At night, side vision is superior. To say she “saw” movement beyond the far creek would be misleading. Peripheral vision “sees” until the eyeballs shift to center on the object, thereby losing the object in their direct glare. She didn’t move her eyeballs. Her one good eye beamed down the barrel through the slot on the sight at the tent. A noise. An ear was aimed too. Conclusion: something large was moving clumsy beyond the far creek, an elk maybe, a bear. Vegetation rippled at the edge of things. Unable to resist, her eyeballs shifted, since humans are devout to direct line of sight. They think eyes belong punched in the front of the head, whereas the horse knows it pays sometimes to be mistress of your periphery. Ginny wasn’t a horse yet.

She had time. She was waiting for Ella.

Ella always twisted things: the girl was a berry picker, yes. The women had babies tied to their backs and the bear watched from the ridge. Agreed. But no, she was more than a berry picker. She was other things too, did other jobs in her town, had hobbies. She was valued before this incident. Those matters come into it. The wider things. For some, the moral of the story is Keep to the Relevant. As Ella would say, Don’t wander off while telling. Stay in the Clearing so that things are Clear. But the girl, she herself might say, was the daughter of the chief. She had a brother, two brothers, if Ginny remembered right. The brothers come into the story, so put them in, drop them into the landscape of circumstance. That’s called the Set-up or Introduction.

Ella’s tent was now peripheral. The top pole, the zip, the fly, the mountain of gear, the man on watch, all these objects—all subsumed by the new bigger view: three creeks joining, cliffs. The creature creeping beyond the far creek, if there’d been a creature, had dipped into some depression on the far shoreline, a pit or crack. Ginny listened, glanced at the ridge, as if the cob might be supervising the whole with the red dog, as if standing on that magnificent pit edge.