He turned and left, made his way back to the lake and went to the shack and examined it, finding the door to the screened-in porch unlatched and the door to the house unlocked. On the porch was a rocking chair and a narrow cot, but without a mattress. He pushed open the door of the shack and stepped cautiously inside, noticing a sag in the floor near the doorsill. Let his weight test it and found it strong enough to hold him, though he did not think it would take much to make the underpinning give way. The inside was a single room with a small woodstove in one corner, one that could be used for heating as well as cooking. Beside it was a wood box with a few sticks of split wood peeking up over the sides. Oak, he guessed. Maybe hickory. Not far from the stove was a pie safe containing a few dishes and glasses and eating utensils and an iron skillet and a coffeepot and a pot for boiling water. A handmade eating table was in the center of the room with two chairs. A kerosene lamp was on the table, having a chipped dish under it. Another cot with a mattress and pillow and blanket was pushed against another wall. He saw a broom leaned in the corner, near the cot. A framed picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was hanging from one wall.

The room had a slight musty smell to it, like a place that needed airing out, or a place that had gone too long without somebody staying in it, leaving the scent of having been there—of cooked food and coffee and tobacco and soap and perfumed skin lotions. A lived-in place gave off its own odors, the same as the earth did.

It would be a good place to stay, he thought, but he would not—not without permission. To do so would be like housebreaking, and he knew the law on housebreaking. He had a brother in jail because of it.

He found a large beechnut tree in front of the shack, between the shack and the lake. A carving head-high on its trunk read:

And now this tree
Belongs to me
AW

The carving seemed several years old, the way it had crusted over, and it made him think of the beechnuts where he had carved his own initials as a boy. He wondered if the trees still stood, still held his initials, or if they had scabbed over and disappeared.

He made a bedding of pine straw under the tree and covered it with his sleeping bag. Put together a circle of stones and started a stick fire to boil water for his coffee. He ate from a can of sausages, sandwiched between soda crackers, and as he ate and took his coffee, he pondered over the force that had pushed him back into the woods as he watched the woman. Was it something his senses had seen, or not seen? Where was the man? Still in the house? Would the man have come from the house and chased after him with a gun?