W-2 was one of the three to accompany him. They didn't speak. The boys took turns pulling the cart of supplies. David didn't offer to pull it. At the end of the third day, on the other side of the river from the Sumner farm, they left him. Before he joined the other two boys who left first, W-2 said, "They wanted me to tell you, David. One of the girls you call Celia has conceived. One of the boys you call David impregnated her. They wanted you to know." Then he turned and followed the others. They quickly vanished among the trees.

David slept where they had left him, and in the morning he continued south, leaving the cart behind, taking only enough food for the next few days. He stopped once to look at a maple seedlingsheltered among the pines. He touched the soft green leaves gently. On the sixth day he reached the Wiston farm, and alive in his memory was the day he had waited there for Celia. The white oak tree that was his friend was the same, perhaps larger, he couldn't tell. He could not see the sky through its branches covered with new, vivid green leaves. He made a lean-to and slept under the tree that night, and the next morning he solemnly told it good-bye and began to climb the slopes overlooking the farm. The house was still there, but the barn was gone, and the other outbuildings—swept away by the flood they had started so long ago.

He reached the antique forest where he watched a flying insect beat its wings almost lazily and remembered his grandfather telling him that even the insects here were primitive—slower than their more advanced cousins, less adaptable to hot weather or dry spells.

It was misty and very cool under the trees. The insect had settled on a leaf, and in the golden sunlight it too seemed golden. For a brief moment David thought he heard a bird's trill, a thrush. It was gone too fast to be certain, and he shook his head. Wishful thinking, no more than wishful thinking.

In the antique forest, a cove forest, the trees waited, keeping their genes intact, ready to move down the slopes when the conditions were right for them again. David stretched out on the ground under the great trees and slept, and in the cool, misty milieu of his dream saurians walked and a bird sang.

PART TWO
Shenandoah

Chapter 10