I just blurted it all out; I didn’t even know his name, but I told him everything. I had never felt as safe with anyone—not even with Nora, occasionally not with my mother. “I’m the illegitimate son of Rachel Brewster—the unmarried daughter of faculty emeritus Lewis Brewster, my insane grandfather,” I began, thus capturing the little snowshoer’s attention. “Lewis Brewster is a madman emeritus; he has deluded himself into believing he used to be principal of the academy, but he was just an English teacher,” I further explained, barely pausing to breathe. “Granddaddy Lew stopped speaking when he learned my mother was pregnant—with me,” I added, just to be perfectly clear. “According to my cousin, who remembers when the lunatic emeritus used to talk, all he ever said was stuff about punctuation marks.”

“What sort of stuff?” the surprised snowshoer asked. I had the feeling that the part about the punctuation marks was the only aspect of my Brewster family history heretofore unknown to him.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I never heard what he said, because he stopped speaking before I was born,” I reminded the snowshoer.

“Oh, yes—you already explained the chronology perfectly,” the tiny man told me. “I’m afraid I’m ‘just an English teacher,’ as you say. I was being overly curious about the punctuation marks.” Here the snowshoer lowered his voice, as if he didn’t want to be overheard; at a glance, I could see we were alone in the parking lot. “In the area of student writing,” the extremely small English teacher said, “some of my colleagues in the department overdo the importance of punctuation.”

“You teach writing?” I asked him.

“I do—that is, to the degree that writing can be taught,” the little snowshoer said. He was disarmingly handsome.

“My grandmother read Moby-Dick aloud to me—when I was ten, eleven, and twelve,” I told him. “When I’m a little older, I would like to try reading it again—to myself.”

“That’s most commendable,” the snowshoer told me. “Perhaps I could suggest another adventure story, also involving a young man—a story that’s a little easier to read to yourself?”

“Yes, please,” I said, but he could see I’d not once taken my eyes off his snowshoes. All the while I’d been babbling, my mind was racing: the bear paws before me were my escape from skiing; the snowshoer had been running on them, and I liked to run.