Rachel did not look up until she'd crested the last hill and was on Waynesville's main street. She stopped at the first house to ask where Doctor Harbin lived. The man who answered the door took one look at her and Jacob and helped them inside. The man's wife took Jacob into her arms while her husband telephoned the doctor. Lay down here on the couch, the woman told her, and Rachel was too weary to do otherwise. The room swayed and then blurred. Rachel closed her eyes. The dark behind her eyelids lightened a second, then darkened again, as if something had been unveiled but only for a moment.

WHEN Rachel came to it was morning. She did not know where she was at first, only that she'd never been tireder even after hoeing a field all day. A man sat in a chair beside the couch, the face slowly unblurring to become Doctor Harbin's.

"Where's Jacob?" Rachel asked.

"In the back bedroom," Doctor Harbin said as he stood. "His fever's broken."

"So he'll be ok?"

"Yes."

Doctor Harbin came over and laid his hand on her brow a few moments.

"But you still have a fever. Mr. and Mrs. Suttles said you can stay here today. I'll check on you again this afternoon. If you're better, Mr. Suttles will take you back home."

"I don't have the money to pay you," Rachel said, "at least not right now."

"I'm not worried about that. We'll settle up later."

The doctor nodded at Rachel's feet, and she saw they had been bandaged.

"You cut up your feet pretty good, but nothing deep enough to need stitches. That was almost a mile walk and you sick as him, and barefoot to boot. I don't know how you did it. You must love that child dear as life."

"I tried not to," Rachel said. "I just couldn't find a way to stop myself."

THE LINGERING COLD DEFIED ANY CALENDAR. From October until May, snow and ice clung to the ridges. Several men died when they slipped trying to avoid falling trees or limbs. Another tumbled off a cliff edge and one impaled himself on his own axe and still another was beheaded by a snapped cable. A cutting crew lost its way during a snowstorm in January and was found days later, their palms peeling off when searchers pried the axe handles from their frozen hands. Fingers or toes lost to frostbite were among the season's lesser hazards.

The harshness of the winter was many-storied among the workers who survived it. One man who'd wintered in Alaska argued this one worse, took off his work boot to show five blackened nubs as proof. Owls frozen on tree limbs, the moon wrapping itself in clouds for warmth, the ground itself shivering-all manner of tall tales were spoken and nearly believed. Several workers argued the denuded forests had allowed winter to settle deeper into the valley, so deep it had gotten trapped in the same way as an animal caught in a rabbit gum or dead-fall trap. Men searched the sky night and day for signs of the season's end, a laying down moon, geese headed north, creasy greens on the stream banks.

The surest sign came at the end of May when Campbell killed a timber rattlesnake while surveying on Shanty Mountain. When Serena heard, she ordered every dead rattlesnake placed in an old applecart next to the stable entrance. No one knew why. One logger claimed from personal experience that rattlesnake meat was eaten in Colorado, and though it was not to his taste others had considered it a delicacy. Another worker suspected the snakes were fed to the eagle because they were a part of the bird's natural diet back in Mongolia. When a crew foreman asked Doctor Cheney what Mrs. Pemberton would want the snakes for, the physician replied that she milked the fangs and coated her tongue with the poison.

Each dawn in the following weeks, Serena walked into the stable's back stall and freed the eagle from the block perch. She and the bird spent an hour each morning alone below Half Acre Ridge where Boston Lumber had done its first cutting. For the first four days Serena rode out with the eagle behind her in the applecart, a blanket draped over the cage. By the fifth day the bird perched on Serena's right forearm, its head black-hooded like an executioner, the five-foot leash tied to Serena's upper right elbow and the leather bracelets around the raptor's feet. Campbell constructed an armrest out of a Y-shaped white oak branch and affixed it to the saddle pommel. From a certain angle, the eagle itself appeared mounted on the saddle. At a distance, horse, eagle and human appeared to blend into one being, as though transmogrified into some winged six-legged creature from the old myths.

It was mid-July when Serena freed the eagle from the block perch and rode west to Fork Ridge where Galloway and his crew worked on the near slope. The day was hot and many of the men worked shirtless. They did not cover themselves when Serena appeared, for they'd learned she didn't care.

Serena loosed the leather laces and removed the eagle's hood, then freed the leash from the bracelets. She raised her right arm. As if performing some violent salute, Serena thrust her forearm and the eagle upward. The bird ascended and began a dihedral circle over the twenty acres of stumps behind Galloway's crew. On the third circle the eagle stopped. For a moment the bird hung poised in the sky, seemingly outside the world's slow turning. Then it appeared not so much to fall but to slice open the air, its body vee'd like an axe head as it propelled downward. Once on the ground among the stumps and slash, the eagle opened its wings like a flourished cape. The bird wobbled forward, paused, and moved forward again, the yellow talons sparring with some creature hidden in the detritus. In another minute the eagle's head dipped, then rose with a hank of stringy pink flesh in its beak.

Serena opened her saddlebag and removed a metal whistle and a lariat. Fastened to one end of the hemp was a piece of bloody beef. She blew the whistle and the bird's neck whirled in her direction as Serena swung the lure overhead.

They Lord God, a worker said as the eagle rose, for in its talons was a three-foot-long rattlesnake. The bird flew toward the ridge crest then arced back, drifting down toward Serena and Galloway's crew. Except for Galloway, the men scattered as if dynamite had been lit, stumbling and tripping over stumps and slash as they fled. The eagle settled on the ground with an elegant awkwardness, the serpent still writhing but its movements only a memory of when it had been alive. Serena dismounted and offered the gobbet of meat. The bird released the snake and pounced on the beef. When it finished eating, Serena placed the hood back over the eagle's head.

"Can I have the skin and rattles?" Galloway asked.

"Yes," Serena said, "but the meat belongs to the bird."

Galloway set his boot heel on the serpent's head and detached the body with a quick sweep of his barlow knife. By the time the other men returned, Galloway had eviscerated the snake, its skin and rattles tucked inside his lunch pail.

By month's end the eagle had killed seven rattlesnakes, including a huge satinback that panicked Snipes' crew when it slipped from the bird's grasp mid-flight and fell earthward. The men hadn't seen the eagle overhead, and the serpent fell among them like some last remnant of Satan's rebellion cast from heaven. The snake landed closest to McIntyre and had just enough life left to slither a few inches and rest its head on the lay preacher's boot toe, causing McIntyre to fall backward in a dead faint.

Dunbar quickly finished off the snake with an axe while Stewart brought his spiritual mentor to consciousness by filling McIntyre's wide-brimmed preacher's hat with creek water, then dousing the unconscious man. Several wagers were made and then settled when Snipes' tape measure reached sixty-three inches from the triangle-shaped head to the last of the snake's twelve buttons.