He shifted, ever so slightly. "Well, these are winter stories… See how gray the light is today, the world's as sleepy as I am. Little Belaire's closed up now, they're all close inside, and the old stories told… and spring comes, when it comes."

And we slept again, not having moved. The days went by full of blown snow, the sun's trip quick and cold and veiled. No stars, no moon for days: the fox: the birds.

Sixth Facet

There was a day, after gray rain had melted the last hillocks of black-peppered snow, and many birds had come home, and the woods were filled with new smells as with a stretch and a yawn, that Blink and I crept down the ladder and stood in the new air burdened with odors, looking around blinking and trying to stand up straight.

At the last full moon Blink, after judging the weather and counting something twice on his fingers, had put away his jar of black powder; but the first warm days found us still sleeping out the last of our long sleep, staying in bed as you do on a fine morning when you know you should be up, but perversely roll and toss under your untidy blankets until the sun is high. Now we wandered slowly in the woods, greeting the others who had come from hibernation, a snail and a basking turtle, a woodchuck so lean he seemed to be wearing someone else's baggy clothes, and the trees too; and as Blink and I stopped to watch the woodchuck sniff the air I was filled with gratitude that I had made it, made it through another winter through which many had not, a winter that was over now, a winter which is half of life. Life is winter and summer, a day is half asleep and half awake, my kind is man and they have lived and died; and I have come through another winter to stand here now on the winter-turned earth and smell the wet woods. I thought of Once a Day, I saw her vividly on travels far away. St. Roy had lost a leg to winter, but had lived to see spring. I sat down with the weight of all this, and looked up at Blink, ancient and lined, whom the winter despite his powder had weakened and aged, and knew there were those in Belaire who hadn't lived. I knew that what the powder Blink burned had done was to stop: stop all this that I felt now rush over me intolerably. It had started again as the powder wore off, and it was enormous. I sighed to breathe it out but could not; and wept suddenly, big panting sobs where I sat on the bursting earth.

At Little Belaire they would be making new rooms from old in honor of spring. Buckle cord would be shifting walls and opening doors all along Path, new dirt would be walked into hard floors, sun would be let in. Belaire opens like a new insect in the warmth, and Leaf cord trims and decorates and invites people to watch it unfold. Insulation is taken down, rooms swept of leaves and winter, favorite chairs lugged along Path to favorite bits of sun; and a new word that makes all the cords hum with thought and laughter.

"And you want to go home to it," said St. Blink.

"What? Go home? Why do you say that?"

"You don't answer when I speak to you, you can't hear what I say. You've been staring out the window all morning when there is a way out of the house, and things to do too, I don't just mean hauling and fixing, there are things abroad now to see and flowers blooming. And you sit instead indoors."

"It's not really indoors here."

"You know what I mean. You itch all over, but there's no place to scratch."

"Well, I can't go back," I said. "Of course."

"Of course."

There would be the bees swarming and the expeditions out beyond Little Mountain to see the new bread, and Mbaba's birds returning; and soon the travelers from the List coming, and perhaps she among them this time, and so much to tell her.

"I suppose," I said, "there are other places in the world."

"Yes," Blink said, "I suppose there are; other places, and just as nice."

I got up from my window and hustled down the ladder, almost angry with him. Because he was right: I went out to sit in the blooming meadow and let myself think Yes, I want to go home, now, in spring, now, I want to go home; my throat was hard and painful with it. I wanted to go home so badly for such a long time that day that I was only a little surprised when my wanting summoned from the leafy trees by the brook two pale boys, lankier than they had been, one with a red and one with a blue band around his neck. Among other more important things, I had forgotten, during the winter, which was which.

They climbed the bank in their dawdling way, stopping to poke into bushes for animals; when one saw me he waved, and I waved back. It was as though they had been waiting all winter just around the turn of the brook for the first hot day of spring.

"Hello," said, I think, Budding. "Are you a saint yet?"

"No," I said. "Not yet."

"Well," said the other, coming up behind, "they'd like to see you back in Little Belaire."

"No Moon went in the fall," said the first, "and again in the spring; your mother misses you."

His brother hunkered down on the meadow and ran his hand through his lank blond hair to find a leaf. "Maybe," he said, "if you had a whole year, and you're not a saint yet, you should go home and start again later."

"Maybe," said the other.

"Maybe," I said, thinking of my mother, and of the little that No Moon could tell her, and how easily I had left and how little I had thought of hers or anyone's feelings. A hot wave of shame and impatience made me jump up with clenched fists. "Yes. Yes, I should," I said. "Maybe I should…"

"Where's the saint?" the twins said, almost in unison.

The saint. I turned from the twins and looked back toward the woods, where from the cover of the hawthorns a brown face ringed with white hair peeped out at us like some shy wild thing, and disappeared into the shadows when he saw that I saw him. I stood halfway between the woods and a fallen log where the twins sat absorbed in something they had found. "Wait!" I shouted to the twins, who looked up, surprised. They were in no hurry.

I remembered the spring before, when I had crashed through these trees in search of him; it had been just a wood then, like any wood. Now, like a face you've learned to love, it had grown so familiar that the first wood was gone forever, and I knew this one only, which had a path through it, secret like Path, by the split birches, around the dense evergreens and down the bank to the mossy, ferny places and the black fallen trees where mushrooms grew, up the slate outcropping splashed now with clinging green, and up the sloping, brambly ground to where the old oaks grew, and to the oldest oak. To Blink, who sat at its foot, looking down it seemed in sorrow.

I crept up slowly to him and sat by him without speaking. He didn't look up at me, but now I saw that it wasn't sorrow that made him look down, but something in the grass at his feet which he watched intently: a black ant of the largest kind. It struggled through the bending grasses, its feelers waving unceasingly.

"Lost," Blink said. "Can't find his nest, lost the path. Nothing worse than that can happen to an ant. For an ant, being lost is a tragedy."

"What is that? Tragedy."

"Tragedy, it's an ancient word; it meant a description of a terrible thing that had happened to someone; something that, given circumstances and some fault in you, could happen to you, or to anybody. It was like truthful speaking, because it showed that we share the same nature, a nature we can't change and so cease to suffer. If this ant ever finds his nest again, and could tell about his experience and the suffering he felt, they'd have a tragedy. But he's unable, even if he does get back. In a way, no ant has ever before been in the tragedy of being lost; this one's the first, because ants have no way of telling about such things, and so being forewarned. Do you see?"