material of his summer shirt.
“If you ever try to run away on me again I’ll tan your hide,” he said to her, and she said, “
“What?”
“Tan my hide?”
“Damn right.” He was high-spirited now, irresistible as when she had first known him.
Birds were everywhere. Red-winged blackbirds, robins, a pair of doves that sang at daybreak. Lots of crows, and gulls on reconnoitering missions from the lake, and big turkey buzzards that sat in the branches of a dead oak about half a mile away, at the edge of the woods. At first they just sat there, drying out their voluminous wings, lifting themselves occasionally for a trial flight, flapping around a bit, then composing themselves to let the sun and the warm air do their work. In a day or so they were restored, flying high, circling and dropping to earth, disappearing over the woods, coming back to rest in the familiar bare tree.
Lizzie’s owner — Joy Tucker — showed up again, tanned and friendly. She had just got sick of the rain and gone off on her holidays to hike in the Rocky Mountains. Now she was back.
“Perfect timing weatherwise,” Clark said. He and Joy Tucker were soon joking as if nothing had happened.
“Lizzie looks to be in good shape,” she said. “But where’s her little friend? What’s her name — Flora?”
“Gone,” said Clark. “Maybe she took off to the Rocky Mountains.”
“Lots of wild goats out there. With fantastic horns.”
“So I hear.”
FOR THREE OR FOUR days they had been just too busy to go down and look in the mailbox. When Carla opened it she found the phone bill, some promise that if they subscribed to a certain magazine they could win a million dollars, and Mrs. Jamieson’s letter.
Mrs. Jamieson went on to say that she was afraid that she had involved herself too closely in Carla’s life and had made the mistake of thinking somehow that Carla’s happiness and freedom were the same thing. All she cared for was Carla’s happiness and she saw now that she — Carla — must find that in her marriage. All she could hope was that perhaps Carla’s flight and turbulent emotions had brought her true feelings to the surface and perhaps a recognition in her husband of his true feelings as well.
She said that she would perfectly understand if Carla had a wish to avoid her in the future and that she would always be grateful for Carla’s presence in her life during such a difficult time.
The strangest and most wonderful thing in this whole string of events seems to me the reappearance of Flora. In fact it seems rather like a miracle. Where had she been all the time and why did she choose just that moment for her reappearance? I am sure your husband has described it to you. We were talking at the patio door and I — facing out — was the first to see this white something — descending on us out of the night. Of course it was the effect of the ground fog. But truly terrifying. I think I shrieked out loud. I had never in my lift felt such bewitchment, in the true sense. I suppose I should be honest and say fear. There we were, two adults, frozen, and then out of the fog comes little lost Flora.
There has to be something special about this. I know of course that Flora is an ordinary little animal and that she probably spent her time away in getting herself pregnant. In a sense her return has no connection at all with our human lives. Yet her appearance at that moment did have a profound effect on your husband and me. When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified — no, frightened — by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity — that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends. So Flora has her place as a good angel in my life and perhaps also in your husband’s life and yours.
As soon as Carla had read this letter she crumpled it up. Then she burned it in the sink. The flames leapt up alarmingly and she turned on the tap, then scooped up the soft disgusting black stuff and put it down the toilet as she should have done in the first place.
She was busy for the rest of that day, and the next, and the next. During that time she had to take two parties out on the trails, she had to give lessons to children, individually and in groups. At night when Clark put his arms around her — busy as he was now, he was never too tired, never cross — she did not find it hard to be cooperative.
It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.
SYLVIA HAD TAKEN an apartment in the college town where she taught. The house was not up for sale — or at least there wasn’t a sign out in front of it. Leon Jamieson had got some kind of posthumous award — news of this was in the papers. There was no mention this time of any money.
AS THE DRY GOLDEN days of fall came on — an encouraging and profitable season — Carla found that she had got used to the sharp thought that had lodged in her. It wasn’t so sharp anymore — in fact, it no longer surprised her. And she was inhabited now by an almost seductive notion, a constant low-lying temptation.
She had only to raise her eyes, she had only to look in one direction, to know where she might go. An evening walk, once her chores for the day were finished. To the edge of the woods, and the bare tree where the buzzards had held their party.
And then the little dirty bones in the grass. The skull with perhaps some shreds of bloodied skin clinging to it. A skull that she could hold like a teacup in one hand. Knowledge in one hand.
Or perhaps not. Nothing there.
Other things could have happened. He could have chased Flora away. Or tied her in the back of the truck and driven some distance and set her loose. Taken her back to the place they’d got her from. Not to have her around, reminding them.
She might be free.
The days passed and Carla didn’t go near that place. She held out against the temptation.
THE BEAR CAME OVER THE MOUNTAIN
FIONA LIVED IN her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay- windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic — a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to strange tirades with an absentminded smile. All kinds of people, rich or shabby-looking, delivered these tirades, and kept coming and going and arguing and conferring, sometimes in foreign accents. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and this activity in her house was probably the reason.
Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics, though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also she played the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired, gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her — she said he was a Visigoth — and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their
