In His Own Words

HARD TO SAY WHAT FRIGHTENS A MAN MORE-THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY OUTSIDE HIS DOOR OR INSIDE HIS MIND

HE HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO OWN LAND. NOT JUST A NICE BACK­YARD. BUT AN EXPANSE. LAND AS FAR AS THE EYE COULD SEE. ENOUGH LAND TO GET LOST IN.

HE HAD NO IDEA WHERE THIS DREAM CAME FROM. HE HAD GROWN UP IN THE CITY, AND HIS PARENTS DID NOT REALLY UNDERSTAND LEISURE OR THE OUTDOORS. WHEN MUELLER WENT TO COLLEGE AND MADE FRIENDS WHOSE FAMILIES HIKED AND CAMPED, HE

couldn't imagine it. His mother in a sleeping bag? A tent?

But even then he had wanted land. To own a chunk of prairie. Or forest. And now he had it. Mueller stood in the gravel drive in front of the small white clapboard farmhouse. It was in good shape, cozy. His wife liked it and had plans for some remodeling, but it was the acres beyond that excited Mueller.

"Those are our trees," he told Annie, his four-year-old, as he helped her out of the car. His sons, both older than Annie, had soccer games. His wife was running laps between the fields while Mueller had escaped up here with his daughter to roam the property they had bought a few months ago after a long period of debate. Annie, a serious child, looked off in the distance and rubbed her nose.

"Do we own the sky?" she asked.

Mueller did not really know the answer. What were "air rights" anyway?

"I don't think we own the sky," he said. "Just the ground. And the stuff that's on it."

"I want Mom," his daughter responded. Her tone was desultory and probably intended to be provocative, a way to hold her ground. They had already been through that one several times in the car. His daughter preferred her mother's com­pany. It was one of the amazing things about having children—to realize you could have a complicated relationship with someone who was four years old.

Mueller's life had changed around the time his daughter was born. He had been a trader to start with, and did well at it, but that was not a life for somebody with a family—you'd blow your heart out screaming in the pits. Soon after Annie came along, a friend had offered him an outside job selling brokerage services to corporate investors who wanted to get into the futures markets. Now Mueller was on an airplane three or four times a week, sometimes crossing the ocean and coming back in a space of days. When he reached home on Fridays, he often stood on the step, taking a deep breath before entering. He was about to plunge into the realm of true feeling, where he loved everyone inside that door and where they each would be simultaneously overjoyed to see him and resentful he had been away. They all would be worn out by his absence, his wife and the two boys who'd once had him as a constant companion and now received his attention only on the weekends, and even more so Annie,

who regarded him with suspicion, this man who was there, then disappeared. From an early age she seemed to realize it had not been the same with her two brothers. During the years he was trad­ing, Mueller was home by late afternoon and took over with the kids until he got them into bed. He drove, he bathed and fed—and played. All that had changed with the new job. He was making far too much money to even consider quitting. He'd had one great year after another. He was taking care of the stuff he'd always known he had to worry about someday, college and retirement, a bigger house. They could afford things he never thought they'd have. Like land. Forty acres, wooded. Oak—white, red, burr. Shagbark hickory. A few stray pines that grew from the seeds the birds had carried from the Christmas-tree farm down the road. He was learning the names of the trees he owned. He still did not under­stand why it thrilled him.

With Annie, he stopped in the house to place the groceries he'd brought for lunch in the old groaning refrigerator. She ate only peanut butter or bologna— or occasionally, to the mockery of her brothers, both foods together—but you had to watch her. She never understood she was hungry until it was on her like a raging beast. She refused the peanut-butter crackers he offered her now and went off to play with a set of wooden trucks the boys had handed down.

"Let's go for a walk," Mueller told her. "Let's go for a walk in the woods. Do you want to see the woods?"

"Are there bugs?" his daughter asked.

Mueller pondered. "Some," he answered.

"What kind?"

He didn't know really. "Nothing to hurt you," he said. "Come on. Let's go. Don't you want to see what our woods look like? We can take a walk and see our woods. You can tell Monica about it. Monica doesn't have any woods."

Annie skated the wooden trucks across the floor, but he could tell she was con­sidering all of this. She was a beautiful towheaded little girl with a solemn look, especially in the many moments when ihe withdrew into herself. He thought she bore a resemblance to him, especially the brow and eyes, but Annie herself believed otherwise, even going so far as to correct those who said, when she was beside her father, that she was his image. "I look like my mom," she would declare

with an utter finality, as if this were a fact established by science. She had cer­tainly mastered many of her mother's expressions, especially a dour, doubtful gaze that both of them frequently fixed on Mueller and which he saw now when he spoke of the woods. He had to coax her a few more times, but she finally rose up and took his hand, and together they strolled outside.

It was a mild day, with spring gusts. The forecast had been for isolated storms, but instead there was a strong sun amid the frothy clouds. Mueller often said that, in his next life, he wanted to come back as a weatherman and make half a million bucks a year for being wrong three quarters of the time.

At the back of the yard, between two stout oaks, there was a path into the woods. The realtor had showed it to them when they bought the place, but that was at the end of winter, and the trees now were in full leaf, just going from that soft spring green to the fully defined shade of summer, and beneath them scrub plants had sprung up, along with tendrils and runners of all kinds thicken­ing on the ground. Mueller picked up a broken branch and hacked at some of the brush. He could see plenty of clear space beyond, but the ground was soft and he took Annie back inside and put on the high rubber boots he had brought for her at his wife's suggestion. Annie whined a bit as he forced her foot into the knee-highs and he thought for a second that they were going to have one of those scenes in which she reminded him how much better his wife was at these tasks, but once the red rubber boots were on she liked the look and the idea of being able to tromp without care in the mud. Back outside, Mueller took the same dead branch and pushed aside the leaves as if they were a curtain.

As he did it, he felt a chill breath stir­ring through the wind. The clouds to the west had thickened somewhat. Annie, like most four-year-olds, had a primor­dial fear of thunder, but they would be spending no more than half an hour on their explorations. But Mueller thought the time would be important. Whenever Annie returned to this place, she would know that she and her father had discov­ered what was here together, before her brothers, or even her mom. He reached back to take his daughter's hand.

With only a few steps, they fell into the eerie (continued on page 132)

WOODS

(continued from page 80)

dusk of the forest world in which only its own sounds were audible within the thick greenery. This isolation inside the land he owned was, Mueller quickly realized, what he had always longed for. It seemed to have something to do with his thoughts as a child of what it must have been like to be a king in a fairy tale, sovereign over all he could see.

This remained a primary-growth for­est, or so the realtor had told him. He wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but he knew the trees were old. He stood with Annie beside an enormous white oak and reached his hands around it, holding one of hers. When he told her to try to grab his other hand, there was a gap of at least two feet.

"This tree is older than any person you know, sweetie. It's older than anybody I ever met in my life."

He led Annie along, stepping into the open breaks between the bases of the trees and the hardy low-lying brush that had gained a foothold around them. The path was less distinct than he had thought when they had started out. There were thorny bushes to be avoided and sometimes no clear direction amid the thickets.

More than once, the sharp thorns of a tree or bush had snagged his clothes or Annie's, and at one point a projecting branch he'd failed to notice raked across his arm. Mueller swore out loud as he in­spected the dotted line of blood the buck­thorn had engraved in his skin. Annie did not miss the opportunity to scold him.

"Daddy, that's a bad word."

"You're right, baby. I'm sorry."

On the path, or what remained of it, the fall's leaves and the downed tree branches were well into the process of decomposi­tion, yielding a goo black as tar.

"This is how the soil gets made," Muel­ler told his daughter, "from other grow­ing things." On either side of Mueller's property were working farms, bean fields east, corn west, and the earth beneath their feet was coal black and fragrant with its own loamy richness. He pointed grow­ing things out to Annie as they walked: the green lichens that carpeted the earth in patches and several bright-orange mushrooms, the size of small plates, adhering to the bases of the trees. In one area where a massive oak had come down yielding a break in the canopy, thin stalks of raspberry, fuzzed with thorns, were emerging from the broken remains of the tree, as well as some kind of rose­bush, primrose probably, with tiny white flowers. The sights excited and intrigued Mueller, all this stuff he knew next to nothing about and would now come to understand over the years.

Annie for her part seemed to be lis­tening to him with some of the endur­ing skepticism with which she always regarded him, but he did his best to

entertain her with his curiosity. As Muel­ler was explaining how they would be able to eat wild raspberries in a month or two, he stepped down into a pile of nested wood on the path, and an ani­mal of some kind shot out from under it. Annie squealed and Mueller himself instinctively grabbed her and threw her to his other side. With the quick move­ment, the bright pain from a nagging disc radiated toward his toes, and as Mueller held his daughter in his arms he felt her heart racing at the same pace as his.

"What was that, Daddy?"

"Nothing to hurt us," he answered. He really didn't know. Like Annie, he'd seen only the dark form as the animal raced from cover. Barely an hour from the city, Mueller's woods were full of creatures. The realtor had explained that there was little wooded land left due not sim­ply to the clearing for farms but because the Indians before had burned out huge chunks of forest to flush the wildlife and to make sure the tribes could drive their prey into open ground. The remaining forests, like this one, were the principal breeding grounds for badgers, foxes, wild turkeys, skunks, woodchucks, bea­ver—and deer, of course, which roamed around eating everything like large brown rabbits. Recently coyotes had moved into these parts, eager predators that flour­ished on the abundance of smaller ani­mals, including the farmers' cats and dogs. Some months ago a coyote had gone rabid, and on the first of the family's visits up here, Mueller had seen a swarm of farmers pouring from all sides into a patch of woods nearby in their optic-orange hunting suits, shotguns raised like some kind of rural SWAT team. Mueller assumed the animal had been dispelled, although he had never heard for sure.

To distract Annie, he stood at the base of another huge burr oak and lifted her, more slowly this time, so they could look up into the immense umbrella.

"Do you know what trees eat?"

"Bugs?" asked Annie. Probably wishful thinking. There had not been too many insects so far. A few black wasps had come swirling by to Annie's dismay, but for the most part it was not so bad. They were still a week or two ahead of the mosqui­toes. The checkout woman at the grocery had told him that.

"That tree eats sunshine. That's why it's so tall. Isn't that smart? To grow so far into the sky to get dose to what it needs."

"Is it bigger than an elephant?"

"Ten times," said Mueller. "Maybe 20." He put her down and wandered on.

"Are we lost?" his daughter asked him a minute later.

Lost? He swung back to look for the path behind him, but it was not immedi­ately apparent.

"No, no," Mueller finally answered, but he had waited an instant too long to answer, and the child, a master of nuance, turned to scrutinize him.

"Mom won't like it if we're lost."

True enough. He wouldn't like it either. He tried to stare through the brush to see the house, but it was hidden now.

"I need to potty," Annie said. That explained her sudden concern about knowing the way.

"Let's take just another minute out here," Mueller said, but he decided then it was better to turn back to home.

When they did, he had trouble finding the path. He went left and right with no success, and for lack of any other option, he led Annie in a wide circle around the tree—at least he thought it was the same tree—he had spoken to her about. After several minutes Mueller realized he could not find the path. In fact, he was not sure they had ever been on the path.

He stood still then, trying to form a plan, and was there when he heard the first faint rumble of thunder. The simple truth came to him then: This had been a bad idea.

"Daddy," Annie said. He knew what was next. He was already behind the eight ball. "Do trees really eat sun?" she asked.

It took him a second to process the question. "Sort of. They don't have mouths. They're not exactly like animals. They eat their own way. Come on, sweetie. Let's get back to the house."

He had realized, while he was answer­ing his daughter, that they could sim­ply follow their footprints through the soft earth, and he led her back the way they had come, including circling the tree once more. But the indentations in the soil disappeared on a swell of high ground he had not noticed before, and so he looked again for the path. One direction appeared largely clear. That had to be it, but there was a faint trickle of water percolating through the soil. He couldn't believe he wouldn't have shown that to his daughter. Was that when they were looking up at the tree?

Annie's grip on his finger had tight­ened noticeably.

"Daddy, where are we going?"

"Back to the house."

"I need to potty."

"I know."

"I'm hungry."

Oh Jesus, he thought. She was going to be a sulky mulish weepy creature any instant now. He set off at once for the wet ground. That had to be the way.

They were a few steps along when Annie jerked his hand and shrieked.

"Daddydaddydaddy!" When he turned back, one of her feet was in a sinkhole, not far from where the water was bubbling through the earth. Her entire boot was gone from sight and her leg was in the black mud to the knee. She looked to him, unsure if she should be amused or terrified, and he tried at once to make light of it.

"Oh, look at that," he said, "isn't that silly?" He launched into an explanation of a sinkhole, how water underground softened the earth. "Let's pull," he said. He grabbed the boot top. "One, two,

three." They tried several times, but the boot might as well have been set in con­crete. Annie by now had decided there was no humor in this situation, and he recognized he had to free her quickly. He took her leg. "Can you get your foot out of the boot?" He jerked on her calf and it came out with a sudden whoosh, so unex­pectedly that he toppled over with Annie landing solidly on top of him.

"Oh brother." He was sunk in the goo, and his entire back was soaked. "Oh, am I a mess." Except for the fact that she was shoeless, Annie was unscathed and laughed when her father got up and dis­played his backside, mud-covered to the collar of his shirt. He carried his daugh­ter over to the high ground and then returned to free the boot. He tried work­ing with a stick first, then began scooping out the earth with his hands. He had got­ten down several inches when he realized that the boot was sinking farther. He had to hold onto the top of it and dig with the other hand, but even so, one edge was beneath the level of the ground. Once he got the thing free, it was filled with pitch-colored mud. He shook it out as well as he could, but he already knew that his precise daughter would not put her foot

back in that slop. He picked her up and carried her and the boot along.

"Daddy, you're dirty," she told him.

"I am, sweetheart."

"You're making me dirty."

"I'm sorry."

"I don't have new clothes."

"I'll clean you off when we get inside."

"I'm dirty. Daddy-'

"It'll be okay."

He had barely said that when there was a distinct crack of thunder. It echoed a bit, so he knew they had some time. In his arms, Annie tensed and swiveled toward the sound.

"It's okay, baby," he told her.

"I don't like boomers, Daddy."

"I know, sweetie. That's why we're going back inside."

He walked on urgently, until he recalled he still had no idea where they were headed. He was increasingly fright­ened, tromping around in circles, and was growing angrier by the minute with himself for ever wanting any of this. A wild unknown seemed to have trapped him. Looking around, it occurred to Mueller he knew exactly as much about these plants as they knew about him. Owning them was a ridiculous notion.

Their existence went on and so did his, with little meaningful intersection. It had seemed so obvious that a man could not get lost in his own woods, that hav­ing the right to level everything in front of him, an entire landscape, meant it could not get the better of him or mystify him. Wandering about with his daughter growing heavy in his arms, his hip starl­ing to ache, he could not imagine the source of such a grand illusion.

Where was the sun? He found it over his right shoulder, still visible through the thickening gray, but that did not really do him that much good because he was not sure if it was before or after noon. He gave some thought to asking Annie which way she thought the house was. Even at the age of four, she had an impressive sense of direction. But he knew from the way she was clinging that it would scare her more if he admitted his confusion.

"Are we lost?" she asked again.

"We're in our woods," he answered.

"But where is the house? 1 need to potty, Daddy. Real real bad."

He asked the inevitable: one or two? "Well, then, go here," he said. "You know-how to go outside. Remember you'd go outside at the beach when you were little."

"Oooh, Daddy." The thought was revolting to someone who had been fully-trained for only a little more than a year. It took some time.

While she was squatting, a bird called sharply overhead and a tree branch rattled in the midst of some kind of woodland skirmish. Startled, Annie jerked to her feet and wet her pants. As soon as she real­ized what had happened, that she had to choose between nakedness and wearing soiled clothes, she dissolved in tears. When he picked her up to console her, she beat on his collarbone while she wept. Mueller held her for quite some time, rocking her as he had when she was a baby. She went through her list of needs. She was hungry and dirty. She wanted to go home. She wanted her mom. In the end, when he could put her down, Mueller removed her remaining boot, tucking the wet underwear in the dirty boot, then replacing her jeans. She shook her bottom.

"That feels funny," she said, but she was not completely unhappy.

He picked her up and began to move again. Annie still seemed preoccupied by the noise in the trees.

"Daddy, are there lions here?"

"No no, sweetheart," he told her, even though he had recently heard radio reports of mountain lions moving south. It was the coyotes that concerned him. The animals in these woods were entirely unpredictable in their interaction with humans, unlike city creatures. In the sec­ond or third trip Mueller and his fam­ily had made up here, they had heard someone tapping at the sliding glass door to their deck, only to find a wild turkey, a torn, pecking belligerently at its own reflection. All of them, even Muel­ler, had been briefly terrified by the sight before he dispelled the bird by knocking a broom handle on the window. Huge as

it was, it opened its wings and rose into an oak near the house in a second.

Mueller knew that Annie and he were on the animals' terrain. God forbid, God absolutely forbid they were still out here at dark. On cue, something broke the brush behind him, and he swung around at once with Annie in his arms and somehow lost his footing. Afraid to loosen his hold on his daughter, he could do nothing but fall backward and landed so hard this time that Annie was thrown from his grasp.

His daughter was shrieking instantly, a huge sound now, not simply crying for his benefit but in true despair. And even so it was another second before he could move. Lying flat, he heard the thunder roll again. Lord, what had he gotten them into? He thought Annie had knocked the wind out of him, but when he sat up, there was a new pain near his hip, fiery and distinct and rendering his leg all but useless for a second. The wind, which had been mounting, kicked up more, a steady force rocking the trees.

Annie was sitting beside him, howling for all the world. Her face had been planted in the mud apparently, and the dirt was mix­ing with the fountain running from her eyes and nose as she squalled.

"Oh my God, oh God oh God," he said. He cleaned off her face with his shirttail. "I want Mom," she said as he wiped her nose. "I hate you."

"Sure," Mueller said. He didn't blame her. But his lack of protest only seemed to encourage her.

"I hate you," Annie answered. "Mommy hates you."

"Mommy hates me?" Mueller asked. He had never heard that one.

"Everybody hates you,' said Annie.

He felt each of her little limbs to be cer­tain there was nothing broken. She was okay. Just scared. And angry. Really angry.

He still didn't know what they would do, but he drew his daughter into his lap and held her until she calmed somewhat. She was caught now in that cycle Muel­ler remembered from his own childhood, when she heaved with sobbing breaths even though she was willing to stop. The wind had remained high, sizzling through the trees. Every storm brought heavy boughs crashing. It was nature's answer to pruning. The yard was always littered with debris in the aftermath. And Annie and he had passed more than one lightning-struck tree today, split straight through the trunk. The dead remnants turned the color of a weathered barn and stood broken and leafless, haunting as skeletons. This was no place to be in a storm, let alone with a four-year-old.

He tried to push aside his fear. He had to think. At this stage, he would call 911, but he had left his cell phone on the char­ger in the car so he would be beyond his wife's summons. For a second, he consid­ered screaming, but that was pointless. The sound would never carry in the high wind, and if he was wrong about that, Annie's outburst a minute ago would have been enough. Besides, if he called out. the only thing to yell was "Help," and if he bellowed that word hopelessly at the dis-

tance, Annie would descend again to the full grip of panic, knowing her father had declared himself useless.

He lifted Annie to her feet, then strug­gled up himself. The hip was bad. The ache spread into his back and down the rear of his leg, but he could not suggest that Annie walk in her stockings. Instead he picked her up and started forward again. The pain was fierce at first, but he continued. It didn't dawn on him for sev­eral minutes that he'd left the other boot behind, and he gave no thought to turn­ing back when he remembered.

They did not get far before she was screeching again, gyrating wildly. It took him a second to see she was try­ing to reach her back. He put her down, and when he lifted her shirt, a copper-colored beetle fell to the ground. There was a large red bump where the bug had bitten her. Once Annie saw the insect, there was no consoling her. She danced away from him and fell once more into a state of red-faced hysterics. At some instinctive level, she had decided she was going to wail until they died here, if that was what was going to happen.

"I hate you!" Annie yelled when she could summon herself to speak.

He tried to hold her, but she refused to return to his embrace. He was stupid, she told him. And mean. He felt as if she were poking holes in his heart with each insult. He could do nothing but repeat her name.

"I hate you," answered his daughter. "Mommy hates you."

That again. She was just a four-year-old who was beside herself. But when he looked up again at the rocking trees surrounding them, he felt the change. Annie was right. Something was wrong in his marriage. His wife and he were apart in a way that probably would not heal. She knew it, and he knew it. And they were not going to do anything about it, not now anyway, because they were in the middle of their life's work and really could not stop to figure that stuffout. But Mueller was suddenly in despair, knowing he was not happy in a way he'd more or less assumed he was.

The thunder resounded then, a huge crack from directly above that seemed to turn the forest sideways for a second. Dis­traught, unbelieving, Annie cried out again for her mother and began to run.

"Annie! Annie, baby. Annie, come back!" She was gone around a tree. He tried to move quickly, but with his hip there was no keeping up. It was all he could do to remain on his feet. He was heading directly into the fierce wind, and even though he shouted after her, he knew she would never hear. The rain came at once, pounding down, although the heavy drops were often deflected by the cover of the trees tossing and creaking in the storm. He continued limping in the direction he'd last seen her, swinging the bad leg around him as if it were a pole. He was crying now. He was not sure when he'd started and did not really care. He did not know if it was the pain, or the fear, or some form of exhaustion, but he saw that he had always had the wrong

idea. In some secret place within himself, he had wanted to be the solitary emperor over a benign, compliant universe, which was a joke. He hadn't really considered his need for other people or what they wanted and required of him. He did not even have any hope of being a better person after this, because he had no idea if he was going to survive, and all he could see was what he didn't know.

He moved along under the dumb weight of failure. He loved this child, and some­how she did not really believe that. He loved this child, yet he had brought her into these woods. He called her name in the rain and the wind and wept, knowing there would be no more to his life than stagger­ing around here hoping to find her.

And then he saw Annie. She had col­lapsed on the ground in a small clearing, where she was balled, quaking with terror. He fell down beside her and threw his body over hers to keep her dry. He whispered her name and told her again and again that they would be fine, which amid his great relief he suddenly believed. They remained like that for some time. The rain continued, but the wind began to settle. And then the storm passed as quickly as it had arrived, the downpour receding and then stopping entirely, as if someone had sopped the sky. He sat up, and Annie crawled into his arms, still sobbing and quivering. He clung to her, seeking comfort from the heat and solidity of her small form, pressing her to him, even though he knew that in a fun­damental way this child was probably lost to him. This trauma would never be fully set aside; he was unlikely to regain her

complete confidence ever. And even so he felt the desperation of the love for her that would never leave him.

In a few more minutes the sun reap­peared. It was over his left shoulder now but lower, which meant they had turned around. Land parcels in this area were square. Mueller had heard this plan attrib­uted to George Washington, a surveyor by training, who had laid a straightedge on America's open spaces. The basic unit was 160-acre bounds, divided these days into 40-acre plots backed up to one another. The east-west roads were about half a mile apart, the north-south roads two miles. That meant if Mueller walked either due north or south he would eventually reach either his house or the land of his neighbor. But he would have to go consistently in one direction, with the sun roughly square to his shoulder. Thank God he did not own all the land in the world or Annie and he would never escape.

So they started out again, the father with his bawling daughter in his arms. He moved slowly because of his hip, although it actually grew a little better as he walked. Mueller continued straight on as much as he could, pushing through the bushes that would yield, circling to the small breaks of clearer ground when he had to. He gave up worry­ing about how many times he was scratched or gouged by thorns or branches but wrapped his shirt around Annie whenever they had to drive through anything thick. Even so, a branch snapped back and whipped across her back, leading to new howls. He had nothing to say but "I'm sorry" and kept repeating it as they went on.

Whenever he was driven sideways, he took careful note of landmarks—a par­ticular tree and the exact position of the sun—so that he could resume his prog­ress. He hobbled on this way until they finally found themselves at a barbed-wire fence. They had arrived at the southern boundary of his property, a quarter mile from his house.

The fence was old, and the posts were gray and wormy. None of them looked likely to offer much resistance, but as he shook each standard, it was solid. Finally, he found one already slanting in the earth. Each heave against it shot a white throb through his hip, and he had to stop often to regain his breath. But soon he was able to rotate the post until it broke free and he could draw the fence down. With Annie in his arms, he stepped carefully between the rows of barbs.

It was only a moment before he found the neighbor's path, neatly mowed. They were going to be okay. He told Annie that.

"We're okay, sweetheart."

In a minute, he could see daylight ahead and hear the passing cars on the road.

When they emerged into the open, the sun had again grown intense. He tried to imag­ine the scene between his wife and him when Annie treated his wife to every detail of this disaster, as she was certain to do. He would have to survive that the way he had survived this, by taking the blows and moving ahead.

But he knew where Annie and he were. Highway N was there. He would take a right, then at 46 another right, and then at O, right again. Limping along the gravel embankment at the side of the county high­way, he estimated the journey was likely to take them an hour. He was probably too much of a sight, gimpy and slathered in mud, for a neighbor to take mercy and offer a ride. Besides, the locals didn't much like city people, whom they saw as determined enemies of their way of life. Their sons and cousins had moved to the city to make more money, and in the meantime the urbanites came this way, once again with money in their hands, and bought the property the local residents had lived on for generations, driving up the values—and the taxes—and making it harder for anyone who wanted to stay here to remain.

When Mueller and Annie reached the road, they rested. He held her in his lap and reviewed in his mind everything that had happened in his woods, making no effort to restrain his loathing for himself. Then they started toward the house. The pavement rose more steeply than it had seemed when he'd come this way by car, and it was a hard climb in the hot sun with his hip burning and his arms tiring from his daughter's weight. They would have to stop often. But they would make it.

"We was lost," said Annie, whose gram­mar rarely failed her. "Weren't we. Daddy? Weren't we lost?"

"Well, we're not lost now," he answered and discovered as he spoke that he did not believe a word he'd said.

For Eve.