"Good, we'll get this settled, once and for all," Serena said, her eyes settling on the Saratoga trunk at the foot of the bed, a trunk whose contents Pemberton had yet to see. "It jeopardizes more important matters."

Serena took off her jodphurs and placed them in the chifforobe. Overhead, a few tentative taps announced the hard rain promised all afternoon by clouds draped low across Noland Mountain. The rain steadily picked up pace, soon galloping on the tin roof. Pemberton began to undress, reminded himself to get his hunting boots from the hall closet. Don't fret none if it rains tonight, Galloway had told him that afternoon. Momma says it'll clear up by morning. She's counting on that as much as we are.

Serena turned from the chifforobe.

"What's the bard of Appalachia like, in person?"

"Stubborn and cranky as his buddy Sheriff McDowell," Pemberton said. "Kephart told me at the first meeting how it pleased him to know I'd die and eventually my coffin would rot, and how then I'd be nourishing the earth instead of destroying it."

"Which is one more thing he's wrong about," Serena said. "I'll make sure of that, for both of us. What else?"

"He's also overly fond of the bottle, not nearly the saint the newspapers and politicians make of him."

"Though they have to make him appear so," Serena said. "He's their new Muir."

"Galloway says we'll be going right past Kephart's cabin tomorrow, so you could see the great man himself."

"I'll meet him soon enough," Serena said. "Besides, Campbell and I are putting down the stobs for the new spur line."

Serena stepped out of her undergarments. As Pemberton gazed at her, he wondered if it was possible that a time would come when he'd look at her naked and not be stunned. He couldn't imagine such a moment, believed instead that Serena's beauty was like certain laws of math and physics, fixed and immutable. She walks in beauty. Words recited years ago in a voice dry as the chalk dust choking the classroom's air, part of a poem Pemberton had paid attention to only so he might laugh at its sentiment. But now he knew the truth of the words, for Serena's beauty was like that-something the world opened a guarded space around so it could go forth unsullied.

After they'd coupled, Pemberton listened to Serena's soft breaths mingle with the rain hitting the roof. She slept well now, in a deepness beyond dreams, she claimed. It had been that way since she'd stayed in the stable with the eagle, as though the nightmares had come those two sleepless nights and, with no dream to enter, gone elsewhere, the way ghosts might who find a house they've haunted suddenly vacated.

The rain stopped during the night, the sky blue and cloudless by midday. Scouting, not hunting, Galloway had called their trip, searching for tracks and scat, a fresh-killed deer carcass with its heart ripped out, but Pemberton took his rifle from the hall closet, just in case.

When Pemberton walked down to the office, he found not only Galloway on the porch but also Galloway's mother. She wore the same austere dress as last summer and a black satin bonnet that made her face recede as if peering from a cave mouth. The old woman's shoes were cobbled out of a reddish wood that looked to be cedar. Comical looking, but something else as well, Pemberton realized, a disconcerting otherness that was part of these mountains and would always be inexplicable to him.

"She likes to get out on a pretty day like this," Galloway explained. "Says it warms her bones and gets her blood to flowing good."

Pemberton assumed getting out meant the office porch, but when he walked over to the Packard, the old woman shuffled toward the car as well.

"Surely she's not going with us?"

"Not on the traipsing part," Galloway said, "just the riding."

Galloway did not give Pemberton a chance to argue with the arrangement. He opened the Packard's back passenger door and helped his mother in before seating himself beside Pemberton.

They drove toward Waynesville a few miles before turning west. The old woman pressed her face close to the window, but Pemberton couldn't imagine what her blighted eyes could possibly see. They shared the road with families returning from church, most walking, some in wagons. As Pemberton passed these highlanders, they characteristically lowered their eyes so as not to meet his, a seeming act of deference belied by their refusal to sidle to the road's shoulder so he might get around them easier. When they drove into Bryson City, Galloway pointed at a storefront, SHULER DRUGSTORE AND APOTHECARY lettered red on the window.

"We got to stop here a minute," he said.

Galloway came out of the store with a small paper bag, which he gave to his mother. The old woman clutched the folded top of the bag with both hands, as if the bag's contents might attempt to escape.

"She's a fool for horehound candy," Galloway said as Pemberton shifted the car into gear.

"Does your mother ever speak?"

"Only if she's got something worth listening to," Galloway said. "She can tell your future if you want. Tell you what your dreams mean too."

"No thanks," Pemberton said.

They drove another few miles, passing small farms, a good number inhabited only by what creatures sheltered inside the broken windows and sagging roofs, foreclosure notices nailed on doors and porch beams. In the yard or field always some remnant left behind-a rusty harrow or washtub, a child's frayed rope swing, some last forlorn claim on the place. Pemberton turned where a leaning road sign said Deep Creek, traversing what might have been a dry river bed for all its swerves and rocks and washouts. When Pemberton got to where the road ended, he saw that a car was already parked in the small clearing.

"Kephart's?" Pemberton asked.

"He ain't got no car," Galloway said, and nodded at a tan lawman's hat set on the dash. "Looks to be the high sheriff's. Him and that old man is probably out looking for pretty bugs or flowers or some such. The sheriff's near hep on naturing as Kephart is."

Galloway and Pemberton got out of the car, and Galloway opened the back door. The old woman was motionless except for her cheeks creasing and uncreasing like bellows with each suck of the candy. Galloway went around and opened the other back door as well.

"That way she can get her a nice breeze," Galloway said. "That's what she's been craving. You don't get no breeze in them stringhouses."

They walked down the path a hundred yards before the trees fell away to reveal a small cabin. Sheriff McDowell and Kephart sat in cane chairs on the porch. A ten-gallon hoop barrel squatted between them, on it a tattered topographical map draped over the barrel like a tablecloth. McDowell watched intently while Kephart marked the map with a carpenter's pencil. Pemberton placed a boot on the porch step, saw that the map encompassed the surrounding mountains and eastern Tennessee. Gray and red markings covered the map, some overlapping, some partially erased, as if a palimpsest.

"Planning a trip?" Pemberton asked.

"No," Kephart replied, acknowledging Pemberton for the first time since he'd stepped into the clearing. "A national park."

Kephart laid the pencil on the barrel. He took off his reading glasses and set them down as well.

"What are you doing on my land?"

"Your land?" Pemberton said. "I assumed you'd already donated it to this park you're wanting so bad. Or is it just other people's property that the park gets?"

"The park will get any land I own," Kephart said. "I've already taken care of that in my will, but until then you're trespassing."

"We're just passing through," Galloway said, beside Pemberton now. "Heard a panther might be roaming around here. We're just helping to protect you."

McDowell stared at the rifle in Pemberton's hands. Pemberton motioned at the map with the gun's barrel.