In windless calm under the pines, Reuben's dark-dilated eyes could still find the furrows where sled-runners had passed, and the half-moons of dainty hoof prints. Nothing stirred within the vague archway continually opening before him. Gradually, tree and rock and snow came to possess sharper lines, stronger shadows; somewhere, a birth of new light—"Ben," he said, "it's the moon."

"Where, Ru? I can't find it."

"Somewhere ahead...."

Since they came under the shelter of the trees—and that was a long time ago—Reuben had felt no longer the cold kiss of snowflakes. It had been nothing but a flurry, now ended. At a curve in the road he discovered, through a break in the treetops, a grayness brightening. He halted; Ben blundered into him, arms slipping clumsily around him as if in need of support. Dull rags of cloud dropped away from the naked radiance. "I told you, Ben. There she rides." Ben was smiling. "Ben—all's well?... I did right? We could not have stayed, and thou to be flogged, maybe put in the stocks."

"The stocks, was it?"

"Yes, old Anna was yattering about that too when they came home from the sermon, and Grandmother never said her nay."

"Of course thou'st done right.... They'll search. That snow wasn't enough to hide anything."

"No.... We've walked more than an hour—must have done five miles."

"We can walk another five." Though standing quietly, Ben was breathing too fast, his eyes too steadily fixed on the new light in the sky.

In the woods Ben always had been leader. And there it was Ben's natural way to send his glance flickering everywhere. Reuben recalled the voice of Jesse Plum: "No Inj'an'll ever surprise you, Ben. Swoonds, you could look at a squirrel while the little bugger jumps from one branch to the next, and tell me its age and gender, and if she be female whether she got little 'uns." Jesse had not croaked that in flattery. Wilderness had been near and vital to Jesse; he never made a mock of it, and was capable of scolding either boy for walking noisily in dead leaves.

"Ben, do you feel——"

"All's well. Let's go on."

Reuben walked on ahead, trying to set an easier pace. Surely, surely there was no reason why Ben should fall ill....

In time the forest opened to a park-like region where perhaps in past seasons the Indians had followed their custom of burning over the land, killing new growth and brush, allowing established trees to expand their side branches in isolation. Through more than a mile of this they walked. Ben did not speak.

The sled-tracks passed abruptly over the edge of a slope. Reuben could make out no treetops directly ahead, though a thick cluster of them stood to his left; the part of the slope where the road ran down would be open ground. A ghost of alien sound disturbed him.

He held out his hand, but Ben either failed to see it or was unwilling that his brother should go ahead alone; he still followed closely—more quietly though, more careful of his steps—when Reuben reached the beginning of the slope.

The thing could not be more than thirty feet away, a living blot of long shadow on the trampled white.

The slope ran steeply down. At the bottom, a flat expanse to the right must be the northern end of a pond or lake, frozen, snow-covered. The sled-tracks, plain in moon-shadow, skirted that level surface and disappeared in thicker woods beyond. On Reuben's left, all the way down the slope and connecting with the farther woods, hemlocks loomed densely black, branches bowing to the ground.

The thing gazed up across the wild turkey between its paws, and Reuben understood the sound—crunch of monstrous teeth on frail bone. Ben drew his knife and pushed in front muttering: "He won't attack, Ru. They're timid—Jesse alway said...."

The panther had flattened in alarm and readiness, all motionless but for a quiver at the tip of the tail. Round ears spread back on a skull smooth and cruel as the head of a snake, and moonlight greenly sparked from eyes arrogant with the majesty of loneliness. Once or twice the angry head dipped as if meaning to snatch up the meat and save it from the human threat; the motions were abortive, the beast preferring to freeze, and watch, and wait.

Reuben yielded no time to the weakening pain of anticipation. He scooped a handful of damp snow into a ball, swung on his heel in the fine free motion that Ben himself had taught him, and let fly.

The snowball hit the great face on the nose, spattering wonderfully. Unbelieving, Reuben watched a grayish blur shoot away to the black shelter of the hemlocks, belly to earth.

A violent tremor of reaction took hold of Reuben; he heard Ben gasp. "Ru—Ru—oh, man, how he scooned off!" Ben sat down laughing helplessly in the snow.

"Ay," said Reuben, shaken and panting and full of pride. "I allow, Mr. Cory, he might travel some little time, Mr. Cory." The tremor was overcome by the swift joyous action of running down the slope to bring back the remains of the turkey. "See, Ben—he's left us both legs and some of the back and breast."

"Poor puss! My own little brother, a man who'd steal from a——"

"Snow down your backside!" said Reuben, and jumped for him.

Ben caught him fairly and pulled him off his feet, but in the mimic struggle Ben stiffened suddenly and groaned: "Ru—help me up!" Before Reuben could do so, Ben was on his feet without help, denying his own words: "It's nothing, Ru—I got a little dizzy, nothing more."

"Ben, if you——"

"We can't go back.... Hoy, here's a thought! All that turkey blood on the snow—couldn't we make it seem——"

"Law you!" Reuben yelped and war-danced. Ben could not be ill, he thought, so long as he was able to produce such a dazzling conception. "Ben, a marvelous bloody swindle—why, damme, they'll mumble it in chimney comers till the Devil's blind, and his eyes a'n't sore yet. Think of it!—those poor lost boys!"

"Small red gobbets."

"What?"

"Hast thou forgotten? Thine own tales——"

"Oh, that. Nay then, behold how bravely they did stand before the beast—alas, all for nothing, though Benjamin Cory with his good right arm did—did make varsall sure to pick up the turkey feathers."

Eagerly Ben joined him in that undertaking. Reuben found and scuffed out the line of tracks where the gobbler had walked out from under the trees into calamity. As they viewed the shambles critically in devoted silence, it seemed to Reuben that there ought to be more blood. Beside the patch of snow where the stain was largest, Reuben dropped on his back with outflung arms to leave a tragic imprint. Ben grunted approval, but then spoke with a discouragement that was unlike him: "It'll never deceive a woodsman."

"Oh, Ben, they'll be townfolks that find it. Superstitious too. If our own trail ends here, what can they think? We must go under the trees, where—where he went."

"Oh, him!" Ben recovered, laughing again not quite naturally. "He's na' but a spent fart, Ru. He'll travel as you said, and then I picture him climbing a tree to grieve all day tomorrow about what my little brother did to him. 'Snowballs!' he'll say. 'Me, to be whopped by a snowball—why, bugger me blind, and all the time it was that Reuben Cory no bigger'n a boar's tit!'"

"You're no Goliar neither, in fact I could whup you handy with my arse tied under my chin. Now drag me, Ben, from here to the trees, along that line where he ran. That'll make a fine confusion and wipe out your own tracks. Then we'll follow his marks under the trees and smear our own till they can't tell which from nohow."

"That's the thing. What a catamount was he! Know what he did? Laid us out like a pair of sticks, he did, your ankle crossed on mine, took both feet in his mouth, poor wretch, and for his sins went a-blundering through the woods with a boy dangling on each side."

"I tell you, Ben, the superstitious will believe madder things than that. La, some of the tales Jesse used to tell!"

"Miaaow!" Ben doubled over, laughing far too much. "Why, of course—by the time the tale is carried back to Springfield he won't be a catamount at all. He'll be taller'n a house, the Old Nick himself with a passel of demons. It'll be a—a——" he stopped, watching Reuben blankly, all laughter spent.

Reuben said: "It will be a judgment of the Lord." Ben stared, and nodded, and looked away, searching the northern sky above the hemlocks.

Following his gaze, Reuben lost himself a while in the wonder of open night, seeing Cassiopeia released from a last fringe of departing cloud, and the Great Bear slanting toward the North Star. Reuben darkly felt the absence of some familiar thing, something his own mind ought to supply and would not. The night was serene, without complication beautiful, answering nothing.

Ben Cory followed his brother in slowly deepening weariness. The time must be not far from dawn. The moon rode high and lonely, dimmed by new cloud battalions from the west. Ben groped at the thought of sleep; but Reuben, who was wise about everything tonight, might tell him it was not yet time. Ben suffered a passing resentment, that the boy could walk on ahead so untiringly, so unconcerned.

In this more open part of the woods they were not attempting to disguise their tracks. Reuben said it was no longer worth it, and Reuben knew best. Ben tried to step in his brother's prints, nowhere else. This seemed a clever thing to do—when he could remember to do it, and forget the pain in his knee, and ignore certain soft dark waves that now and then approached him from nowhere and flowed away independently of any shadow on the moon.

Back there under the crowded hemlocks, a very long time ago, it had not appeared necessary after all to search for the panther's prints and follow them. All the way down that slope, and far beyond it where the land rose again and the hemlocks continued, many patches of snowless ground allowed them to progress without leaving marks. For an hour, or two or three hours perhaps, they had worked their way along these areas. Glimpses of the moon held them to a general easterly direction. In several places—Ben recalled this with solemn pride in Reuben's wisdom—Reuben had spread his jacket across a patch of snow too wide to jump, so that they might step on it and leave a vague blur nothing like a footprint, rather like the impress of some animal's body lying down. At the least, their efforts would provide a most confusing trail unless the searchers brought dogs; they reassured each other of this from time to time. Advance by this method had been tormentingly slow, yet after a while Reuben, who knew everything, announced that they must have covered another mile.

The road and the sled-tracks were things forgotten. The eastward direction was still a certainty: the moon had said so, until it climbed too high to be a fair guide. The trees had thinned out, the snow lay continuous on the ground; Reuben who knew everything said they might as well walk naturally again, since there was no help for it anyway, and to blur the tracks here would be a waste of effort. Ben had a confused sense of walking on higher ground where a light wind was blowing.

Once, back in the darker woods, he had heard the wail of a mountain cat, so thin and far away that hills and hollows must have intervened. Their friend, maybe, lamenting at snowballs. Reuben had laughed at it. Later Ben caught another sound, a remote tenor howling, lonely at first but answered by another and another. Reuben who knew everything had not laughed at that. Ben thought or imagined that he heard it still.

No wolves had come.

Or if they have come, he thought, I can't see them. They slip along fogfooted behind the larger trees—that tree or that one—maybe. If they are truly come, my brother Reuben will know and tell me. In time for me to draw my knife. Wolves do understand cold steel, they say....

"Ru——"

The boy turned quickly and came back to him. Ben saw his face fade and brighten; the eyes, improbably large, watched him from a mighty depth. Now that, Ben thought, that is certainly an effect of the new cloud-wrack passing over the moon. How warm it is! he thought—nay, damn the thing, how cold! Nothing's truly warm since Mother died, therefore I was deluded.... "Ru, what's the time?"

"Can't be far from dawn."

"How do you know?"

"I can feel it.... Some kind of shack over there—see it? A hunter's lean-to, that's what it is."

"Looks more like a beast."

"Can't you see the poles? Come on—it's not far."

"Ru, listen!"

"Yes, I hear them. They're a long way off. Come!"

"Wait, Ru!" The waves of darkness, each time they advanced on him, were climbing higher, toward his eyes. "Listen to me, Reuben, and not to the wolves." Perhaps the next one would go over his head, and he could be quiet. "Listen to me—in my father's house are many mansions."

"Ben, save thy breath. Lean on me. It's not far."

Nothing came in search of them that night. For another hour Reuben heard the wolves, unable to guess in what region of the secret night they were crying. The shrill desolation of the noise wavered from every quarter of the dark, ceasing at times; then the mind could propose that it had never sounded, until it started up afresh, as pain will.

A flood of intense and soundless fire grew along the lower edge of a mass of winter clouds that had gathered and thickened in the latter part of the night. At some time before the kindling of that sullen splendid flame the howling of the wolves was ended.

Ben had fallen into sleep. When they reached the lean-to he appeared to have shaken off some of his confusion. He spoke reasonably; he stretched out on the heap of leaves and long-dead balsam boughs, insisting that Reuben lie down and rest also. Doing so mainly to humor him, Reuben heard his brother mutter something about Roxbury and then grunt in the plaintive way he always did when sleep had taken him.

When the clouds caught fire Ben still slept, his cheeks raging hot and his hands restless.

The lean-to had been shrewdly made, by some hunter looking to his own welfare. Heavy poles slanted against the base of a perpendicular bank some seven feet high, with others laid across them horizontally; on these brush was piled; snow had gathered, making a dense roof. The back was closed with tougher brush. Near the open end the hunter had thoughtfully heaped dead sticks so that the next comer need not immediately search for firewood. The shelter stood near a curve of the bank, the open end facing east and secure from any wind but the most violent. The space under the roof, barely enough to allow a large man some elbow room, was almost warm, and became unmistakably so after the boys had lain there a few minutes. But Ben shivered continually in his fevered sleep.

Reuben wrapped his coat around Ben's legs. He dreaded lighting a fire: it seemed to him still that to be discovered by searchers from Springfield was a sharper peril than any other. They would do nothing for Ben's sickness, he thought—flog him and let him die. Reuben collected evergreen branches small enough to hack off with the kitchen knife, and piled them at Ben's sides and over him, to hold in the body warmth. This occupied him for half an hour. The sky flamed. It was the third day of March.

He found he could study the position with some practicality; he could weigh the odds for survival, and say: we have a pound or so of smoked ham, half a loaf, part of a raw turkey; we are at least ten miles from Springfield, and anyway I cannot leave him to search for help. Having done this once or twice, he found it unprofitable to toil through the summary again, yet the emptiness of the morning hour demanded action of the mind, if only to hold away a madness of panic.

He saw Springfield consumed like Deerfield by flame from heaven, then saw himself in the bleak honesty of morning as a foolish child for creating such an image: Springfield wasn't to blame. If he dared leave Ben and go back there, he might dodge the powers represented by Grandmother Cory and find help. But he could not leave Ben to retrace a journey of ten miles. Wolves hunted sometimes by daylight; wolves and Indians. They could find Ben sick and sleeping.

Ben shook in a chill; his tossing pushed away some of the cover. Reuben restored it and lay close against him to give what warmth he could until the shivering passed. Panting, with some faint shine of sweat on his forehead, Ben said: "Right of the meeting-house—yes, I see it."

Reuben tried then, long and earnestly, to pray in the manner of his childhood, repeating familiar words aloud, since Ben was too far lost in sleep and sickness to be disturbed. During the act of supplication, some memory nagged. Something demoralizing, to be refused, but at last it sharpened into focus in spite of him. His mother had prayed: "Deliver us from evil ..." her clear voice completing the words, twice, three times perhaps in that reddened doorway until she received the answer, the blow, itself a completion which God had allowed. To Reuben the sound of his own voice became alien, then contemptible, a disgusting whine. A human being ought never to sound like that. Why should God listen to such a squeak?

In the abrupt silence the words of that question swelled to vast importance. They were not right. The question was not the right one.

Change it. Shorten it.

Why should God listen?...

The question was still not the right one.

Reuben crawled out into cold sunless light. He searched the east. The sun was present, a hazed white blur just visible in the overcast. New snowflakes were already drifting, far apart, without a wind.

Why God?...

That was not merely the sun but something of the mind, old, vaguely evil, dying, dissolving not quite as a dream dissolves but with the illogic and inconsequence of a dream.

Reuben said aloud: "Why?..."

The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

The snow would thicken, covering all things. It increased as he watched, the white ball fading, blotted out at last in the gray and white morning. The cold was not severe. No wind was blowing.

Reuben said: "I do not believe it."

He crept back into the shelter to hold his brother in his arms.

Late in the morning Ben woke in a remission of the fever, knowing Reuben was not far away. To the complex interesting lines above him—evidently a roof—he said experimentally: "I must have been sick."

"Lie quiet!" The power of Reuben's hand on his chest startled him, the sodden ache of his own muscles dismayed him. "We can't go on today, Ben. It's snowing heavy. I mean to light a fire—with all the snow they'll never see the smoke, if they come this way at all."

"They?—oh." Ben doubtfully remembered. It would not do for Reuben to guess how puzzled he was; craftily he asked: "How far you think we came from Hatfield?"

"Hatfield?"

"How stupid I am!" The unintended words drawled out of his mouth and floated away. "Meant Deerfield. My leg...." Reuben (who knew everything) helped him shove down his breeches, then allowed him to sit up and look at the splinter-wound, a yellowish scabby island in a puddle of pink. He wished to study it, but Reuben was already pulling up the musty repellent garment and urging him back on the pile of sweet-smelling leaves. "Suppose that's what made me sick?"

"Maybe."

"Suppose I ought to be bled?"

"I daren't, Ben. I don't know how a physician does it. I might cut wrong and not be able to stop the flow."

"I'll do well enough."

"Yes, but you must eat, or you'll weaken."

Ben considered this. He was hungry, yes, but wasn't some difficulty connected with the idea of eating? Meanwhile someone, apparently himself, was burdened with a bladder about to burst. "Must go outside."

"Watch out!" Reuben somewhere sounded frightened or angry. "You'll fetch down the roof if you try to stand."

That was sensible, Ben observed—of course he would, and then they'd have all the trouble of building it over. He located Reuben kneeling in a whiteness outside, ready to help him in spite of his stupidity, and crawled to him. Improbably, the boy transformed himself into a pillar under Ben's right arm, a curve of warm iron around Ben's middle—only Reuben who knew everything could have thought of that.

Out here in the blind white morning, Ben was distressed by inability to interpret what he saw. The swirling pallor might conceal a thousand significant shapes. He simply must not urinate on what might easily turn out to be Grandmother Cory's doorstep. He asked with care: "Here?"

"Anywhere. Hurry! You must get back under cover."

"That's right," said Ben humbly, suffering a panic dread that his bladder would never let go; it did, with relief like an end of pain. But still the gray and white was all a whirling bewilderment. He knew the sentinel monsters to be trees; nothing or everything might be stirring just beyond reach of his vision in these enormous distances. "Where is the way where light dwelleth?"

"What?"

"Which way is Roxbury?"

"That's east," said Reuben, and jerked his head. "Don't think about it now. Come back under cover. Damnation, Ben, help me a little! You know I can't lift you if you fall."

Ben walked with extreme care, and then crawled, back on the pile of leaves. Darkness approached and slid away. Reuben was shaking his shoulder, urging him to eat something. "What? What is it?"

"Some of the ham I stole—don't you remember?"

"Yes. But.... How much have we?"

"A plenty. See—all this. And the turkey too—I'll cook that when I have a fire going."

"Oh yes, the turkey.... Ru——"

"I ate all I wanted while you were sleeping."

He would lie of course, Ben thought. But with a face changeable as sunlight on a wind-rippled pond, Reuben had never been a good liar. Ben lifted a heavy arm to turn that face into the wan daylight. "You—did?"

"I swear to you, Ben, we have enough for several days, and I ate all I needed an hour ago."

Ben struggled over the mouthfuls. The meat lay heavy in him, threatening nausea; that passed. He accepted a final wave of darkness—not true darkness, simply a voluntary closing of the eyes. Certainly not unconsciousness, because he could feel Reuben wrapping some cloth around his legs. He wondered what it was, the curiosity not powerful enough to raise his ponderous eyelids. Later he heard Reuben speak—close to his ear maybe; surely not far away, or the words could not have reached him with that sweetness and clarity: "Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me."

The wolves came that night, not with howling but in silence.

Through the afternoon, under the long patient drive of snow, Reuben had gone out after more dead wood whenever Ben seemed quiet in his sleep. He had struggled with Ben's tinderbox to the edge of despair, and won a flame at last, the fire then leaping bravely and settling to steadiness under the endless slanting white, the smoke pushed away from the opening of the lean-to by a faint breeze out of the west. When he had gathered all the firewood he could find without going beyond reach of Ben's voice, Reuben used the stolen kitchen knife to hack off a green ash sapling and trim it to a six-foot spear. He was wearing Ben's knife now at his belt, but was unwilling to employ it in such labor—besides, the tedious task of trimming and whittling disposed of much time when there was nothing else to do and he knew it might be dangerous to think. All afternoon he heard only the crackle of his fire, the sustained mild hiss of the snow, and the small sounds of Ben's troubled slumber. His mind heard the wolves, knowing they would come.

The hunter-builder had chosen this location cleverly. Thick brambles and a looping confusion of wild grape covered the high bank above the lean-to; a beast could squirm through it, no doubt, but probably would not try, and surely would not jump down from it so long as someone tended a fire below. This fair security in the rear left only a half-circle of territory that needed watching. At the western end of that little arc, where the lean-to itself shut off his view if he sat by the opening, Reuben laid ready a stack of dead wood mixed with evergreen branches. It would be a moment's work to carry a brand to that pile, sending it up in a fine blaze to guard the blind spot. The wolves would not like that.

This was his last act of preparation before evening came on. He knew of evening as a gradual failing of the light, a growth of shadows in the continual drift of snowflakes, a shift from gray to black. At one time it had been afternoon; then afternoon resembling evening. Then night. Reuben became ears and eyes.

He could never hear their feet when they came, but all night he must listen for any change in Ben's breathing or any call from him, such a sound as might be smothered by fire noises or the small narcotic monotone of the snow. He sought to imitate Ben's way of looking everywhere, never allowing his gaze to become frozen in a stare. If something seemed to move out yonder, as happened many times deceivingly after darkness beyond the fire had grown complete, he must flick a glance at it, look away, return, and so assure himself that it was nothing, maybe a leap of fire-shadow, a harmless swaying of a branch of the giant spruce that stood twenty yards away.

He knew the truth of it, and with relief because it ended the sour agony of anticipation, when twin emeralds to the left of the spruce blinked on and off and shone again nearer. Two other pairs of jewels flashed into life, one to the right, the third directly below the tower of the tree. "I know you," he called. "I know you for what you are."

He stood up to look beyond the lean-to. A fourth pair of hunting lights had been approaching the blind spot, and halted at sight of him. Reuben drew forth a burning stick. He walked slowly, with care for the flame, and touched it to the dead wood and pine needles. The lights in the snow did not retire; they watched, curious and cold. In the sudden radiance they acquired a gray body, taut, startled at the new flame but not yet in retreat and visible to Reuben in sharp detail. A bitch wolf carrying young, her belly not much distended but seeming so because of the gauntness of her ribs and a wiry thinness of long flanks.

Only four; probably no others. They ranged in small groups like families, Jesse Plum used to say. The tales of large wolf packs, Jesse insisted, were travelers' fancies. A few of the young sometimes remained with the old ones until full-grown, then drifted away to start families of their own. "Be you ever confronted by 'em," said Jesse once, "they'll be few, boys, and no great peril unless they can get behind you in the dark. True, they can kill you and eat you, but they do doubt it, they understand cold steel and they be full of fear, the way all creatures fear man, and so do I." Well, in the complex story that grew from that opening, Jesse had been assailed by ten wolves who were not wolves; after he climbed seventy feet to the top of a beech, the great dog wolf leader had scrambled up after him, snapping at his heels but unable to reach them so long as Jesse remembered to make certain signs in the air. All that had been perfectly understood as a fireside fantasy, designed to send the children off to the black garret in a good mood. Here, Reuben told himself, he faced only four common wolves, angry with the long winter hunger but afraid of the fire. The gummy spruce branch in his hand still sputtered hotly. He flung it at the somber eyes. The bitch wolf casually dodged the brand. He saw the gray evil of her glide away to join the three others in deeper obscurity.

He sat on his heels near the opening of the lean-to, the green ash spear lying under his right hand, and listened for Ben's breathing. That sound reached him at last, seeming untroubled; then he could watch with greater assurance. If anything pushed through the brambles and dry brush at the top of the bank, he would hear it and be ready.

The eyes shifted, winked, vanished to reappear in silence. He found no more than four pairs at any time. If they became three or two, that might mean fresh danger. They remained, for a long time, four.

Reuben wondered when the snowfall had ceased. He remembered noticing that it was thinning when the eyes first appeared. Now it was over, the air clean and mild, a weak wind still sending the smoke away from the place where Ben lay sleeping. Reuben glanced upward in search of stars and found a few. Maybe—though not for hours yet, he thought—the moon would return, and shine on a smooth silver blank where yesterday his feet and Ben's had scrawled a trail.

He began to feel acquainted with those eyes. "You over on the left," he called—"you're Snotnose. You under the spruce, you're Trundletail, and your mother is Doxy Tumble." For a while he amused and warmed himself by hurling snowballs at them.

They slunk away, not far. The unconcern of their withdrawal conveyed the arrogance of contempt. They could wait.

Reuben's amusement died like the breaking of a weapon in his hand. He thought: What do they know? He stood as tall as he could, waving the green spear, and shouted at them: "I know you! Dirty dogs! Offal! I spit on you!" He fought back a desire to rush out in pursuit of them, with Ben's knife and the green spear.

That would be mad. They would understand his smallness, his singleness, and close in, tear him apart, move on to the shelter where Ben lay helpless and sleeping.... Reuben carried more wood to the other fire, then forced himself to squat once more patiently on his heels, and keep count of the pairs of eyes. Four. He could wait, too. How long?

Eternal hours. Like those that must have already passed since the wolves came. Or had they been there forever?

Why, of course they had. The breed was immortal. They had never been far from Deerfield. They owned the wilderness before ever Christians came to it. They howled in Rome, when Reuben Cory was not. Meeting the green ancient stare from the dark, Reuben felt his face stiffly smiling. He thought: It's true, true—there was a time when I was not. Something new began—something—the name of it I, Reuben Cory. Well, this I may have known, but until now I did never believe it.... He shivered, and although there was cool pleasure in it he drove away the consolation of philosophy because anything that dimmed alertness was dangerous. He could wait.

In a reasonable world, one slept for a part of each revolution of the beautiful sun. Reuben thought back in search of the last time he had slept—Springfield, before Jesse was found in the snow. Danger hid in this reflection also, the danger of self-pity. He put an end to it: I will not sleep.

It came to him that if one is hungry enough, any creature not downright poisonous is meat. Suppose, somehow——?

He could not go out against them, away from the fires. Either they would rush him all four together, or they would run away—good meat lost. But suppose, somehow, one of them might be tempted to come alone—say the old gray bitch who had already tried a sneak approach. How?

Wisdom lurked in her, a cold flame behind a long gray face. Reuben thought of her as their leader. He discovered that he hated her, in a swelling ecstasy not extended to her slinking companions. The thought of killing her, at first a random flicker like a further warning of madness, became a purpose, a source of power, a wildness deserving a better name than lunacy because of its very absurdity. For ten minutes or perhaps an hour Reuben hovered apart from his mind and watched the thought grow. A boy does not kill a grown wolf with a little stick.

And yet the point was sharp. The ash would bend like a bow but never break. His hand and eye were true, true as Ben's.

The fire beyond the lean-to was dying down. This had happened before—how many times? Marching over to refresh it, Reuben found he could not remember. No moon yet, therefore dawn must be remote in the future. He stood with his spear on the unimpeded ground between the two fires, considering, brooding.

The passion of hatred held something of love or at least a sultry need, a hunger not of the belly. He studied the pairs of eyes—four—wondering which pair might be hers. He fell to muttering, aiming at the gray bitch wolf every foulness of indecent words he could recall. Words only, unrelieving, lacking the thrust and achievement of a spear. New words startled him: "Such meat should help him...."

He had not the strength to do any harm with a thrown spear; he would only lose the weapon. Sometimes the very power of a stronger adversary can be made to work for you. If you know how. If you dare.

Reuben knew he was not mad. Within the passion was a coldness to match her own; shrewdness; wicked planning with all the treachery of a wolf and the bravery. No time now to think of courage or fear. Endless time to know the unbearable need for an act of love.

Reuben sank to his heels on this open ground, the lean-to at his back, fires not great to the left and the right of him, between him and the wolves only an expanse of flame-lit snow. He dropped the green ash spear in that white so that the sharp end was covered. His hand curling midway on the shaft owned a separate life, refusing to suffer from the harsh coldness. Gradually he allowed his head to droop, lift feebly and droop again, while his upturned eyes, perhaps not plain to the enemy, maintained alertness. Seeing all. Clever as Ben's.

The beasts were cruelly wise, Jesse Plum used to say. Out of thickets and moon-shadows they watched men's ways, as dogs did. Unlike dogs they watched only for signs of weakness, and this from no motives but hunger and savagery—except, said Jesse, those wolves which were not wolves.

He must be not reckless but wise and cold as they. He must be ready also to recognize the need for retreat. Supposing they all four came together, then he must jump to life quickly, scare them with noise and bustling and renewal of the fires. But supposing, when this interminable ordeal of crouching, waiting and feigning weakness came to an end, supposing it ever did—supposing his feet had not grown numb and frozen to betray him—supposing the old gray bitch should advance alone, while Ben lay sleeping and the Great Bear slanted toward the North Star——

She was coming.

He would not believe it for a while. Slowly he explained to himself that one of them must have crept out into the open a long time ago, as some trick of the firelight deceived him into calling it another shadow. Then he knew this was not so. She was coming to him. With all his heart he accepted it.

He lowered his head once more, and in that moment witnessed the brief belly-to-earth advance, the freezing down to watch him again across a much smaller distance. This could only be the one he hated, no other. She was coming to him. The others remained a shifting of eyes beyond the clear ground—afraid of him, mere offal, mere dogs as she was not—or else they were holding back because they knew her reasons and his own.

He knew that if he were to jump to his feet and dodge back behind the fire, she would not rush, not yet. No gambler, she would slide away and wait for the certainty, wait till dawn or beyond dawn or beyond the next dawn. He could not do it. It might be wiser, safer; might almost be a duty to Ben that he should retreat to comparative safety, now, while he had time. His body would not do it. His body would only wait like a bowstring, clutching the spear, controlling that deceitful droop of his head until the approaching moment when one of them—a half-starved alien beast or a boy who must remember the doorway of a reddened room where he clung sickly to a bedpost and did nothing—one of them would die quickly.

Was she only a wolf? Some wolves, Jesse said——

Was it possible—he was up on his feet in the surging act of madness—was it possible she could hate and love him in the same way?

He could not understand.

His mind must have flown away, missing the interval, the second of decision. But she was here. She was down. It was over.

She had screamed once, he thought, like a human thing; his ears held something of the strangled cry. More of the moment returned, her flaring mouth receiving the point in mid-air, her own driven weight spitting her upon it. It could not have happened.

It had happened, and she was down, and it was over, and he could remember his own backward staggering at the impact while all of him tightened down on that center of existence where his hands grasped the green ash spear. There followed some wave of elastic power in his legs, and all the force was then flowing the other way until it was over.

Simple butchery remained. He must follow with the spear her agonized writhing, hating no longer. No danger. Her failing paws threshed and tore at the shaft of the death she had swallowed. Her blood fumed out around it from a pierced lung.

It was all over.

"Thursday night we came away—remember? That was the night you fell sick, and was burning and tossing all day Friday. Saturday you was better, but once or twice you didn't know me. It was the Friday night when the wolves came."

"Are they still about? Nay, they can't be on so fair a morning. I feel washed clean, Ru. Weak, but—oh, I could do anything."

"Weaker than you know. It'll pass. I saw the wolves last on Saturday. They scented something, I think, and drifted away."

"It's all so still under the sun, and warm—what? I thought this was Saturday."

"This is Monday, Ben. Yesterday was the Sabbath. I hadn't thought of that till now, when you began asking me about the time. It was yesterday your fever broke for good. These three days have been a hundred years. I've had much time to think, when there was nothing else I could do—mind the fire, gather more wood, then either think or go mad, but I've not gone mad. I have not prayed, Ben, since before dawn on the Friday morning."

"I don't know what I should say about that. Father said, just before he died—did you hear?—said that God is far away."

"And Mother's last prayer was not answered. She prayed, 'Deliver us from evil.' And mine have never been answered."

"But we can't know that."

"I can't say that I know anything, anything at all, except that I'm here with you, and the air has turned warm, and the Bay Path road must be somewhere a mile or so over yonder, and tomorrow we shall try for Roxbury."

"And that thou hast killed a wolf.... Ru, if I didn't see that carcass under my nose——"

"I never lied to you. Oh—tales for your fancy now and then."

"I know that. What did you do with the hide?"

"Flung it out to the cannibals. The entrails too, and the head. They were delighted."

"Puh! What's this part I'm eating now and enjoying so?"

"Have you swallowed it, Mr. Cory?"

"I have, and you needn't try to make me puke."

"A puppy. She was carrying young—six. I had one whole, when you was still in the fever."

"Ow-ooh!"

"Oh, ay, your ears'll turn furry any day now. I say, Ben, when we're dirty-rich and famous, let's keep a few wolves on hand—you know, so to have roasted pups for guests of distinction."

"Now you sound like yourself."

"Do I?... Ben, I—something happened that night, Friday night."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know whether I can tell it.... When I dragged the carcass to the fire I was crying like a fool, I don't know why. Sat there crying with her bloody head on my knees, some-way I couldn't make it seem she was only a piece of meat. Later I could, later it didn't matter. And then—well...."

"What is it, Ru?"

"I found my britches were wet. Nay, not what you think, and not her blood neither, though that's dried all over 'em and I declare we both smell like the Devil's own. Remember you told me how some time soon, whenever it happened, I'd be spending the seed?"

"Oh—of course."

"Ben, I didn't know it when it happened. It must have been the moment when I was killing her. I didn't know it could happen that way."

"I didn't neither."

"Is something wrong with me?"

"No, no."

"You see, I already knew how it feels. I did confess to you about that—long ago, remember? That was the time when you told me, about the change, and the seed."

"Yes. Well, they say it's a sin to bring it on, but I think it must be venial, Ru, for Jesse said once that every man's vessels are alway in need of it. The dreams don't help. Nothing's wrong with you."

"But why didn't I know it when it happened?"

"Oh, the excitement—why, you must have been white-hot, to stand up to a wolf with nothing but a little stick. I didn't know it could happen that way, but I think it's not so strange."

"Jesse Plum.... Why did Father never speak of those things?"

"I don't know, Ru."

"Did he to you?"

"No, he never.... Look: I remember I spent once, merely from lifting a big rock. And—oh, tree-climbing, things like that. So you see—anyway there's nothing wrong with you, brother, nothing."

"Do you have those dreams much, Ben?"

"Not too often. You?"

"Oh, they...."

"You will. You'll be dreaming about girls, and——"

"I ... You'll be strong enough to go on tomorrow, Ben. One thing: we needn't fret now about anyone following from Springfield. That snow will have covered everything. I hope they found the turkey blood before it began a-falling. We can go slowly, rest as soon as we come to another fair shelter. This morning might be the start of another thaw, even an early spring—only look at the tears of that spruce, how they fall in the sun! We'll find more food some-way, now that you're well. There must be towns between here and Roxbury, where we could work for a few meals, a few nights' rest."

"Why, sure, we'll make it.... What happened to your jacket?"

"My—oh, the wolf."

"But the wolf did not reach you, brother."

"I dragged her."

"And so got your jacket torn and muddy on the inside? But I found it wrapped around my legs yesterday when I woke with a clear head, and you slipped it away, but I knew. Last night when it turned a little colder you put it around me again, thinking I was asleep, and I was silent, wishing to speak but too stupid."

"No need. You'd have done the same. Don't speak of it now."

"Very well. But——"

"Thou owest me nothing. I've been forced to think of these things—so many hours, Ben, when I—nay, but how could there be any owing or standing beholden between thee and me?"

"I think I owe thee everything."

"No! Pray understand, Ben. It's not a thing to be measured—why, it's not a thing at all, but—oh, like a region one travels through, an area of light."

"Love, a region?"

"What else? Can you own it or give it or take it? It came to me, Ben, that we only dwell in it, as in the sun, or this morning air."