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swallow a mouthful of spit.
    “Git off now before I take a gad to you!” he stormed at them. They scattered like a covey of Conestoga field quail, but not very far. Worth came in the cabin and fooled around like there was something he wanted to do or say before he went. Seemed like he couldn’t fetch it out, for he looked beat as he went outside where the hound leaped up and tongued at the sight of powderhorn and rifle.
    “You git back and stay back!” he ordered harshly.
    Young ones, older ones and sad-eyed hound stood together on the log step or by it and watched him go down the path. After a little the spice bushes cut off his legs, and he seemed to be just head and shoulders swimming through the brush. Slowly the great butts of the woods swallowed him up. But for a long while Wyitt held on to the loose neck of the hound so he wouldn’t go after.
    “Now nary me nor Mam nor any of you’uns knows where he’s a goin’,” Sayward told her sistersand brother. “Maybe he don’t know right hisself yit.”
    But that evening when they were all in bed, she thought she could see her father lying out in the forest with no more than the shelving back of a rotten log to keep him warm and the pack of furs under his head for a pillow. And next morning when gray showed through the oiled paper window light, she had the notion he was up this long time, hunched forward on the trace, making tracks for whatever place he was going. A night or two afterwards she dreamt she saw him sleeping under some strange roof, snug as a mouse in a mill, while a soft dust powdered his buckskins like fine, dry snow.
    Till it was over, she wished he had gone only to Shawaneetown. The third evening Jary coughed like it was spittle in her windpipe, and when she fetched it out, it was heart’s blood. Sayward reckoned it would have filled a wooden cup but she had no chance to measure. Her mother went to the door and spat it outside and next morning it looked as if a hunter had cut the throat of a buck there. When the others got up, Jary said she expected she’d lie abed that day. She made as though nothing had happened, but the face on the pallet was white and waxy as the corpse plants that come up under the beech trees. You could tell by looking at her that, had she tried to stand on her feet today, her legswould have buckled under her like wild cherry whips.
    Sayward didn’t look for her father till the sixth day. She was down in the cabin alone with Jary tonight, for Genny couldn’t stand the sight of blood and Sayward had sent her up in the loft. The fifth night she heard Sarge get up. His nails rattled across the hard dirt floor to the door where he growled. Settlement folks claimed the night air was poison and night swamp air gave you the shakes, but Sayward had left the puncheon door open a crack in the hope that Jary could catch her breath. The girl reckoned some beast was around, drawn by the firelight shining out in the forest, for it couldn’t be Worth. A man would have to own lynx eyes to hold to the trace through the pitch-black woods night. Every step it had branches lying in wait to gouge the eyes out.
    Then Sarge pushed the door open with his nose, wormed out and bawled like a bell. Sayward lighted a pine splint from the fire and went to the step. Holding the fire above her head, she waited. Up the path something formed itself slowly out of the gloom, and when it floated closer, it was the face of her father.
    “You all right?” he put to her, meaning the fire at this time of night.
    “Oh, we’re just a middlin’ fair,” she said in a low tone.
    Holding the light well off so Worth wouldn’t see too much at once, she moved ahead to the bed and tucked the cover high over Jary’s neck. Her father could run his knife into any forest beast and watch the red sap run. His hunting shirt was black from the veins of quartered deer he had fetched home on his back. But he wouldn’t take it easy to see the dark blots on Jary’s bed gown