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a bear.
    But it turned out there was something to worry about after all. In the past year or so, strangers had been wandering up the long road from the south. Hobos, people called them. They were looking for work, his father said. It seemed that in the world outside there were no jobs anymore. From time to time one of the hobos would knock at the kitchen door and ask if he could help out in the fields, or chop firewood, or anything else that needed doing, anything at all. Arthur’s father felt sorry for them and would have been happy to employ one or two, but he couldn’t pay them; money was something farmers—the ones around Struan anyway—had never had much of and nowadays they had even less. Arthur’s mother felt sorry for the men too, and gave them food sometimes, but she was also afraid of them. Who knew what a desperate man might do?
    So Arthur was obliged to become his little brother’s bodyguard, escorting him to school and back, protecting him from…what, exactly? What did his mother think a hobo might do to Jake? Eat him? Arthur couldn’t imagine, but he knew better than to argue.
    Before the end of Jake’s first week at school Arthur knew something else, which was that being at school with Jake was not going to be a picnic. All eight grades were taught together—eight rows of desks, grade oners along the wall nearest the door, grade eighters nearest the windows—so comparison of siblings was more or less inevitable, and that Jake would outshine him in every way was inevitable too.
    Arthur had suspected for some time that it was his father he took after in the brains department. All his father knew about was farming, and that was all Arthur was ever going to know about too. He was a dunce at school. His mother had told him that book learning was important, so he tried, but none of it made any sense. Miss Karpinski would ask him a question and he wouldn’t have the first idea what she was talking about.
    “Can you define an adjective for me, Arthur?” she would say, impatience already licking at the edges of her voice although he hadn’t yet had time to fail to know the answer. She was much younger than Arthur’s mother and wore dresses with round white collars and belts pulled so tight at the waist that it was surprising she didn’t break in half. “Come on, now, we’ve just done it—haven’t you been listening? An adjective is a part of speech that…? What does it do?”
    He had no idea.
    Jake did, of course. He sat on the far side of the classroom with the youngest kids, smirking at Arthur’s stupidity. He’d been born knowing what adjectives did.
    So schoolwork was added to the list of things that Jake could do and Arthur could not. The list got added to at regular intervals. Jake could whistle, for instance, while Arthur’s mouth was somehow the wrong shape. Jake could ride a bike. The length of time between Jake’s first sitting his small neat behind on a bicycle seat and being able to spin off on it, unaided and in control, was about three minutes. Whereas something about bikes eluded Arthur. He knew only one other person who couldn’t ride a bike, and that was his father, who had never tried because he said he couldn’t see the point.
    But Jake’s best trick was the way he could make their mother glow. He would wrap his arms around her and hug her with all his might—Arthur wondered why his mother liked it so much, considering how fierce it was, but she loved it, you could tell. So one evening Arthur tried it. He went up to her while she was peeling the potatoes for supper and put his arms around her and squeezed—carefully, because he knew he was much stronger than Jake and didn’t want to hurt her. She stopped what she was doing and looked down at him in puzzlement. She said, “What is it, Arthur?” Not unkindly, just perplexed.
    He was embarrassed. He thought he must somehow have done it wrong. Squeezed too hard or not hard enough or not in the right place. Then he thought