Sweeten me up, fill me with delight, and swallow me whole.

“How did you get to be a cattle rancher?”

“My family’s always been cattle ranchers. Well, not always. My sister will tell you when we were princes and princesses.” He smiled, then frowned. “Me, I think I’d rather be an orchid finder.”

“I think I’d rather be that too.”

“What do you do?” he asked.

That question always made me do a somersault and try to come up standing. I would never say as easily as some “writer.” I was no longer a housewife. I once told a fellow I was a “limbo expert.”

“I’m a limbo expert.”

“We’re all limbo experts. What else do you do?”

“I’m a freelance journalist. I was assigned to do this article on the flora of Madagascar for this gardening magazine. But I guess you already know how little I know about Flora, or her sister for that matter, and how big a bluff I am.”

The rest of it’s silly, I guess, when you read it on paper. Like the fellow telling the woman he’ll teach her everything about Flora and her sister, from A to Z, but they’ll start with C. Why C? she asks. C for Come home with me, he says. Filled up with brandy and beauty she says she will, and so after he gets through with his business in town, she packs her bags and follows him to his ranch. His jeep smells like saddle soap and brilliantine, a smell that has begun to seem comfortable and loving.

“That’s a nice mountain. I’ve always loved mountains. I’ve seen all kinds of mountains and never been in one.”

“Well, we ought to do something about that. That one’s got a history that might interest you. It’s sort of a mystical mountain. In the seventeenth century, I believe, fugitive slaves and pirates used to hide out there.”

I wondered what fugitive slaves and pirates had to do with mysticism, but I didn’t ask.

“What’s its name?”

“You’ll have to ask Miandra; she’s the one who keeps up with the names of mountains, not me.”

“You know the names of all the orchids in the world, and you don’t know the name of one little old mountain.”

He laughed, and I drew closer.

“So who’s Miandra?”

If you’ve ever seen a cat hump up, that’s Miandra when the jeep drove up. She was sitting on a porch swing fanning. The fan stopped. She got to her feet and stood looking. If you’ve ever seen a cat humped up and snarling, you’ve seen Miandra, except the snarl was invisible and covered the prettiest mouth you’ve ever seen.

I laughed her off but still felt uncomfortable around her. She was like a cat all right. She didn’t fight those she didn’t like. She moved around them with indifference, but cognizant indifference, if you can picture that. She looked at me as if I were a hole in space. If Vinandratsy came too close he would fall in. It wasn’t possible for any American woman—even one as dark as she was—to be anything but a danger in the world.