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to kiss your nipples until they stand up straight like little soldiers]. Ba mhaith liom unfairt leat ar an ngaineamh lom laithreach agus muid inar craiceann dearg [I would like to roll in the sand naked with you right now]. Isteach linn san uaimh seo ‘s bauilimis an craiceann go mall reidh ar feadh seachtainne [Let’s go in this cave and make love slowly for a week]. Aithrimis an t-abhar I dtreo go bhfeadfainn seasamh faoi dheoidh [Let’s change the subject so that I will be able to stand up eventually]. Ta do shuile chomh fiain agus chomh tarraingeach leis an bhfarraige [Your eyes are as wild and alluring as the sea]. Silim go bhfuilim ag titim I ngra leat [I think I am falling in love with you]. Nil d’ainm fiu amhain agam [I don’t even know your name]. Is bean iontach thu [You are extraordinary]. Ce faoin speir ata ionat? [Who are you?]
    19.
    Owen grinning finishes the beaver and stands back to get a good eyeful of his work. The trick with stuffing a beaver is to make it the imposing animal that it is alive, but not to force the issue of aggression; to reflect, in the now-frozen carriage of the creature, its diligence and muscularity, its sturdy urge to relentless work, not the fact that it could bite your pecker off with bright-orange choppers the size of playing cards. So Owen has placed beaver-bitten alder sticks in its rubbery black hands, and mounted the animal half-risen, alert to danger but unafraid—a burly worker absorbed in the business at hand but attentive to and ready for trouble if it shambled into view.
    Very deftly done, says the crow.
    Thank you, says Owen.
    It looks alive. I’m scared.
    Liar. If it was alive you’d be teasing it.
    Grace will be pleased.
    Hope so.
    A most interesting young lady.
    Owen turns to regard the bird carefully. Moses, who had been taught to speak by a shy nun who found him broken in the mud, is intricately courteous and circumspect; also he has a dry humor and a corvidian cast of mind, as he likes to say, that combine to make his remarks intriguing. Owen enjoys the play of Moses’ mind. They have been friends, he and Moses, since the nun brought the bird in to be repaired, years ago now.
    What do you mean?
    Just that. A most interesting young lady.
    How so?
    Well, this morning I noticed her cutting apart a car with a blowtorch, for one thing. And you notice she chopped all her hair off.
    I assume she had reasons for these things.
    I think she likes you.
    So she cut up a car?
    Who can understand the ways of human beings?
    I am a joyously married man.
    Which has nothing to do with it.
    I’m not available.
    Which is not the point.
    It is the point. She knows I’m married.
    Yet she likes you.
    How do you know?
    I can tell.
    Tell me. I’m curious.
    The way she carries her body when you are near.
    I think you’re wrong.
    I have been wrong before.
    Let’s go home, says Owen.
    Okay, says Moses.
    Keep an eye out for Daniel on the way home.
    Okay. Not hard to spot him. Always speeding, that boy.
    And all that hair.
    And all that hair.
    Moses floats over the town: over the grocery and the church, the pub and the bowling alley, the clinic and the school, the barber on his porch with a cigar, the cop car behind the liquor store, the teenage boys smoking dope behind the rec center, the father beating his son again, the teenage couple in a dark fringe of woods near her house, kissing gently, their lips bruised and hot, their empty bellies churning, his pecker sore, her breasts sore from his sucking them all afternoon, her mother just coming through the screen door and opening her mouth to call O Rachel where are you where are you?
    Moses floats over the old hotel where the nun is dying in the last light, the very nun who taught him to speak. She sees him from her bed but he doesn’t see her and she can no longer cry out to catch his ear, nor whistle, she can no longer speak at all, but she stares at him wheeling, and a hundred yards away he feels her hot glance like a whisper in