Soon, he thought. Soon.

First, he must find his place for sleeping.

Around him, birds made cheerful throat music. Redbirds, he guessed. Coming off the hill to the dam, he had seen some. And wild canaries, yellow as the bloom of a jonquil. Blackbirds with scarlet-tipped wings. Sparrows. Brown thrashers. A hawk, balanced on invisible cushions of air like a war glider, crying its war cry. He stood, holding the rod, the line still in the water, and listened. A breeze stirred in the trash trees, making its whisper. A squirrel chattered from a laurel bush. A frog made a jump from the bank of the lake, landing with a dull belly splash in the slush of water and mud. And then he heard the faint braying of a mule and he believed there was a farmhouse not far away, one he had not seen from the hillside above the lake, one probably resting on the hump of a knoll, hidden by trees.

He reeled in his line and locked it down, the lure snug against the eye at the tip of the rod, and then he lifted his knapsack and slipped it over his shoulders.

It was likely the owners of the farmhouse were also the owners of the lake. If he could find the house and the owners before dark, maybe he could make a trade of fresh fish for sleeping in the lake shack. Could even be a cot in the shack. Such a place would bring good sleep, better than the ground and a mattress of raked-up pine needles. He would have to be careful, though, approaching a farmhouse so late in the day, and he would have to be forthright about his offer. Mountain people were all right if you were straight with them. Try to fool them and they could turn rough.

On the edge of the lake a black snake slithered against a washed-up limb, curled, buried its head beneath a wad of decaying oak leaves. It was a good sign, a black snake.

He paused in the fringe of the woods, his soldier’s training still with him, and surveyed the farmhouse. It was as he imagined it would be—off the road on a knoll, tucked under oaks, a tree line of pine and hemlock along the road gully, hiding the house from travelers. At one side of the house was a barn with a barbed wire fence, and near the barn, a smokehouse and a corn crib that had sheets of tin fashioned around its stone pillars and nailed to the underneath to keep rats from gnawing through the flooring.

Being summer, and the oaks in full leaf, the house was as camouflaged as a deer, and could easily have been missed by some stranger walking past, not paying attention to what occupied the right and left of his or her vision. The house surprised him. It was larger than he thought it would be—add-ons, he guessed—and had been recently painted a light gray that reminded him of troop ships. He had thought that it, and the barn with it, would be small, the same as the house and barn of his childhood—clapboard and tin, the clapboard unpainted, aged with weather, the tin roof coated in rust, its nail spots making rust freckles. Just room enough for what was needed. His mother—in despair, as he remembered it—had once said of their home, “No reason to go to dreaming, son; there’s no room here to fit one in.” And it had been true. He had not missed the home of his childhood, not after the death of his father and mother, not after the jailing of his brother. Once his childhood home had seemed as permanent as mountains. Now it seemed as distant as stars.