“It’s all right, Nick. I understand,” she had said. “But just don’t tell anyone—they wouldn’t.”

“Another thing, Mother. The bucks draw the hunters off to protect their does. They’re so much better than people.” The very quietness of his tone was devastating.

Always Ellen had recoiled at the idea of what the talk would be down at the store—how Nick had come home from the war a sissy. Probably they thought it anyway. He was too gentle for his own good. And whatever we are told in church (Ellen was not a churchgoer), Nick’s kind of gentleness was looked down on in a part of the world that liked to think of itself as still a sort of frontier. Rufus had talked enough about it. A good hunter was skillful, killed quickly and efficiently, never had to follow a trail of blood. To wound, not kill, was a crime. Nick had been brought up to that. They always had a deer hung up in the barn, and Ellen herself was partial to the meat. This attitude of Nick’s wasn’t quite normal. So this year Ellen was glad to be able to tell Nick how Cornelius felt, that he himself had decided to give up hunting. That was what Christina had told her that day when they got lost in the woods. It was somehow fortifying, for no one could say that Cornelius Chapman was a sissy!

“He’d better watch his woods, then,” Nick had said.

“Oh, Nick, he can’t—he can hardly walk since that stroke.”

And she had seen the flicker in Nick’s extraordinarily clear blue eyes, and guessed that a thought was slowly making its way down to the springs of action.

“Besides, his woods are posted, always have been.”

Nick smiled. “Oh, Mother,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Where are you off to? It’s nearly suppertime.”

“Just to have a little talk with Old Pete,” he said, taking his father’s rifle off the rack, and a little box of shot.

Ellen’s needle flew in and out, in and out—a way of keeping nervous hands busy. She tried to set her mind on the schools and how to begin that essay. The first thing, she supposed, would be a list of all the teachers with dates. That’s what Jem was after. But somehow today she couldn’t seem to set her mind to anything, kept looking out the window. It was a Saturday just a week after the Websters had closed up, and more than one out-of-state car, filled with hunters in shiny orange or red jackets, went past. She kept an eye out for Nick and Old Pete, but maybe they had gone out the back way, if they did go.