Ellie had been a good way ahead. Now she came back also gazing with frank wonder. Church padded at her heels.

The hill was not a high one, but it did not need to be. To the east, heavy woods blocked any view, but looking this way, west, the land fell away in a golden and dozy late summer dream. Everything was still, hazed, silent. There was not even an Orinco tanker on the highway to break the quiet.

It was the river valley they were looking into, of course; the Penobscot, where loggers had once floated their timber from the northeast down to Bangor and Derry. But they were south of Bangor and a bit north of Deny here. The river flowed wide and peacefully, as if in its own deep dream. Louis could make out Hampden and Winterport on the far side, and over here he fancied he could trace the black, river-paralleling snake of Route 15 nearly all the way Bucksport. They looked over the river, its lush hem of trees, the roads, the fields. The spire of the North Ludlow Baptist Church. poked through one canopy of old elms, and to the right he could see the square brick sturdiness of Ellie’s school.

Overhead, white clouds moved slowly toward a horizon the color of faded denim.

And everywhere were the late-summer fields, used up at the end of the cycle, dormant but not dead, an incredible tawny color.

“Gorgeous is the right word,” Louis said finally.

“They used to call it Prospect Hill back in the old days,” Jud said. He put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth but did not light it. “There’s a few that still do, but now that younger people have moved into town, it’s mostly been forgot. I don’t think there’s very many people that even come up here. It don’t look like you could see much because the hill’s not very high. But you can see-”

He gestured with one hand and fell silent.

“You can see everything,” Rachel said in a low, awed voice. She turned to Louis.

“Honey, do we own this?”

And before Louis could answer, Jud said: “It’s part of the property, oh yes.”

Which wasn’t, Louis thought, quite the same thing.

It was cooler in the woods, perhaps by as much as eight or ten degrees. The path, still wide and occasionally marked with flowers in pots or in coffee cans (most of them wilted), was now floored with dry pine needles. They had gone about a quarter of a mile, moving downhill now, when Jud called Ellie back.

“This is a good walk for a little girl,” Jud said kindly, “but I want you to promise your mom and dad that if you come up here, you’ll always stay on the path.”

“I promise,” Ellie said promptly “Why?”

He glanced at Louis, who had stopped to. rest. Toting Gage, even in the shade of these old pines and spruces, was heavy work. “Do you know where you are?” Jud asked Louis.

Louis considered and rejected answers: Ludlow, North Ludlow, behind my house, between Route 15 and Middle Drive. He shook his head.

Jud jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Plenty of stuff that way,” he said.

“That’s town. This way, nothing but woods for fifty miles or more. The North Ludlow Woods they call it here, but it hits a little corner of Orrington, then goes over to Rockford. Ends up going onto those state lands I told you about, the ones the Indians want back. I know it sounds funny to say your nice little house there on the main road, with its phone and electric lights and cable TV and all, is on the edge of a wilderness, but it is.” He looked back at Ellie.

“All I’m saying is that you don’t want to get messing around in these woods, Ellie. You might lose the path, and God knows where you might end up then.”

“I won’t, Mr. Crandall.” Ellie was suitably impressed, even awed, but not afraid, Louis saw. Rachel, however, was looking at Jud uneasily, and Louis felt a little uneasy himself. It was, he supposed, the city-bred’s almost instinctive fear of the woods. Louis hadn’t held a compass in his hand since Boy Scouts, twenty years before, and his memories of how to find your way by things like the North Star or which side of the trees moss grew on were as vague as his memories of how to tie a sheepshank or a half hitch.

Jud looked them over and smiled a little. “Now, we ain’t lost nobody in these woods since 1934,” he said. “At least, nobody local. The last one was Will Jeppson-no great loss.

Except for Stanny Bouchard, I guess Will was the biggest tosspot this side of Bucksport.”

“You said nobody local,” Rachel remarked in a voice that was not quite casual, and Louis could almost read her mind: We’re not local. At least, not yet.

Jud paused and then nodded. “We do lose one of the tourists every two or three years because they think you can’t get lost right off the main road. But we never lost even one of them for good, missus. Don’t you fret.”

“Are there moose?” Rachel asked apprehensively, and Louis smiled. If Rachel wanted to fret, she would jolly well fret.

“Well, you might see a moose,” Jud said, “but he wouldn’t give you any trouble, Rachel. During mating season they get a little irritated, but otherwise they do no more than look. Only people they take after out of their rutting time are people from Massachusetts. I don’t know why that’s so, but it is.” Louis thought the man was joking but could not be sure; Jud looked utterly serious. “I’ve seen it time and time again. Some fella from Saugus or Milton or Weston up a tree, yelling about a herd of moose, every damn one of em as big as a motorhome. Seems like moose can smell Massachusetts on a man or a woman. Or maybe it’s just all those new clothes from L. L. Bean’s they smell-I dunno. I’d like to see one of those animal husbandry students from the college do a paper on it, but I s’pose none ever will.”

“What’s rutting time?” Ellie asked.

“Never mind,” Rachel said. “I don’t want you up here unless you’re with a grown-up, Ellie.” Rachel moved a step closer to Louis.

Jud looked pained. “I didn’t want to scare you, Rachel-you or your daughter. No need to be scared in these woods. This is a good path; it gets a little buggy in the spring and it’s a little sloppy all the time-except for ‘55, which was the driest summer I can remember-but hell, there-isn’t even any poison ivy or poison oak, which there is at the back of the schoolyard, and you want to stay away from it, Ellie, if you don’t want to spend three weeks of your life takin starch baths.”

Ellie covered her mouth and giggled.

“It’s a safe path,” Jud said earnestly to Rachel, who still didn’t look convinced. “Why, I bet even Gage could follow it, and the town kids come up here a lot, I already told you that. They keep it nice. Nobody tells them to; they just do it. I wouldn’t want to spoil that for Ellie.” He bent over her and winked. “It’s like many other things in life, Ellie. You keep on the path and all’s well. You get off it and the next thing you know you’re lost if you’re not lucky. And then someone has to send out a searchin party.”

They walked on. Louis began to get a dull cramp of pain in his back,from the baby carrier. Every now and then Gage would grab a double handful of his hair and tug enthusiastically or administer a cheerful kick to Louis’s kidneys. Late mosquitoes cruised around his face and neck, making their eye-watering hum.

The path curved down, bending in and out between very old firs, and then cut widely through a brambly, tangled patch of undergrowth. The going was soupy here, and Louis’s boots squelched in mud and some standing water. At one point they stepped over a marshy spot using a pair of good-sized tussocks as stepping stones. That was the worst of it. They started to climb again and the trees reasserted themselves. Gage seemed to have magically put on ten pounds, and the day had, with some similar magic, warmed up ten degrees. Sweat poured down Louis’s face.

“How you doing, hon?” Rachel asked. “Want me to carry him for a while?”

“No, I’m fine,” he said, and it was true, although his heart was larruping along at a good speed in his chest. He was more used to prescribing physical exercise than he was to doing it.