In the wind-blown snow, I couldn’t be sure he was a guy; he looked smaller than me, even smaller than Little Ray. He was as small as the smallest Exeter student I had ever seen; he was as small as a child, but he didn’t move like a child. I saw something decidedly male and adult in the strength of his stride. The way he loped along reminded me of a runner I’d encountered a few times in the warm weather—both outdoors, on the academy athletic fields, and on the wooden track in the cage. He was out of my league as a runner—too fast for me to keep up with, though his legs were comically short. On the sloped boards in the cage, he had lapped me a couple of times in less than a mile. There was a very mature element in how friendly he was; the Exeter students rarely acknowledged me. This made me think he was a very young faculty member, although—in addition to his childlike size—he was absurdly youthful-looking for anyone on the faculty. It was hard to imagine he could command the students’ attention.

I was thirteen that February day in 1955. I wouldn’t become an academy student until September 1956. I hadn’t started to shave; in my estimation, neither had the snowshoer. I couldn’t see they were snowshoes until he removed them—old wooden bear paws with leather bindings and rawhide laces. He stood beside his snowshoes in the parking lot of the Thompson Cage, where he brushed the snow off them. They were the long kind of bear paws, shaped like teardrops—nearly a yard long, more than half as tall as the diminutive snowshoer himself. “I thought you were a skier,” I told him.

“I’m just a runner,” he said, smiling warmly, “either on snowshoes or off them. You’re a runner, too, aren’t you?”

“I’m just a kid—I’m a kind of faculty brat,” I told him. I’d never thought of myself as any kind of faculty brat—not a legitimate one, anyway. I didn’t think my being the grandchild of a faculty emeritus counted for faculty-brat status—especially not the grandkid of a deluded grammarian.

“A kind of faculty brat?” the exceedingly small snowshoer asked. “What kind of faculty brat are you?” He was too good-natured to be a student; he was definitely a faculty member, but a very unusual one.