Walks, climbs up the perilous rock steps of the Devil’s Cascade, encounters with clumps of bears snuffling at the base of trees like fat spoiled children, the smell of the forest at night, the lake into which they lowered themselves as in baptism, the deer so soon familiar, the sheep-smelling blankets with which they wrapped themselves at night, the making of the fire, the food they ate, the feel of different kinds of tree bark, the afternoon naps in the sunwarmed meadows, the thick, spongy, wet moss beneath the falls, glimpses of other campers far away, seen through their own languor as through a benevolent fog, the love they made that was, for once, at last, as effortless as sleep and, like untroubled sleep, fell naturally without thought into the rhythm of their hours.

The valley held them in thrall—their histories, each so alien to the other, were erased from their consciousness. She thought, once, how odd it was that this release she felt was somehow connected with a surrendering-up of their divergent temperaments, those personalities which they seemed to have lost track of in the tunnel above the valley. There was nothing really personal in her observation of how easily he kept his pace on the steep paths, how expertly he made fires. And similarly, she noted how dispassionately his gaze followed her as she walked into the water of the lake, or fed the deer, or folded up the blankets early each morning.

Yet somewhere, stirring at the back of her quietness like that bird over there in the woods among the leaves, was the knowledge that the spell would be shattered soon, would leave hardly a trace of itself when they left the valley.

At the end of the week, they packed up. Walter dismantled the stone fireplace and kicked earth over their cooking ashes. Annie watched him intently through the car window. He put his hands in his pockets and walked slowly toward her. They drove down the valley, up the road to the tunnel, and as they emerged from the other side to the pleasant if undistinguished landscape she had first mistaken for Yosemite itself, he said, “Those goddamned bastards! Now we’ve got to stop off in Merced to return that junk they loaned us!”

Bad magic. His words thrust her back into the scandalous, miserable time of his absence. She began, timidly, to tell him what the drive-in was like, but he brushed aside her tales of Ernie and the drunken cook. What he wanted to know, he said, was what she’d been reading, what meetings she’d gone to, if they’d given her any assignments, if she had seen anything of Paul Lavan.

She hadn’t read much—it was so complicated and so boring.

“Boring! What’s that got to do with it?”

Well, she had gone to a few meetings, and she’d tagged along with a woman who was supposed to recruit some Mexicans—