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place is by this hearth. You heard your father say so.”
    â€œThat,” said Duck, “is quite ridiculous nonsense, Robin. The hearth’s in the firepots, and the firepots are in the boat. Here.” He pushed the Young One into Hern’s hands. I noticed Hern did not object. Because Robin was busy with Gull, Duck pushed the One at me. He kept the Lady himself. She has always been his favorite. The One felt heavy in my hands, cold and grainy. I was afraid of him and even more afraid of slipping in the water and losing him. I took him so carefully to the boat that they were all calling out to me to hurry and trying not to call too loud. I could hear Zwitt talking outside. He sounded near. They had a heavy blanket over the boat, hanging over the mast. Robin was holding it down on one side, Duck on the other. Hern had the boat untied and was standing ready to push it out of the shed.
    â€œGet in , Tanaqui. You can be religious in the boat,” he said. I climbed in carefully and found Gull lying in the bottom where Robin had put him. As soon as I was in, Hern started to push the boat. It was so loaded that he could hardly move it. I pushed up the blanket and offered to help. “Get down!” he snapped, red in the face, with his teeth showing.
    As he said it, the boat was through the door, and the current took her sideways along the end of the house, all in seconds. I am not sure whether Hern meant to get in straightaway and did not have time or whether he meant to stay out and push us into deep water. At all events he was still surging through the edge of the floods with his hands on the stern when the boat came out beyond our house, in front of Aunt Zara’s, and the Shelling people saw us.
    They shouted. I had not seen how they hated us till I heard them shout. It was terrible. Some of them were wading in the water toward our house, and they ran through it toward us. Zwitt slipped over. I hoped he drowned. The others on dry land yelled and pointed at us and cursed. And Korib, on one knee, bent his bow to an arrow again.
    â€œHern! He’s shooting!” I screamed.
    Hern was trying to push us sideways into the deep River. He tried to get round to hide behind the boat at the same time. That pushed us the other way. We wove about. Korib shot. It was as good a shot as the first. Hern would be dead, but at that instant we reached the real Riverbank at last, and the ground went from under Hern. He disappeared up to his neck, and the arrow hit the rudder instead. Korib took another and bent his bow again.
    Hern had the sense to hang on to the boat. If he had let go then, he would have drowned, for he lost his head completely. “My clothes are heavy!” he screamed. “The River’s pulling me down!”
    Duck and I climbed about over poor Gull, trying to heave Hern up, and Hern went hand over hand along the boat to keep out of Korib’s aim. The boat tipped frighteningly, and Hern’s caution was undone, because it spun round and let Korib see him again. The boat was spinning all the time after that. Every time I saw the bank, it was in a different place. Korib kept shooting, at Duck and me as well as at Hern, but we were too busy trying to get Hern aboard to be frightened. Afterward we counted six arrows stuck in the blanket, besides the one in the rudder.
    We got Hern up in the end. Robin, by that time, had hooked the tiller in place and was trying to steer, but the boat still went round and round. Hern sat streaming beside Gull, very much ashamed and trying to laugh it off. “When your clothes are full of water, you can’t swim, you know,” he said. “They weigh a ton.” We made him get into dry things.
    By this time we were almost at the end of the part of the River we knew, right down to the thick forest. We had gone that fast. I took the steering from Robin and tried to stop us spinning so. It was not easy. The current ran so strong that if you pushed