Still, a little gravy on the potatoes never hurt. The nugget pressed against his heart from where it rested inside the pocket of his jacket. He couldnt wait for Elaine to see it. It wasnt a diamond, but it would do.

Hed walked all day, following one game trail after another. They were there if you took the time to read them: a stalk of fireweed crushed beneath a hoof, the cropped tops of a stand of diamond willow, a section of creek bank falling into the water. A pile of brush and bones. A grouping of small mounds of dried waste dotted with highbush cranberry pits. A knoll where the wild ryegrass was cropped short and the south face pockmarked with smaller holes leading to mediumsize holes leading to large holes. The branch of a birch tree, shaken free of leaves where something had run into it, the rest of the trees leaves still clinging stubbornly to life, unready to give up summer, unwilling to admit the possibility of fall.

It was the same if you listened. The shrill whistle of marmot and ground squirrel, the boarish bay of the grizzly, the call of the moose bull in rut, the cry of the eagle soaring high above.

The encroachment of man was the easiest of all to sense.

Tired from the long days walk, he had burrowed between the roots of a giant cottonwood, blown over years before and now stripped down to the bare bark. Other, smaller creatures shared the hollow, who had smelled the smoke before he had and whose agitated rustlings had woken him.

He eeled down the bank to drink from and sluice his face in the creek, taking care to stay hidden beneath a willow branch trailing leaves in the slow-moving water. The woodsmoke could have meant any of a number of things; there were four hikers scaling Alayak Mountain to the northwest, a group of Japanese fly fishermen pulling the last trout out of the streams flowing near Outuchiwenet Mountain Lodge to the north, two park rangers putting the campsite at Nuklunek Lake into winter mothballs to the west. And there were the isolated homesteaders and miners, firing up their hearths and stoves in anticipation of shorter days, longer nights and cooler temperatures.

This was one of those. He had smelled this type of fire before, the concentrated smoke from a stove designed to burn wood slowly, giving off the maximum amount of heat to the room and letting as little of it as possible escape up the chimney. He rolled over on his back, parted the leaves with gentle fingers and squinted at the sky. Dark, or near enough. Seven oclock, maybe seven-thirty, and he still had miles to go before he slept again. He was tired, and stiff from having slept on the ground, and wanting home, and the comforting presence of his fair lady, Elaine, Elaine-fair. He loved the old legends best, of Arthur and Camelot, and Lancelot and the Holy Grail, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Each with his quest. Elaine had told him once that Guinevere was not so noble as the knights in her life, that she was a liar and a deceiver and an adulteress. There was nothing tragic about her end, she deserved to be burned at the stake, not rescued and taken to live out her life in the comfort of a rich womans nunnery. Hed been angry with her, very angry. That was the first time she had run away, but she was soon back again, and sweetly forgiving.