Read The Double Hook for Free Online Page B

is fooled and every day fools others. He doesn’t know, Kip thought, how much mischief Coyote can make.
    Coyote reaching out reflected glory. Like a fire to warm. Then shoving the brand between a man’s teeth right into his belly’s pit. Fear making mischief. Laying traps for men. The dog and his servants plaguing the earth. Fear skulking round. Fear walking round in the living shape of the dead. No stone was big enough, no pile of stones, to weigh down fear.
    His mind awake floated on the tide of objects about him. Was swirled in a pool. Caught in the fork of a tangle. Diverted from its course. Swept into the main stream. Birds’ eyes. The veins of leaves dark in the moonlight. A beetle caught blue on a shelved stone.
    Not far from James’s gate Kip turned his horse off the road and led it across the creek into the matted willows.
11
    So it was not James that the girl saw first but Kip. There was no mistake. The moonlight was clear around her. So clear that she could see every split shake on James Potter’s roof.
    A man stumbles on things, Kip said. Just walking along in the brush. I go all the way down to your place with some words for you and you’re hanging about in the house. Now girls should be in bed. And now I just find you sitting outside in the bushes.
    What are you doing here? the girl asked. What words did James send?
    How do you know it was James sent words? Kip asked. I didn’t say James’s words.
    The girl said nothing.
    Supposing James did send words, Kip said. What do you think he said?
    Still the girl did not speak.
    I forget, Kip said. A man can’t be remembering things all his life.
    He turned away and started towards the creek.
    Where are you going? the girl asked. Come back.
    Kip walked a few more steps away from her. She got up from the ground and followed him.
    Tell me, she said, what words he sent. Tell me.
    Kip looked around.
    You got anything to oil up a man’s mind? he asked.
    Nothing, she said. Nothing worth having. Nothing that someone else wouldn’t take back from you. Girls don’t have things to give. I’ve got nothing of my own.
    You gave something to James, he said.
    Go away, said the girl. Go away. Then she ran.
12
    It seemed to her that it was someone else breaking through the brush. Splashing across the creek. Racing up the hoof-pocked path to the barnyard. Running headlong for the door she’d been watching.
    She could hear hands beating wood. Each stroke prolonged joining the first. Clamour filling the night.
    Yet Kip had not followed her. There was no one but herself in the emptiness before James’s house.
    James had forbidden her to come.
    The door opened outward.
    I have broken my word, Lenchen thought. And she imagined the old lady’s eyes and Greta’s blazing like lamps in the inmost corners of the room.
    What do you want here? It was a woman’s voice. Greta’s. But the girl heard at the same moment the explosion of a match. Saw flame rise gold from its blue fire. Saw James lifting the lamp so high that the light slanting down over Greta’s shoulder reached out towards her.
    Yet Greta stood almost full in the doorway like a tangle of wild flowers grown up between them. All green and gold and purple in the lamplight. Fat clinging clumps of purple flowers. Honey-tongued. Bursting from their green stems. Crowding against green leaves. Her face above. Fierce. Sharp. Sudden as a bird’s swinging out on the topmost surge.
    Lenchen shrank away from the riot of the falling skirt. Shut her eyes against the tumult of branch and leaf. Calling: James. James. As if she saw him at a great distance. While behind her Kip’s voice sounded. Loon laugh shivering the night.
    James shoved Greta aside. He held the lamp high as he came.
    Can a man have no peace? he said.
    He took the girl by the arm.
    Kip came out of the shadow by the barn.
    Why are you hallooing about my house? James asked. In a whole miserable country can a man have no rest?
    Not when he’s got the weight of his