By the time I was old enough to walk anywhere I wanted—when I was also old enough to imagine myself as a student at the academy—I liked watching the older boys playing their sports, and wondering which sports I would play. Most sports didn’t appeal to me; team sports were particularly unappealing. So many of the boys on teams appeared to be struggling; the attention paid to balls or pucks seemed stupid, beyond moronically obsessive.

Henrik was a ball-and-puck person; his sports were soccer, hockey, and lacrosse. Henrik started at Exeter in the fall of 1952; he graduated in the spring of 1956, about three months before I would start. Given my negative relationship with Henrik, I had long ago decided against soccer, hockey, and lacrosse.

Because I was small, wrestling tempted me; it was a weight-class sport (I would wrestle other small boys) and I liked the one-on-one aspect of it. But the wrestlers often competed in a box-shaped gym attached to the cage; the wooden track overhung the wrestling area, and spectators sat on the boards with their legs dangling above the mat. It disturbed me that the wrestlers grappled at the bottom of a gladiatorial pit, with their pitiless fans staring down at them. And I didn’t like how the wrestlers ran their laps after wrestling practice—the way their flat-soled wrestling shoes pounded on the wooden track. They jogged half a lap, then sprinted the other half; this meant that I was always passing them, and they were always passing me. Therefore, I somewhat tentatively decided that I wouldn’t wrestle. My only sport would be running, I believed. I would run cross-country in the fall, and run the mile in track-and-field—in the cage in the winter, and outdoors in the spring.

I met the snowshoer one winter day, after I’d been running on the wooden track in the cage. I could see him coming toward me. He was crossing the snow-covered baseball diamond, from the infield to the outfield. In the distance, the narrow stone bridge over the Exeter River was obscured by wind-blown snow. I mistook him for a cross-country skier—a very small one, too small to be one of my uncles. The snowshoer had ski poles. His stride was shorter than a cross-country skier’s, or he had the wrong wax on his skis. He didn’t appear to be getting any glide from his stride. Of course I couldn’t see his snowshoes, which I thought were his skis.