeting wildly, falling downward, always downward, crashing and breaking across heaped-up boulders, catching the sunlight and fracturing it into a million dizzying bits of light, always rushing impatiently downward. Mile after mile it falls, year after year, joined by smaller streams-some of them little more than rivulets trickling snakelike across slabs of rock-a spider's web of tributaries that, drawn powerfully together, become a torrential river, a true river, crashing over ridges of rock, falling many feet, giving off icy steam and spray and a deafening thunderous roar that can be heard for miles. At one point the river rushes through a steep canyon, and changes color: suddenly it is magenta, russet, orange-red: and always its roar is deafening: and always it gives off clouds of mist that drift heavily upward, so that waterfalls appear to fall from midair, suspended between the canyon walls.

When Jedediah came to the edge of the cliff, limping with exhaustion, his horse stumbling beside him, he felt for a terrifying instant the enormity of his mistake-the enormity of all human error-but the thunderous sound rose to engulf him, making his skull and teeth vibrate, and his vision misted over, and his thoughts were swept away.

"My God-My Lord and my God-" he whispered.

But his words were swept away.

It was late afternoon. Shapes tinged with orange danced on the farther cliff, graceful and splotched with sun. Jedediah wiped his face, drew his sleeve roughly across his eyes. Ghosts, demons, spirits of the mountains? For four days he had heard their whispers, their dovelike cooing, their lewd cries, and he had told himself that he heard nothing. But there were shapes on the other side of the river, dancing in the rainbow-wet light. They were iridescent, they quivered with joy.

From somewhere higher up the mountain a rock plunged, unloosing a small avalanche of rocks and pebbles and dirt. Jedediah gripped his horse's reins tight. Moisture gleamed on his face like droplets of perspiration. . . . Then the avalanche was over. The loose stones had fallen hundreds of feet down into the river and had sunk without a sound.

In his saddlebag, along with his bedding and other light provisions, he had a leather-bound Bible that had belonged to his mother. In it, in the Gospels, he might read of the casting-out of devils; he might read once again of the powers promised to those who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, and who sought to come unto the Father by way of Him. But for the moment he could not move. He stood, gripping his horse's reins, staring across the river at the queer stunted pines that appeared to be growing out of solid rock. A near-invisible rainbow arched above them.

The mountain's voices, the mountain's music. . . . From time to time it was alarmingly clear. But there was nothing human about it, perhaps because, at this height, nothing could remain human: Mount Blanc was more than fourteen thousand feet high, Jedediah must have climbed to a height of at least six thousand feet, without quite knowing what he had done. There was no other direction for him except upward.

The rainbow quivered, almost visible. Jedediah stared at it, shading his eyes. Perhaps it was not there. Perhaps the high thin air had begun to affect his brain. The wailing of the spirits-but of course there were no spirits-was not self-pitying or heavyhearted, nor did it seem to be addressed particularly to him. It was all about him, on all sides. Though he trembled with cold he was not frightened, for he knew, he knew very well, that there were no spirits in the mountains, not even in the highest and most remote of the mountains, it was simply the river's torrential roar and the high altitude that made him dizzy, and caused his thoughts to come falteringly, like little pinches.

That day, he had been walking for ten hours. His legs ached, the heel of his right foot throbbed with pain, yet he felt elated: despite the invisible creatures beckoning to him on the farther shore, tempting him to believe in them, he felt quite jubilant.

"My name is Jedediah," he cried suddenly, cupping his hands to his mouth. How forceful his voice was, how young and raw and yearning! "My name is Jedediah-will you, allow me to enter your world?"

Great Horned Owl.

In the spring of 1809, after the last snowfall in early June, Louis Bellefleur set out to find his brother Jedediah, who had been gone three years. He could not accept it, that Jedediah had become a recluse, one of those eccentric mountain hermits about whom so many stories were told (told and retold and embellished and pondered over, in country stores, in taverns, in depots, in trading posts, in the offices of coalyards and granaries where, in winter, their stocking feet brought up close against the red-warm curving bottoms of wrought-iron stoves, men gathered to talk and sip cheap mash whiskey-for there was always a crock of whiskey nearby, even on the counters of general stores, and a ladle for customers who could not be bothered with glasses-and repeat stories they'd heard months or even years and decades previously, laced with hilarity, or malice, or envy, or simple frank astonishment at the pathways others' lives took). Louis knew approximately where Jedediah was camped, since a half-dozen men had met with him up beyond Mount Beulah, and two or three had actually talked with him and handed over to him the letters and provisions and small gifts (a handknit sweater, woollen socks and mittens, a fur-lined hat, all Germaine's work) Louis had sent. These hunters and trappers, eccentric men themselves who might disappear for months at a time, brought back conflicting reports of Jedediah Bellefleur, which left Louis greatly disturbed. One trapper swore that Jedediah's beard fell to his knees and that he looked like a man in his sixties; another claimed that Jedediah had shot at him as he approached his cabin, and screamed that he was a spy or a devil, and that he should go back to Hell where he belonged. Another report had Jedediah lean and muscular and bare-chested and dark as an Indian, not especially friendly, or interested in news of his father or brother or sister-in-law, or even his two very young nephews (which hurt Louis's feelings tremendously: Jedediah must be interested in his nephews!), but quietly hospitable, willing to share his supper of rabbit stew and potatoes with his visitors, provided they said grace with him, on their knees, for what seemed like a very long stretch of time. Still another report, which Louis and Jean-Pierre both discounted at once, had Jedediah living with a full-blooded Iroquois squaw. . . .

When Louis located his brother's shantylike cabin-built on a wide rocky ridge on the side of Mount Blanc, some hundred or more feet above a narrow, noisy river, and facing Mount Beulah some miles to the east-it did not surprise him, though it rather discouraged him, that Jedediah was not there. Not only not there, but he had, evidently, run off only a few minutes before: a fire was burning in a tiny crude fireplace dug into the earthen floor, an old leather-bound Bible Louis recognized as having belonged to their mother was lying opened on a stoollike table, some greasy potatoes, still warm, lay on a flat wooden plate-for Louis, perhaps?-who was famished from the hike, but mildly nauseated by the odor of the cabin; and in any case he had brought along his own provisions, smoked ham and cheese and Germaine's whole-wheat bread. "Jedediah? It's Louis-" So he stood in the doorway of the cabin, crouching, shading his eyes, calling for long minutes at a time, though he knew that Jedediah knew who he was, and had deliberately fled, and was at this very moment (Louis could almost feel it) watching him from higher up the mountain or from across the river. "Jedediah! Hello! It's me, it's Louis! It's no one to harm you! Jedediah! Hello! It's your brother Louis! It's your brother-" He shouted until his throat was raw, and tears of despair and rage stung his eyes. That sly little bastard, he thought. To make me yell like a fool. To make me care.

Louis examined carefully the hard-packed dirt floor of the cabin, but found nothing. He then examined his brother's bed (a plain cornhusk mattress, no longer fresh, bumpy and uneven and stale-smelling and probably bug-ridden, and covered with a heavy, soiled brown blanket that looked like a horse blanket, complete with leather straps and buckles), and the Bible with its worn leather binding and its thin, gilt-edged pages and the small fussy Gothic type that looked so familiar but which annoyed Louis, the very sight of which annoyed Louis (had Jedediah, his own brother, become a religious fanatic?-had he hidden himself up in the mountains like one of those Old Testament prophets who hid themselves in the desert, maddened with God, touched by God's fire, ruined forever for the world of man?)-though he forced himself to glance at the opened pages, in case they held a message he must decipher. (The Bible was open to Psalms 9197. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in Him will I trust. . . . He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.) He went outside and called again. There was a faint echo, and another. "Jedediah? Jedediah? It's your brother. . . ." He walked about the rocky clearing, careful not to lose his balance. Jedediah had built the cabin here, evidently, so that he could look out upon Mount Beulah-one of the highest peaks in the Chautauquas, and topped at all times with snow. A beautiful site but impractical. Windy on even this June morning. Dizzying. Blinding. A hundred feet below was the river, which bore little resemblance to the wide, brown-tinted stream of the Valley; the sound of its rapids was thunderous. Louis squatted at the cliff's edge and stared down. Crashing water, wild white spray, boulders and petrified logs and pockets of scummy froth. The granite beneath his feet vibrated. His teeth and skull began to vibrate.

"Jedediah? Please . . ."

Jedediah was watching him. He knew, he could feel it; but he could not determine where Jedediah was. Behind him . . . in front of him . . . slightly above him . . . to the right, or to the left . . .

"Jedediah? I've come to bring you news. I haven't come to do you harm. Do you hear? Jedediah? I haven't come to do you harm but only to say hello, to shake your hand, to see if you're well, to bring you news. . . . How are you? You're alone, eh? Did you trade off your horse?"

He turned suddenly, to stare up beyond the cabin. But there were only tall massed trees. Pines and hemlock and mountain maple. Stirred by the wind. But unmoving, really; utterly empty.

"Jedediah? I know you're nearby, I know you're listening. Look-" And here, for some reason, he tore off his red neck scarf and waved it frantically. "I know you're watching. At this very moment you're watching."

Strange, that his younger brother should fear him. Jedediah, so far as he knew, had always liked him; at any rate he had always obeyed him, more or less, just as he had obeyed the old man. A quiet, small-framed, docile young man. With that narrow squeezed face, rather homely, self-conscious, weak. Something of a coward. And stubborn too, in his quiet way. Limping since the riding accident when he'd been six or seven; self-conscious because of the limp, which was pronounced when he was tired. Poor child. Poor little bastard. . . . But now he had outfoxed Louis by running away after Louis had hiked two days and a morning to find him.

"Jedediah!" Louis shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth.

He was a thickset, porcine young man, a week from his thirtieth birthday. His jaw was broad, his nose rather long and full, with dark flaring nostrils; his red-brown beard was clipped short and blunt. When he shouted his eyes bulged and veins in his forehead and neck grew prominent.

He straightened; his knees had begun to ache. With fastidious, self-conscious movements he retied the red scarf about his neck. (Germaine had made the scarf. Which Jedediah might guess, if he was watching closely.) As if conversing quite ordinarily with his invisible brother he said, "Well, the news back home is mostly all good. I can't complain. In my last letter-which I know you got, Jedediah, I know you got-though you couldn't be troubled to reply, not even to let us know that you're in one piece or not-let alone to congratulate us: there's not just little Jacob now, he's already two and growing every day, getting into everything, there's Bernard, just three months old, the apple of his mamma's eye and quite a howler, there's the baby Bernard too, as well as Jacob-and you haven't seen either of them, let alone be their godfather-but I'm not here to chew you out, I didn't climb fifty miles up into these goddamn mountains for that. . . . Well, in my last letter I told you about Germaine and the babies and the addition to the house, and did I tell you about Pappa and his friends and the Cockagne Club-they bought into a steamboat, one of those gambling boats-floating casino-and of course there's plenty of drinking, and women too-and the Methodists in the Valley are up in arms-they're taking some petition or something to the governor-but Pappa isn't worried, why should he be worried-he's buying into a spa at White Sulphur Springs, and maybe into a coach line to connect it with Powhatassie too, but I don't know the details yet-it depends upon a loan and you know Pappa never talks about his business until it's settled and no one can cheat him-"

Louis's throat ached from the effort of speaking in order to be heard over the river. He paused, conscious of his brother watching him. But where was he, in what direction . . . ? Jedediah might be crouched behind one of those immense boulders farther up the mountain; a sudden movement and a landslide might start, and Louis could be killed. Then again Jedediah might even have climbed a tree. "Don't you even care about Pappa, Jed?" Louis said softly. "Pappa and Germaine and Jacob and Bernard. . . . Germaine says you won't see your family again alive, you won't see your little nephews, she told me to beg you to come back . . . but she said it would be useless. . . . But if I could actually see you, if I could reason with you, I can't believe that it would be useless."

As soon as he paused the great silence returned. It seemed to roll in upon him from all sides, but especially from the river's deep canyon and the immensity of Mount Blanc. My brother has gone mute in his solitude, Louis thought. He has gone mad. But it was annoyance Louis felt, and he could not keep it out of his voice: "Don't you even care about Pappa, Jed? Your own father? He's getting to be an old man-he'll be sixty-five, I think, sometime this year though I'm not really supposed to know-don't you even care?-he's aging no matter how he disguises it, and he misses you; he says every day how he misses you. The message he sent with me was just-he misses you, and wants you back. He isn't angry. He really isn't angry. For one thing there's the Cockagne Club taking up so much of his time, and he's spending a lot on clothes again, and has his hair dressed and dyed whenever he's in the city, and he's been outfitted with new teeth-they gleam like ivory, maybe they are ivory-Germaine says they don't suit him but how can anyone speak to Pappa, especially about something so intimate?-you know how sensitive he is, how proud-"

Again he fell silent, beaten back and defeated by the river's noise; and by the oppressive silence of the mountains. He was unaccustomed to being in the wilderness by himself: if he went hunting or fishing, which he did fairly often, he was always in the midst of a lively company of men his own age. They were serious about hunting, and Louis considered himself one of the finest hunters, one of the very finest marksmen, in the mountains; but they were also serious about drink and food and one another's company. The solitude of the mountains, the queer unnerving relentless beauty . . . which was a kind of ugliness . . . baffled him. That his young brother should hide away here was an alarming riddle. Don't you know you're a Bellefleur! Louis wanted to shout in disgust. You can't just hide away from blood ties, from your obligations. . . .

"I've come so far, I'm exhausted, I want only to see you and embrace you, I am your brother," Louis said, looking helplessly around, turning, his arms outstretched, his face reddening with anger he dared not show. If only he might clasp hold of Jedediah's skinny hand, if only he might seize him . . . why then perhaps he wouldn't let him go: he'd bring him back to Lake Noir tied and trussed if necessary. "Jed? Can you hear me? Are you watching? You don't mean to be so cruel as to let me make a fool of myself like this, after so many hours of hiking, and I'm getting a little short-winded, I guess-Germaine thought it was dangerous of me to go alone but, you know, I wanted to be alone-out of respect for you-out of love for you-I could have come with a few other men, and even some dogs, that kind of thing, you know, and we could have sniffed you out pretty easily, and tracked you down, and in fact Pappa has had that idea from the first, a few weeks after you left-he interpreted your going away as an insult to him, you know-which it is, really-in a way-it's an insult to all of us- You know Germaine wanted you to be Jacob's godfather, and then she wanted to name the new baby after you, because she said maybe you'd want to return and see him, but I said no, under no circumstances, he's already been gone three years when he promised to return in one, he doesn't respect and honor his blood ties, he doesn't love any of us-not even his father. And you know there are obligations, Jedediah, that come with Pappa's land and investments. We are doing quite well, and next year should be the most exciting year yet, with the White Sulphur Springs hotel, and the coach line, and if that scheme for a railroad actually goes through, or even some halfway decent roads-why, we'll be able to clear half the timber in the mountains, clear it and get it to market, Pappa owns thousands and thousands of acres of good timber but he hasn't had much luck yet in getting it out-just those little operations around the lake, and they're mainly played out now, just stumps and scrub trees and witchhobble, worthless land, he can't even sell it to some fool settlers because it would be too hard to clear, and he had some bad luck, a fire over toward Innisfail, thousands and thousands of trees he was planning to cut down- He needs you to help him, Jedediah; he needs both his sons; he told me he's disinherited Harlan, and if you don't come back and don't show any respect or love or common humanity he will certainly disinherit you- Are you listening? Goddamn you, are you listening?"

Louis was suddenly conscious of his brother watching him, from the rear of the little cabin, no, it was from above the cabin, in the air; in a tree. He stooped to pick up his shotgun. (He had taken off his backpack, and laid it and the gun down near the cabin door, as soon as he arrived in the clearing.) His face pounded thickly with blood. He hurried forward, the gun raised, one eye half-shut. Ah, yes! There! A movement in the lower limbs of one of the tall pines! But it was only a bird. A great bird.

Louis stared, his pulses beating. Perched haughtily on a limb, gazing without expression down at him, was an owl-a great horned owl-one of the largest Louis had ever seen. From the ground it looked as if it might measure thirty or more inches in height, and its face, its squat neckless head, was colossal. The stiffly erect ear tufts, the strong clawed feet grasping the limb, the great staring eyes fixed in their sockets and outlined boldly in white and black, as if with a painter's brush. . . . The stillness of the creature as it gazed upon him with its intelligent, somewhat skeptical yellowish eyes in which the black iris floated; the alarming arrogant beauty of the thing. . . .

Panting, Louis raised the gun higher and sighted the owl and made to pull one of the triggers. The owl did not move. It stared calmly at him, with Jedediah's eyes: or was it simply Jedediah's expression about the eyes: and the fairly small beak that looked like a human nose: and the knowingness of the thing, that recognized him, knew why he had come, had been listening intently to his secret thoughts, with that tranquil godly contemptuous look that had, of course, been Jedediah's all along, even as a boy. Jedediah stared at him out of the owl. The owl was Jedediah. Which was why it showed no fear, why not even its softest, finest belly feathers rippled in the wind, and its tawny pitiless eyes did not blink. Louis struggled to hold the barrel of the gun aloft. But it was very heavy. He panted, he grunted, trying to pull one of the triggers. But his finger was numb. His finger was frozen. The right side of his face, and even part of his neck, had gone numb-frozen. And his right eyelid was suddenly heavy, paralyzed, unmovable.

"Jedediah . . . ?" he whispered.