He ignored his liquor business. If men ran short they would only appreciate him the more when he reappeared. There was no other ready source, not for a few days of dry. They could buy it bonded like all the rest meanwhile. But one afternoon he left the Thayer just after lunch and went looking for Estus Terry.

As much as his character would allow admiration for a man he felt it for Terry. If a model might exist, not for means and methods but for essence of a nature it would be Terry he’d look to. He did not believe Joey’s telling that Terry was displeased with him. But he wanted to be in straight with Terry. Who he knew understood the beating of the Canuck cook. That was the business.

Terry owned a one-story single-room house free of civilization built by a hermit called Bliss in the decade before Jamie was born in the untouched forested land north of Bethlehem where the Ammonoosuc turned north in a big bend. Surrounded by stacks of uncut firewood piled tepee style. The sides of the house year round summer and winter banked waist high with raked-up leaf mold and woods trash and the whole anchored in place with cut hemlock boughs stacked one over the other intertwined. Like a burrow with not a piece of windowglass set into it. A single rotting stovepipe rising askew like a hand waving for help or goodbye. The place an indication not of economic condition but of the soul. A place no woman had ever walked.

There was no reason to expect Terry to be there in the peak of summer with the traveling he did—he covering the lumber camps of northern Vermont and New Hampshire while partner Aaron Wells did the same for the vast lonesome tracts of most of Maine. He bumped the Ford slow down the track rutted deep by the teams of heavy horses and the giant wheels of stout freight wagons, the wood’s growth on either side of the way running overhead and so closeby that the motorcar was swathed. He came into the clearing where midday summer no smoke rose from the pipe but the front door was ajar and a pair of big roan Belgian horses with speckled rumps grazed free on the spare grass of the yard like a pair of watchdogs, the horses without halter or tether, neither one bothering to raise heads at the sudden loud approach of the car. Road-broke.

A small-framed man, Terry showed himself in the doorway and stepped back into the gloom briefly before coming out into the yard. In that brief half-lit moment Jamie saw the dark length of a rifle barrel down alongside Terry’s leg. The weapon gone with the man out in the sunlight, Terry in gray wool woods-pants and a boiled white shirt too bright it seemed to have come out of that house. He went to one of the horses and stood with his hand on its withers while Jamie shut down the car. The horse lifted its head and lipped the pants-leg beside him and then dropped back to crop the grass.