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about doing that, to keep it safe from something, bears, ants? anteaters? anyhow it seemed better than leaving it lying around—then knelt to drink from the creek once more, and left.
    He got to Oak Valley Road at seven in the evening of the day he had left work at five-fifteen. His mother had not made any dinner; it was too hot to cook, she said; they went to a chain restaurant for a hamburger, and to a movie afterwards.
    He thought he would be awake all night, having slept at the creek place, but he slept sound in bed, only waking earlier and easier than ever, at four-thirty, before sunrise, in the other twilight, the first, the twilight of morning. By the time he got to the woods the sun had risen in bright, tremendous splendor of summer. He turned from that, going down into the evening land, tranquil and eager, ready to cross the water
and explore, to learn this realm beyond reason and beyond question, his own place, his own country. He knelt by the clear, dark water to drink. He lifted his head from the water to see where he would go, and saw facing him across the gleaming, sinuous, continual movement of the stream, on the far shore, a square sign nailed on a board stuck into the bank, black words on white, KEEP OUT—NO TRESPASSING.

2
    M aybe the gate was always shut now, shut forever: gone. To go to Pincus’s woods and to the place where it should be and see the stupid daylight, the dusty thickets, the culvert, finally the barbed-wire fence across the first slope of the hill, no path down, no gate, there was no use doing that over and over. The first time it had been shut, two years ago, she had stood there where it should have been and willed to open it, willed it to be open, commanded it to be. And come back the next day and the next, and crouched down and cried. Then after a week she had come back and the gate was there, and she had gone in, as easy as that. But she could not count on it. Probably it would not be there. She had not even tried for months; it was stupid to keep trying. It made her feel like a fool, like a kid playing games, playing hide and seek with nobody to play with. But the gate was there. She went through into the twilight.
    She went forward squinting and suspicious, walking as if the ground might get pulled out from under her like a rug. Then she dropped down on all fours and kissed the dirt, pressing her face against it like a suckling baby. “So,” she whispered, “so.” She stood up and reached up at full stretch toward the sky, then went to the water’s edge, knelt, washed her face and hands and arms noisily, drank, answered the water’s loud, continual singing, “So you are, so I am, so.” She sat down crosslegged on the shelving rock, sat still, shut her eyes to contain her joy.
    It had been so long, but nothing was changed, nothing ever changed. Here was always. She should do what she always did when she was a kid, thirteen, when she first found the beginning place, before she had even crossed the river; she could do the things she used to do, the fire worship and the endless dance, the time she had buried the four stones in the place under the grey tree upriver. They would still be there. Nothing would move them here. Four stones in a square, black, blue-grey, yellow, white, and the ashes of her burnt offering, the wooden figure she had carved, in the center. That had all been silly, kid stuff. The things people did in church were silly too. There were reasons for doing them. She would dance the endless dance if she felt like it; keep it going; that was the thing about it, it didn’t end. This was the place where she did what she felt like. This was the place where she was her self, her own. She was home, home—No, but on the way home, on the way at last again, now she could go, now she would go, across the triple river and on to the dark mountain, home.
    She stood up on the shelf-rock, and with arms stretched out wide and hands held hollowed as if they bore bells or bowls