"You think . . . ? But didn't he make such a stink, a few years back, about Jarald and his gang, in the Game Commission . . . ?"

"The problem is, how to determine what he'd accept, what wouldn't insult him, but at the same time . . . at the same time, obviously, we have to think of ourselves, of how much we can afford," Gideon said, yawning. Frequent yawns were, for Gideon, a way of both expressing and restraining anger; he sometimes yawned five or six times in a row, until his jaw cracked and tears spilled out of his eyes.

The brothers were sitting sprawled on a plump-cushioned rattan sofa before a birch fire, drinking bourbon they had prudently brought from home, in the main room of their cabin-an eight-room Swiss chalet made of peeled and varnished logs, and decorated with a curious mixture of expensive imported furniture, custom-made "rustic" furniture done by cabinetmakers in the area, and backwoods things: chandeliers fashioned out of elk horns, tables made of similar horns and gun stocks, ashtrays that had once been hooves, pillows and wall hangings and rugs made of the skins of bears, panthers, bobcats, beaver. They were sitting in their underwear and stocking feet, staring listlessly into the fire.

"Hiram," Ewan said finally.

"Oh, of course Hiram! . . . But Father sent us up here."

"We could discuss it with Hiram anyway. Father wouldn't have to know."

"Hiram would tell him."

"Well, what do you think-? How much?"

Gideon drained his glass. "I'm not thinking anything. I don't think about certain things."

"It's like a poker game," Ewan said uneasily.

"But it's no fun," Gideon said.

The brothers sat for a while in silence. Gideon waited for Ewan to swing the subject around to their wives, as he so frequently did-not so that he might speak, stumblingly, of his increasing difficulties with Lily (who wanted to move out of the manor and live, as she put it, anywhere else), but so that he might query Gideon about Leah, in whom he was too interested; but when Ewan finally spoke it was to say, simply: "Shit."

AND SO THEY left the Meldrom camp before dawn of the next day, telling the servant assigned to them that they had been called back to Bellefleur by messenger. There was an emergency at home, one of their children was sick, would he please explain to Mr. Meldrom, and give him their apologies? It was unlikely that Meldrom would believe them but they didn't care. "The hell with Meldrom." Gideon laughed.

Without needing to confer (for as soon as Ewan mentioned poker the night before, both brothers knew what they would wind up doing) they drove to Paie-des-Sables, where, at Goodheart's Lodge, there was in fact a poker game going, and the brothers were immediately welcomed into it.

Details of the subsequent seventy-two hours were unclear, and afterward neither Gideon nor Ewan quite remembered when, or even how, they lost not only all the cash they had brought with them, but their watches, their belts, and their beautiful leather boots, and their car (a plum-colored Pierce-Arrow with pale gray upholstery, bought and jointly owned by the brothers that spring, when Gideon finally overcame his revulsion for the money-for what he knew of the money-he had won at the Powhatassie race). In the early hours of the game Gideon was doing quite well; and Ewan not at all badly; but as time passed, as players left the table and other players appeared, one of them Goodheart's grandfather (an aged, querulous, crafty, fig-faced half-breed, said to be part Algonquin, part Iroquois, and part Irish, with an absolutely toothless mouth and a vocabulary of no more than a dozen English words and a history-which neither Gideon nor Ewan took seriously, knowing how Indians confused dates or lied-of having been arrested for poaching on Bellefleur territory in the time of Jean-Pierre Bellefleur), and as the brothers drank what remained of their own bourbon and then kept pace, drink by drink, with their new friends, paying for most of the rounds, elated and boyish and noisy, and vastly relieved, as Gideon said, to be in the kind of poker game they could handle . . . somehow, somehow it happened, without their really gauging the extent of their losses, that they lost everything they had brought to Paie-des-Sables that was worth losing. And there was some question about Goodheart's honoring their IOU.

Gideon angrily shuffled and reshuffled the deck, demanding that another game begin at once. Ewan sat slumped in his chair, ashen-faced, scratching at his beard with dirty blunt fingers. It was another morning, fine and misty, raining intermittently; the floor of the tavern, made of rough-sawn wood, was littered with bottles, cigarette and cigar butts, tissues, napkins, crumpled-up cellophane wrappers, partly eaten sandwiches. Goodheart's grandfather reappeared (he had slipped away the night before with $600 of Gideon's money and $360 of Ewan's, thanking the brothers profusely for their "kindness" and grinning a toothless grin that was meant, evidently, to be imploring) and Goodheart and the other men conferred with him, speaking in an Indian dialect that was mainly harsh throaty consonants, unintelligible to Gideon and Ewan. They stood some distance away at the bar, chattering, glancing at the brothers and even cupping their hands instinctively to their mouths in a crude, childish gesture of secrecy-as if Gideon or Ewan had the slightest notion of what their words meant.

"Those fools," Gideon said, shuffling the deck. "That old bastard. Him. I want another chance at him."

"They don't want our IOU," Ewan said groggily.

"The half-breed bastards, they've got to accept it."

"They don't want it, I can tell, the old son of a bitch is telling them not to take it. . . ."

"We'll buy this goddamn fucking place out from under them," Gideon said. "Buy it and raze it. Run them off. Chase them back to the reservation."

"They're afraid of us."

"Why the hell should they be afraid of us!" Gideon shouted, bringing his fist down on the table. "An IOU from a Bellefleur is worth more than cash from anybody else!"

". . . cheated. But I didn't actually see," Ewan said.

"The hell they did, I would have seen," Gideon said.

Ewan brought his shot glass thoughtfully to his mouth, and clicked it against his teeth. "Maybe we should go home. Come back some other time."

"I'm offering these half-breeds an IOU for a thousand dollars and they'd better honor it or I'll come back here and burn the place down, I'll rip off their fucking ears, I'll scalp them, the sons of bitches, it's an insult, they can't insult our name like that, I'm not going to sit still for that kind of thing," Gideon said. He even made a move to rise, letting the cards fall onto the table; but some force, like a hand pressing against his forehead, held him back. He sat down again, heavily. ". . . that kind of thing. Fucking insult."

"They're afraid of us. They think we might-"

"Think we might win everything back we lost, the buggers. I want that Pierce-Arrow back. I want it back and I'm going to get it, listen to those fools babble away, look at that old Indian crook, you'd think he was some sort of priest or medicine man or something, I want another chance at him, I want that car back, otherwise," he said, rubbing roughly at his eyes, "otherwise there will be nothing left. . . . And you know who will give us both hell. . . ."

"Lily hadn't better give me hell," Ewan said loudly. "She's tried that once or twice already and she knows what happens. . . . Drove me wild, got me so I wasn't able to see, shaking her until her teeth rattled. . . ."

"You bastards had better sit down with us! You had better honor that IOU, and sit down, and get this goddamn game going!" Gideon shouted.

But it looked as if there would be no game.

But then it looked as if there might possibly be a game: if the Bellefleurs would settle for a somewhat different arrangement.

Gideon and Ewan conferred, and came to the conclusion-a disgruntled conclusion-that they would accept the altered terms of the game: they would be given credit for $500, but the other players would put up, not cash, but two fine horses, complete with saddles, blankets, and camping equipment. (For how otherwise would the Bellefleurs get home?-they were many, many miles from home.) And so a new game was begun, and this time Goodheart's grandfather was not so clever, and within an hour Gideon and Ewan had lost not a penny of their $500, and had in fact won the horses, the saddles, and the camping equipment, which consisted of a large but badly frayed and soiled canvas tent and two canvas sleeping bags, similarly soiled, and reeking of odors the Bellefleurs preferred not to interpret. The horses were swaybacked and knobby-kneed, a pair of geldings with stained teeth, but they looked, to Gideon's bloodshot eye, halfway reliable; they would get Ewan and himself home; or anyway close to home. The surprise amidst the winnings was a very young girl, Little Goldie, who was said to be of mixed blood, and whose husbandless mother had run away a few nights earlier with a Canadian trapper.

From the first it was clear that something was wrong, alarmingly wrong: for how could so blond and pale-skinned a child, with such fair blue eyes, and such an upturned nose, and so gracefully Caucasian an air be a half-breed? Gideon grumbled that they might as well take her, she couldn't hope for much of a life in the Indian village, and one more child wouldn't matter to the Bellefleurs; she was about Christabel's age anyway; and Leah would probably be delighted. Ewan grumbled that the castle was overflowing with children already, sometimes it seemed to him that there were more children running up and down stairs, and playing hide-and-seek in the cellar and in the stables and barns, and rummaging about in rooms that were out of bounds, and causing a general commotion, than any of the adults could actually account for. . . . Who was going to feed all these children, Ewan wanted to know. And now that Leah had had a new baby Lily was whining and nagging to have another baby herself: where would it all end?

"Poor thing, she isn't destined to any happiness up here in the mountains," Gideon said. "So I don't see, Ewan, that we have any choice."

Standing in the mud behind Goodheart's Lodge, staring at the twin nags and the child, who stared back at them impassively, the brothers were suddenly sober. The rain had taken on a chill that would drop to freezing by sundown, though it was late July.

"All right, then," Ewan said angrily. "Whose will she be? Yours?"

"Ours," said Gideon.

SO FAR AS they could learn Little Goldie had no last name, or could not remember it. She spoke in harsh, thick consonants, her head bowed, her small chin pressed against her throat. A fine, soft, pale skin, lightly freckled as if dusted with pollen; waist-length blond hair that, though unwashed and hanging in greasy snarls, was nevertheless disquietingly beautiful.

The brothers stared at her. There was something about her pert oval face, her snubbed nose, her bright brown eyes . . . Her manner that was at the same time diffident and imperious, frightened and sullen . . .

A beautiful child. But only, after all, a child.

They set out in the rain from Paie-des-Sables, Gideon in the lead with Little Goldie perched before him, shivering beneath a waterproof cape held over her head like a hood. When they stopped to make camp, shortly before sundown, at nine in the evening, the rain had turned to snow flurries. "You'll be warm, you can wrap yourself in this blanket," Gideon said. "And they've given us plenty to eat." (Stringy smoked ham, several loaves of dark bread, odd-shaped hunks of goat's cheese, and a half-dozen cans of pork and beans. Goodheart had slipped a carton of eggs into Ewan's saddlebag at the last minute, but most of the eggs were broken when they unpacked.) Gideon and Ewan were too weary to talk with Little Goldie, who lay curled in her blanket by the fire, staring sightlessly into it; they hadn't the spirit even to talk with each other. They passed a bottle back and forth in silence, and Gideon's mind swung loose: he saw again Meldrom Lake from the window of the Swiss chalet and regretted violently that he had left; he saw again his host and his host's guests in their boats, fishing for bass, and this time it seemed to him that one of the younger guests, a blond, bearded man who had made little effort to speak with Gideon or Ewan, had not only the profile but the manner, the inimitable air, of Nicholas Fuhr. Gideon shuddered. He wanted to protest, but could not speak. In the meager fire there danced certain obsessive figures: Leah with her grotesque swollen belly and her balloonlike legs, Gideon's son Bromwell with his wire-rimmed glasses and his prim, priggish, old-mannish expression, Gideon's mistress Garnet who reached out for him with her scrawny arms, her mouth shaped into an anguished, silent, maddening O of desire. (Leave me alone, Gideon whispered. I don't love you. I can't love anyone but Leah.) Dwarfing the others suddenly was the new baby Germaine, her cheeks pudgy and flushed with the delicate pastel coloring of a peach, her eyes uncannily bright. It occurred to Gideon that he had dreamt of Germaine at Meldrom's camp, the night before he and Ewan slipped away, and that she had something to do with their escape. How strange! He must ask Ewan if he had dreamt of her too- His head jerked up suddenly. There was a commotion nearby. He had fallen asleep by the fire, his forehead on his knees, and he woke to a hellish sight-his brother Ewan crouched atop Little Goldie, grinding himself into her, one big hand covering her mouth and nose so that she was unable to cry out. Gideon screamed for him to stop. He jumped to his feet and grabbed his brother by the hair and wrenched him away from the child.

"Ewan, Ewan, what have you done?" Gideon said. "Dear Christ-what have you done?"

But Ewan was too groggy, too confused, even to defend himself. He simply crawled away, half-undressed, and hid beneath his sleeping bag like a guilty child. And Little Goldie, though sobbing, the whites of her eyes showing crescent-thin beneath her eyelids, was too exhausted to respond to Gideon's questions. She was asleep again within half a minute, and Gideon, gazing upon her, thought it must be for the best-even if Ewan had injured her, even if she were bleeding, a few hours' deep sleep would give her strength.

That was the first night. On the second night, camped beside a small, compact glacier lake, Gideon stationed himself between Little Goldie and Ewan (who had been silent for most of the day, meekly contrite), and again he sat gazing into the fire where there danced demonic figures: his wife, his children, his mistress, his father, his mother, Nicholas Fuhr on his prancing stallion, Goodheart's grandfather with his wrinkled fig of a face and his eyes beadily wise. . . . A female figure beckoned to him lewdly. Its pale hair fell untidily to its waist; its small breasts were exposed, showing tiny, hard, perfect nipples. Though his bones ached from the ride along the mountain trails and from the damp, cold air, though he did not want to be drawn to her, Gideon nevertheless crawled on his knees to the figure . . . which turned out to be much more wiry and combative than he had imagined. . . . Eyes shut, head ringing with an urgency that was more anger than lust, Gideon groped to silence the screams, pressing the palm of his hand hard over a mouth and part of a nose. Be quiet. Be quiet or I'll hold your head underwater.

He was wakened by his brother's incredulous shouts. Ewan had hold of him by the hair, and was wrenching him off Little Goldie, who struck at him with her tiny fists and babbled in a language he could not comprehend. "Gideon, for God's sake! Gideon," Ewan said, dragging him backward. He tripped and fell, and Ewan fell also, and they lay for a while in the mud, breathing heavily, not looking at each other. Then Ewan whispered: "My God, Gideon. You."

He began to sob. His chest and throat were wracked with sobs. What he must do: stumble to his feet and run to the lake and throw himself in the clear, freezing water, and let his clothes soak and grow heavy until he sank, until his body was dragged to the bottom of the lake, and his thick shaggy hair and beard were weighed down, and his eyes bulged sightlessly, and no one knew where he lay, and no one knew his name, and his place in the family cemetery lay vacant forevermore. . . . He must stumble to his feet and run down to the lake, no matter how his brother tried to dissuade him. . . .

But instead he fell asleep.

And woke before dawn, to see Ewan just returning from the lake where he had splashed water onto his face and chest.

"Good morning, Gideon," Ewan said in a queer elated voice.

They looked at the child, bunched up in her soiled blanket, her freckled face wan and pale, almost nacreous, yet eerily charming-a snub-nosed doll's face, innocent as Christabel's. Her thin breath, drawn irregularly through her strawberry-pink lips, made a faint rasping sound. She slept deeply and placidly as an infant, and it was entirely possible that she would remember nothing.

"Still," Ewan said reluctantly, "we should drown her."

Gideon rubbed his face with both hands, and yawned so violently that his jaws cracked. A loon was calling on the lake, invisible, answered at once by another loon. The odor of fresh pine pervaded everything. Gideon's bones were sore, his head ached from the ugly raw dreams that had careened through it, his eyes wanted to roll back into his skull, recoiling from the sight of the wretched child; yet he felt a prick of elation. "We should, yes," he said.

Ewan remained standing, his feet apart, his flannel shirt unbuttoned to the waist; and Gideon remained sitting, his knees now drawn up to his chest. When he returned to the manor, he thought dreamily, after having been gone so very, very long, he would order a steaming hot bath drawn for himself, and he would take a bottle of rum into the bath with him, and one or two of his father's Cuban cigars.

Little Goldie was sleeping by the burnt-out fire, a strand of snarled, greasy hair fallen across her forehead.

"But, being Bellefleurs," Ewan said, sighing, "we won't."

"We can't," Gideon said quickly.

He managed to get to his feet, pulling up on Ewan's arm. How quickly he'd aged! He felt older and shakier than Noel. . . . Ewan was watching him closely, his eyes threaded with blood. For a long groggy minute the brothers could think of nothing to say to each other. Birds had begun to chatter: redwings, sparrows, thrushes. Something scuttled in the underbrush a few yards away. One of the swaybacked horses raised his head and neighed uneasily, and Little Goldie twitched inside her blanket, but did not wake.

"Yes. I mean no. We can't," Ewan said, expelling all his breath.

The Holy Mountain.

On his tremulous bony knees on a granite ledge maliciously ridged with razorlike shards of ice, his hands clasped tightly together, his head atop its long, very long slender neck drifting upward to the polar cap of the holy mountain Mount Blanc, his teary eyes half-shut against the wind that blasted out of a turquoise-blue sky, all clarity and innocence, he heard, beyond the shrill percussive rhythms of his own voice (which, so rarely raised, so rarely heard aloud except in impatient helpless moments when he quarreled with the mountain spirit who impertinently and unmercifully inhabited his clearing, if not always actually his cabin, in the guise of his brother's young wife-for without Jedediah's conscious choice he had begun, one night, to reply to the spirit's flirtatious queries, and then to respond, sometimes with exasperation and rage, to its outlandish proposals: they should both strip naked and dive into the dark plunging water below!-they should howl and tear at each other and roll about the clearing, beneath the full moon!)-kneeling on his granite ledge, his head bowed, his voice ringing out as it did every morning as the sun rose, perhaps aiding the sun in its reluctant rising, he heard, half a heartbeat after each of his words, each syllable of his defiant words, an echo, a faint mocking near-inaudible echo in a voice utterly unknown to him: and immediately went silent.

He waited, opening his eyes cautiously.

In recent months, or was it recent years, Jedediah's hearing had become increasingly acute. He could hear the cries of incredulous pain, needle-thin cries of pain, from the hemlocks cut down miles away, on lower ground: a piteous thing, he'd had to stop his ears with bits of rag, for the trees were not even dragged away, they were skinned in the forest where they lay and then left to suffer, their life's consciousness easing from them slowly, as perhaps it eased into them slowly, and while their butchers took no heed, heard no sound at all, Jedediah was unable not to hear. His sharpened senses picked up the cries of small birds torn apart in midair by hawks, and rabbits seized by owls, and raccoons set upon by wolves; one especially frantic screaming brought him out of his cabin on a winter morning to see, far away, across the chasm, a thrashing furry creature the size of a fox hauled away in the talons of a gigantic bird-it had a naked red-skinned head but a heronlike beak, its feathers were evidently white, tipped with black as if with tar, its tail was long and pronged, extraordinarily long-an amazing predator Jedediah had never seen before and could not identify.

He knelt, his head inclined to one side, his beard-which had evidently grown long again-he had trimmed it only the other day-brushing coarsely against his bare shoulder.

Silence.

God?

Silence.

. . . Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air. . . . Consider the lilies of the field. . . . Therefore take no thought, saying What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? . . . But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day . . .

Again the echo. Faint, blithe, jeering. He heard it with a terrible clarity though his own voice did not weaken.

Slowly he got to his feet, straightening himself with an effort. (His right knee ached nearly all the time now. He could not remember when it had begun: only the other morning, yet it had been with him always.) He shielded his eyes and looked from side to side, as far as his gaze would hook, down into the ravine that leapt with shadow and sunlight and boiling white foam, down the boulder-strewn hill to the pine forest; and up, slowly, reverently, to the very top of Mount Blanc. That timber died away as the mountain rose toward God, that snow and ice covered its very summit, seemed to Jedediah testimony of the mountain's holiness. He could stare and stare across the windswept miles to the mountain until his eyes ached and his vision weakened, and feel that he had only begun to pay it homage. For wasn't it likely that so sacred a place dispelled all evil. . . . Wasn't it likely that Satan himself would cower before that brute glacial magnificence . . . ?

Once Jedediah had stood on his ravine ledge, shielding his eyes as he watched a sparrow hawk gliding and dipping downward, and a shot rang out-and a bullet passed close by his head. He had thrown himself on the rock at once. Without thinking-without having the time to think-he threw himself down, and lay flat for a very long time; and then, cautiously, his numbed lips shaping Dear God, have mercy, dear God have mercy, don't allow me to die before You have shown me Your face . . . don't make of my pilgrimage to Your kingdom a mockery, and my love for You a clumsy joke, terminated so abruptly by a meaningless accident, his arms and legs outspread, he had managed to crawl backward from the cliff, and to barricade himself in his cabin. (By that time he had strengthened the shantylike structure with heavier birch logs, and weatherproofed the roof; he had laid down floorboards; he had set two panes of glass in his windows, which were no more than a foot square; and he had built himself a sturdy oak door with an iron latch.) In the cabin he lay on his cornshuck bed, too weak for an indefinite period of time even to continue his prayer; and then he must have slept, for when he woke it was night and he was entirely alone and God allowed him to know that the danger had passed, and he was once more alone on the mountain, and no one would injure him; and his heart filled with elation like a child's elation, when he learns that he is not to be punished, after all, but gathered in his mother's arms, into her warm forgiving bosom.

The next morning, quivering with his own defiance, Jedediah strode out to the cliff's edge-and saw, after a few minutes, that he was entirely alone, and that God had not misled him. From that day onward no one had ever shot at him again.

From time to time, however, he did suffer intrusions. It seemed to him that the intruders-trappers, hunters primarily-followed close upon one another's heels, and that he had little time to himself to bask in the mountain's holy solitude, and to feel himself refined into a pair of eyes only-a pair of eyes and a self that was so thin, so pure, it possessed the brittleness of a sheet of translucent ice-as God intended. (For why otherwise had God called Jedediah Bellefleur up into the mountains, except to purify him of the heat of creation?-the frenzy of lust, the madness of groveling about in the flesh, bodies writhing upon bodies in a futile attempt to annihilate their aloneness? Why otherwise than to save him from his brothers' fate, and his father's repulsive fate, sinking ever more hopelessly into the quagmire of the senses? For though his brother Louis was married, and God was said to look with favor upon husband and wife, and to consider them one flesh in holy union, Jedediah knew very well that God recoiled with distaste from the baser instincts, and dwelled in His inviolable magnificence high atop Mount Blanc where no living thing could survive.) Jedediah lived on lower ground, however. And so human beings interrupted his peace. If he heard them coming he naturally hid, but what could he do if they took him by surprise! Once the mountain spirit that amused itself by taking the shape of, and mimicking the voice of, Louis's child-bride was teasing him with one silly fanciful thing after another-in a high-pitched disingenuous girl's voice chiding him for having trapped a raccoon for food, such a pretty creature, such an adorable face, and so very nearly tame-and so very fatty!-ugh, how could he eat such meat!-how could he, prim passionless monkish Jedediah, bring himself to eat such meat!-and he had been so distracted, so anxious lest he succumb to the spirit's torment and begin to answer back (which, sadly, he often did-and nothing delighted the mountain spirits more than to trick a human being into conversing with them as if they existed), that he had not heard or even seen an outlandish little party of visitors: a group of some six or seven girls, about the age of his sister-in-law (whose name he had forgotten, but he remembered that she was sixteen and very young for her age), dressed in woollen shorts that fell just to the knee, and heavy-knit socks, and hiking boots of a kind Jedediah had never seen before, and enormous bulky-knit jackets in a variety of bright colors. The girls' cheeks were apple-red; they were out of breath because of the altitude, but obviously in excellent health; their braided hair bristled with exuberance. Jedediah disguised his surprise and dismay, and put aside his hoe (for it was a warm June day, one of the first warm days of the year, and he was going to set down a garden, potatoes mainly, despite the thin pebbly inhospitable soil), and offered the little party water, tinned meat, dried fruit, chunks of black bread grown stale and hard but nevertheless edible if soaked in gruel-all that he had, in fact-for the girls had come a great distance, and it might be said that they were his guests so long as they remained on the mountain. But the leader of the hiking party thanked him, and accepted only water, which the girls drank with evident delight, passing Jedediah's battered tin cup from hand to hand, and giggling at him over the rim. They might have been sisters, they so resembled one another: bright dark eyes, dark brown bangs that fell low over their foreheads, cherry-red lips.

For some reason he did not want them gone quickly. When hunters and trappers and even Mack Henofer dropped by, it was obvious from Jedediah's curt, brusque manner and his near-muteness and the way he stared stonily at the ground that he wanted them gone as quickly as possible-he found that he could breathe only with difficulty in their presence-he detested it that these crude men should presume to offer him whiskey and tobacco as if they pitied him. (And of course Mack Henofer, who brought him unwanted supplies and letters and gifts and news from back home, and who even offered him bits of gossip about Jean-Pierre that were considered, on lower ground, marvelously scandalous, could never quite comprehend Jedediah's disdain.) But he halfway regretted it when the girls, after resting no more than ten minutes, went on their way again, thanking him in unison, and breaking into song as they hiked away without once glancing back. (Jedediah's keen ears picked up their song even as they trudged out of sight. He thought it wonderfully charming, if simple-minded, and wondered if it was a popular tune of the day down below: I'll be no submissive wife No, not I; no, not I I'll not be a slave for life No, not I; no, not I Think you on our wedding day That I said, as others say Love and honor and obey Love and honor and obey No no no no no no No no no, not I I to dullness don't incline No, not I; no, not I Go to bed at half-past nine No, not I; no, not I No no no no no no No no no, not I.).

He was hurt to discover that they hadn't drunk the water he had offered them-they had done no more than pass the tin cup around, raising it to their lips, and pretending to drink. For days afterward he heard their singsong voices, wafted back to him by the mountain winds, no no no no no no, no no no not I.

Another visitor who had also taken him by surprise (the mountain spirit had been laughing warmly at him for picking weevils out of his oatmeal one by one, and setting them free-why didn't he simply dump all the oatmeal down into the river, why didn't he, come to think of it, drag everything out of his cabin, all his supplies, and his bedding, and even the little stool he had put together with such difficulty, and toss it all over the side!-what a lark!-and how good he would feel afterward!-for didn't Christ say give up all you have and follow Me!) was a very tall man in his early thirties, perhaps, with silvery brown hair that fell to his wide shoulders, and tanned, leathery skin that appeared to glint with tiny crystals of salt, and a long straight beak of a nose, and long eyes in which the iris floated rather like a tadpole, with a tadpole's minuscule curl of a tail. A remarkable man, more than a head taller than Jedediah, and obviously very strong-he carried a knapsack and camping equipment as if they weighed next to nothing-but gentle, soft-spoken, excessively courteous. He accepted a bowl of mushroom-milk soup from Jedediah, and warmed himself at Jedediah's hearth, but seemed more interested in querying Jedediah about the region: for he was a cartographer by profession, and was involved in an ambitious project that would take many years to complete, the fastidious mapping of the region traversed by the Nautaugamaggonautaugaunagaungawauggataunauta. So, taking notes in pencil, he interrogated Jedediah about streams and runs and trickles, and lakes on higher ground, and ponds no matter how small, and mountain trails long ago grown over since the first explorers had passed. He spread out his elaborate parchment maps for Jedediah to examine; he was clearly proud of them, and anxious lest they get too close to the fire, or Jedediah happen to touch them by accident. "Nothing matters so much as learning the precise contours of the earth on which we live," he told Jedediah in his soft, calm voice. "That is our way of learning God." It pleased Jedediah, but rather puzzled him, that the tall man should show no curiosity at all about him.

And then there was Mack Henofer. Too frequently-every six or seven months, or was it once a year-there was Mack Henofer, always when Jedediah least expected him. He was a trapper who lived on the eastern slope of Mount Blanc, alone as Jedediah was alone, but clearly not self-sufficient: for he went eagerly to the settlement at distant Contracoeur, where he traded his pelts for cash, and then to the towns to the south, to Fort Hanna and Innisfail and even to faraway Nautauga Falls, which Jedediah only dimly remembered. It was said of Henofer that he had come to the New World as an alternative to prison in Newgate, and that he had left Manhattan Island for the north country as an alternative, quickly chosen, to conscription in the army; he had left the Lake Noir region, again quickly, as an alternative to marriage. Jedediah knew little about him, and never inquired after him except to express the hope, in a rushed courteous murmur, that Henofer was in good health. He was certainly a spy of Jean-Pierre's, and may even have wished to cajole Jedediah into attending to a number of his trap lines, but Jedediah could tolerate him for brief periods of time, and never showed his anger.

(How often Henofer arrived, how frequently was he underfoot! One day in the mountains is all days, all days are one, a single seamless fluid passing of the sun across the sky, moment by moment, quickly, as one breathes, now it is daybreak, now it is the tide of noon, now it is midafternoon, now the sun begins to sprawl as it sinks, now it is dusk-no more than a few moments-now it is night: and one sinks into the oblivion of sleep, into the same dark the sun has penetrated. The days passed so rapidly and there was Henofer, once again, grinning apologetically at Jedediah, showing his blackened teeth and sometimes the tip of his red tongue which Jedediah imagined, but knew he only imagined, to be subtly forked. He was always hallooing for Jedediah from the clearing, he was always making himself at home in the cabin, content to wait for days until Jedediah returned.) Thick-chested, with spindly legs, and a moth-eaten woollen cap pulled low on his forehead in all weathers, Henofer was an emissary of Jean-Pierre's but-as he made repeatedly clear-he considered himself a friend of Jedediah's first. "Both of us have come to live in the mountains to get away from those-" and here he sometimes groped for the correct words, or spat out a shocking obscenity-"and we have to be loyal to each other. That's all there is to say." Yet it wasn't, for once his tongue was loosed he could talk for hours, gobbling up all the food poor Jedediah felt obliged to offer him (which frequently included the delicious dried apricots and raspberry, marmalade, and strawberry preserves Louis's wife had just sent, and strips of salt-dried beef, and nuggets of caramel candy), telling him all the unwanted gossip, items not likely to have found their way into the letter Louis had sent (for Louis wrote to Jedediah faithfully, though it had been a very long time since Jedediah had troubled to reply). The settlement at Lake Noir was growing rapidly, according to Henofer, and there were boundary disputes and duels; men killed in tavern fights; trouble with Indians and half-breeds; lynchings of Indians and half-breeds; a rowdy poor-white family named Varrell who lived in the foothills but were moving one by one into the settlement; envy and resentment at the way Jean-Pierre and Louis were buying up land and fencing it off; and resentment too at certain of Jean-Pierre's schemes-he had recently made a fair amount of money by selling a number of wagonloads of something he called Arctic elk manure, to downriver farmers who had settled on poor soil, and needed their land rejuvenated by a "high-nitrogen" substance. . . . And Henofer even presented Jedediah with tiny perfumed envelopes in which his sister-in-law had slipped, for what reason Jedediah could not fathom, babies' curls. The first curl was pale brown, the second a very light blond, the third dark brown. So there were, now, three babies. Louis and his wife had had three babies. And Jedediah had two nephews and a niece-Jacob and Bernard and-what was the girl's name-Arlette?-Arlette. Of course they must be beautiful children. Of course Jedediah was happy. It was all God's wish, wasn't it, God's plan. But why did Louis's wife send Jedediah those silly little curls? He did not know how to respond and so he made no response at all; he threw the curls into the fire.

Dear God, he prayed, please grant me my own life. My wholeness in Thee. My salvation. My freedom from them . . . from her.

And then Henofer would leave, finally, having nothing more to say, and Jedediah frequently wept with the sheer bliss of aloneness. For he knew that God would not show His face to him unless he was utterly alone.

HE CALLED OUT, and waited, trembling, to hear the echo.

But there was no sound except the river. The river, and the birds' stray shrill senseless cries.

Is someone there, he called, cupping his hands to his mouth; but there was no reply. . . . Why do you torment me, he called, more softly, why do you mock me when I utter God's word. . . .

Yet there was only silence, and even the mountain spirit who so merrily plagued him was absent. He was entirely alone. He knew himself alone. Yet if he spoke in God's word, if he raised his voice to utter Christ's teaching, in a voice of brass, he knew the mocking echo would return: he knew that whoever tormented him would begin again. Why do you mock me, why do you hate me, Jedediah whispered, standing on his windy ravine and casting his gaze about as far as it would go, who are you . . . ? Are you someone sent by my father, or someone in the hire of Satan, or someone I have inadvertently wronged during my life down below . . . ?

Nothing, no sound. No movement in the sky that arched above Mount Blanc except the ceaseless motion of the clouds, and the quick darting flight of a sparrow hawk, intent on prey too small for Jedediah's eye to perceive.

In the Nursery.

At the age of seventeen, when he fell so tumultuously in love with the Bellefleurs' adopted daughter Little Goldie, Garth was nearly as tall and as broad-shouldered as his bearish father Ewan, and possessed of an even more irascible temper: when friends forcibly restrained him from accepting the malicious bet of a daredevil diver at the Nautauga Falls fairground one summer when Garth was fourteen (the daredevil, Flaming Pete McSweet, dove into a ten-foot canvas tank from a one-hundred-foot tower that swayed in even the mild breezes of August, to the awe and delight of his hushed audience, and though it was his practice to plunge through the air livid with orange-red flames he was willing to allow the brash Garth Bellefleur to dive without setting himself on fire-and odds, in Garth's favor should he win, were a very generous fifty to one) he turned on them wildly, beating one into unconsciousness, dislocating another's jaw, seizing another in his massive arms and picking him up from the ground and squeezing until the boy (who was hardly frail himself) shrieked for him to stop. When Ewan found out about the incident-the bet rather than Garth's assault on his friends-he was furious, and dragged the boy out into one of the empty hop-curing barns, shouting that he had nearly made an ass of himself, he had nearly allowed some son-of-a-bitch con man to trick him into breaking his neck, and in public to boot, and that if he was so thick-skulled, so stupid, he had better stay home where the women could watch him. Garth's chagrin, and his awe of his father, made him cringe before Ewan's rage, and meekly accept, some half-dozen whiplashes on his back, buttocks, and thighs. He even wept, alone in the barn afterward; or at any rate he was wracked with loud, hoarse, tearless sobs that left him exhausted and weak as an infant.

Because Leah did not want Germaine to move into the nursery yet (she wasn't a year old despite her size, and the rapidity of her maturation, and Leah frequently worried over her-she had an unreasonable fear that the baby might die suddenly in her sleep), and it was discovered one day that Christabel and Bromwell were really too big for the nursery (and no longer got along: Bromwell claimed that he couldn't tolerate his twin, she was so slow-witted, so ordinary, and it rather offended him that she was several inches taller than he and could now bully him whenever she wished), the nursery was free for Little Goldie when Gideon and Ewan brought her home; and she was settled in there at once. There she had her choice of several charming little beds, each with its good horsehair mattress and its canopy; she could choose among the exciting clutter of hundreds of toys-dolls, stuffed animals, games, puzzles, crayons, paints, child-sized drums and bugles and cymbals, several rocking horses, a five-foot high Viennese merry-go-round with three handsome steeds. But standing in the doorway of the nursery Little Goldie was heard to say, in her hoarse, guttural murmur, "This isn't my place."

They pretended not to hear, and fussed over her all the more. Both Leah and Lily claimed that she was a gorgeous little child: so undernourished, so mistreated! Grandmother Cornelia was slower to come around: it had been a considerable shock for her when Gideon and Ewan (who had been missing for nineteen days) simply tramped in her breakfast room and said bluntly: "We've brought home an orphan, Mother, we had no choice." Her sons were bedraggled and mud-splattered and clearly exhausted, and Cornelia had to stare at Gideon for several long seconds before she was certain he was Gideon-his beard was so grizzled, his eyes so bloodshot. . . . An orphan! A little girl dressed in rags, her face filthy, her hair hanging in greasy strands! The resigned violence with which she scratched her head was a clear indication that she had lice, and there was something disturbing-sullen, or merely mischievous-about the set of her eyes and her thin arched eyebrows. Cornelia managed to say, "Why so you have," though she felt as if she might faint. She had been lying majestically on her chaise longue, swathed in a billowing silk gown, feeding bits of a cherry croissant to one of the kittens, and Gideon and Ewan had strode ahead of the servants, pulling that strange little child between them, tracking mud everywhere. "Why . . . why, so you have," Cornelia murmured, staring at the girl. For several weeks she was to say to Edna (not to any of her family, who would have hooted her down out of uneasiness as much as simple disbelief) that Little Goldie was an elf-child, not a real child at all. Or perhaps she was a half-breed.

But in the end grandmother Cornelia declared her a beautiful child-a little angel-and claimed that Gideon and Ewan had done the proper thing in bringing her home with them. "We're Bellefleurs, after all," she said. "We can take in any number of abandoned children."

LITTLE GOLDIE STRUCK the skeptical Garth as strange rather than beautiful. (And, anyway, what did beautiful mean . . . ?) Demuth Hodge had been dismissed long ago, sent away by a taciturn Ewan with six months' wages and no explanations (one theory was that Leah had been furious because Demuth allegedly "disciplined" Christabel and Morna by rapping their bottoms with a ruler, after they slipped some overripe and easily squashed boysenberries into the pocket of his old tweed coat; another theory was that Bromwell had contemptuously denounced the young man-his knowledge of higher mathematics, Bromwell declared, was sheer fraud). Though the family had advertised everywhere for a replacement, both in the United States and abroad, no applicant appeared whose vita and person pleased everyone; so the Bellefleurs were without a tutor. Since they were reluctant to send the children away to school, especially the younger children, they had no choice but to attempt to educate them at home. Hiram gave instructions every morning from 9:00 A.M. until noon in arithmetic, algebra, classical mythology, and world geography; Vernon instructed them, two or three unscheduled afternoons a week, in composition, literature, and "elocution" (which mainly involved the passionate reading of poets dear to him, aloud, to a small giggling audience always on the brink of mutiny). But Bromwell volunteered to tutor the new child, perhaps because, at first, she excited his curiosity: she seemed to have come from so distant a land, so remote a territory, that her very humanity was suspect. How odd, how coarse, her words . . . ! Was it some Indian dialect she tried to speak, or a language of her own, utterly private? It might be a challenge, a scientific challenge, Bromwell thought, to teach the child how to be human . . . how to become human, through the English language.

But he soon grew impatient. "Repeat after me," he said, and again, "Repeat after me, please," and "Are you listening? Do you comprehend?" Garth and Albert and Jasper hung about in the doorway of the nursery, snickering. They rather resented Little Goldie. Another child . . . ! Another comely child, drawing the adults' attention. . . . Garth called out suggestions of his own, which were ignored. He thought it especially comic that Little Goldie could barely hold a pen-she was always splashing ink on herself and Bromwell. How clumsy, for a girl . . . ! It was only when Bromwell pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes in a weary, adult gesture, and said in his sharp curt voice, "Maybe you are a half-breed, or anyway a halfwit: in either case we may as well abandon lessons," that Garth felt a rush of sudden, irresistible emotion-not the hilarity that reduced Albert and Jasper to shrieking hyenas, but rage-rage so violent that he had to be restrained from throwing the terrified Bromwell out the window to which he had carried him, snarling: "You little bastard! You wise-ass little bastard! Now you see how you like it! Now you see how hard you land! Now-"

Garth would have defined it as resentment he continued to feel as the weeks passed, had he been given-as he was not-to brooding over his own emotions: resentment and a dull baffled aching anger and a sense of something obscurely not right. Garth had always been a fairly closemouthed boy, though inordinately noisy and lively; he had walked home one winter afternoon from bobsledding, after a spill in which no one was evidently hurt, holding his hand close against his side, saying nothing to the other children, though the smallest finger of his right hand had been nearly severed (and was to be sewn back on by a remarkably quick-witted Leah, even as the doctor was sought) and there was of course an alarming loss of blood. He would never say what was wrong, if he was growing angry, or why he was growing angry-it was his habit merely to erupt into passion. Even when Yolande (with whom he shared certain secrets against their parents and the other adults) asked him what was wrong, was he slipping into a black mood, he muttered only, "Go to hell with you, you nosy damn bitch."