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“We don’t usually set folks down here, lady. There’s nowhere near. The next camp is a matter of some miles on.”
    “I shall be all right. Just set me down near the river.”
    The driver slowed up, and Maggie, with her gear, left the bus. The bus picked up speed and was soon out of sight. Maggie walked down to the margin of the river as in an enchantment. The pine-needle earth felt soft. She set down her gear, gazed up and down the stream, sat down, and then lay down, looking up at the sky.
    Some rivers are sweet and equable. Such was the lightly dancing Similkameen River at that place, and such was Maggie lying beside it. She gave herself up to the high morning. Was she not lucky. Chipmunks watched her.
    The bend of the river beside which she lay was so far from the road that the sound of the immediate rippling water filled her ears, and so she heard no sound of passing cars, and lay high up in these mountains, near the sky – it seemed – on the fringe of some open pinewoods. Something had happened, she thought as she lay there, to her sense of smell. It had become vitiated. But now her breath drank and drank again the scent of firs and pines and juniper. Time dissolved, and space dissolved, and she smelled again the pinewoods of New Brunswick, one with these woods, a continent away, and she was all but a child again. No, she was nothing. No thought, no memories occupied her. The clouds that drifted across the blue drifted through her mind as she lay idle. She sat up at last, and, looking round, saw a doe standing by a tree trunk, regarding her. The lovely silly eyes of the deer regarded her without fear. It flicked its ears, turned and nibbled at its own coppery flank, turned again its elegant neck, looked at her, and passed on into the woods. Maggie, smiling with pleasure at the sight of the deer, took out of her knapsack some fruit and biscuits, dipped her little plastic cup, drank of the water, and lay down again. Her fingers strayed and found a pine cone, and through her fingers she saw its rich and elegant brownness. Later, when the sun had passed somewhat over, she set up her rod, chose a likely fly, and on a good clear piece of bank cast across the flowing river.
    Maggie continued to cast. In the pleasure of casting over this lively stream she forgot – as always when she was fishing – her own existence. Suddenly came a strike, and the line ranout, there was a quick radiance and splashing above the water downstream. At the moment of the strike, Maggie became a co-ordinating creature of wrists and fingers and reel and rod and line and tension and the small trout leaping, darting, leaping. She landed the fish, took out the hook, slipped in her thumb, broke back the small neck, and the leaping rainbow thing was dead. A thought as thin and cruel as a pipefish cut through her mind. The pipefish slid through and away. It would return.
    Maggie drew in her line and made some beautiful casts. The line curved shining through the air backward forward backward forward, gaining length, and the fly dropped sweetly. Again she cast and cast. Her exhilaration settled down to the matter of fishing. Then she became aware that the sun had passed over the arc of sky between the mountains. She reeled in her line, gathered up her gear and climbed to the highway.
    She walked along the highway, and she walked straight and well and carried her load so lightly that passing cars did not stop for her. The evening grew darker. A plane, full of invisible beings, roared across the patch of sky between the mountains and disappeared to the west. Maggie walked on – cars had headlights now – and her bags had begun to grow heavy long before she saw lights on the right-hand side of the road, country lights among the trees. She approached a row of small cabins, each with its glow over the door, then a little lighted store. She put down her load and went in.
    “Good evening,” said the fresh-faced young woman behind the counter.
    “Have