At first Joel didn’t know what it was, although he noticed how tense Nick became, lifting his head like an animal who senses a threat. He got up at once and walked off toward the sound. Joel knew enough by now to know that there was no love lost between the Taggarts and the Comstocks. Ellen had told him about the fight that Rufus had had with Ed’s father. But that seemed like ancient history. Was it possible that people could hold a grudge so long? Nick never said much about Ed Taggart, but he was always pointing out things Taggart and his big machine had done to the landscape. There was nothing Joel admired more about Nick than his minute knowledge of, and caring about, the whole natural world of Willard. Nick was a one-man conservation society—that was what it came to, and Joel found this admirable. At the store he had occasionally heard gossip about some fight Nick had had with New Yorkers over a deer last fall, but it was treated with amusement rather than censure. And by now Joel had learned that all such tales got embroidered in the telling, so he had not taken Nick’s reputed violence on that occasion as a fact. No doubt he had had a fit of anger, and now the village was busy making a mythical assault on five men out of it, with half of them left sprawling. It was a quaint image when one looked at Nick, gangling, silent, and so unaggressive.

But it did seem a little odd, this violent feeling about Ed Taggart. Joel saw Ed now and then at the store, a heavy, quiet man who complained about being overworked and had a hard time getting help on the roads. Once when Joel had been up at the Ark with Cathy, Ed was there playing cribbage with the old man. All this added up in Joel’s mind to a decent person, not the monster Nick made of him. Of course the work was rough, and sometimes the heavy machinery tore out precious wild things. Even Cathy had been upset when, on one of their walks, they came on the whole bank of a dirt road torn up to widen it. It looked terribly raw and disorderly, gashed-up earth and piles of rough stones left helter-skelter, and the stumps of trees. They had stood and looked at it in dismay, and then Cathy had shrugged. “Oh well,” she said, “in a few years it will all grow back. The wilderness wins around here. You’d be amazed.”

“But why do they have to do it?” Joel had asked. This seemed such a remote road, leading nowhere as far as he could see.