What an odd thing for a son to be blind about—to see every person in the world, or at least to see the way they went, except his own father.

This time Rigg had to make doubly sure of his calculations, because he had to make the crossing with many pounds of bulky, unwieldy furs and hides bound on his back. A crossing he could make easily, carrying only a canteen and traps and a bit of food, would now require him to jump onto too small a rock; he would overbalance and fall in.

He was three leaps out, on a dry platform of rock a full two fathoms wide, when he caught a glimpse of movement and saw, on the far side of the water, a boy of about ten. He thought perhaps he knew him, but since Rigg only came to Fall Ford a few times a year, more or less, and didn’t always see everybody, it might be the younger brother of the boy he thought it was; or it might be a boy from another family entirely, or a complete stranger.

Rigg waved a greeting and the boy waved back.

Rigg made his next leap, and now he was on a much smaller rock, so there’d be no room to make a run. This was the trickiest place in his crossing, where he was most at risk of dying, and he thought that perhaps he should have let down his burden on the big rock he had just left, and crossed with only a third of the furs, and then gone back for the rest. He had never made this leap with such a burden—Father always carried more than half.

It wasn’t too late to go back to the big platform and divide his burden.

But then he saw that the boy had moved out onto a rock. It was much too close to the lip of the falls—Rigg knew that it was the beginning of a path that had the most deaths of any.

Rigg waved and gave a sign with both hands, as if he were pushing the boy back. “Go back!” he yelled. “Too dangerous!”

But the boy just waved, and made the push-back sign in return, which told Rigg that the boy hadn’t understood him. Obviously Rigg could not be heard above the roaring of the water as it swept among the rocks.

The boy leapt to the next rock, and now he was on a path that was pure peril. It would be hard for him to get back now, even if he tried. And the boy was apparently so stupid he was determined to go on.

Rigg had only a moment to decide. If he went back the way he had come, he could set down his burden and then take a dangerous path that would get him nearer to the boy, perhaps near enough to be heard, near enough to stop him. But it would take time to get the furs off his back, and he’d be farther from the boy while he did it.

So instead he simply made the leap he was already planning. He did it exactly right, and a moment later he was ready to leap for a slightly bigger rock. He made that leap, too.

He was only two stones from the boy.

The boy jumped one more time, and almost made it. But the water caught just a part of one foot and swept his leg toward the lip, and it threw the boy off balance and he whirled around and both his feet went into the water, and the water pulled savagely at him.

The boy wasn’t quite stupid after all. He knew he was doomed to lose the rock he was on, so he tried to catch at a smaller rock that was right at the lip of the falls.

He caught it, but the water whirled him around so that he hung by his fingers from the outward, dry edge of the rock and his body dangled over the vast drop to the river below.

“Hold on!” cried Rigg.

A whole winter’s trapping, and he was about to discard it in order to have a slim chance of saving the life of a boy so stupid that surely he deserved to die.

It took Rigg only a moment to get the thongs untied, so he could shrug the load of furs from his back into the water.

He was so close to the lip now that the huge bundle caromed only once against the rocks as it hurtled toward the lip of the falls and then flew out into empty air and fell.

Meanwhile, Rigg dived for the rock that the boy had not quite made; Rigg made it, even though the boy had splashed water onto the surface and made it wet. “Hold on!” Rigg cried again. All he could see of the boy now was his fingers on the rock.

There wasn’t room on the rock for Rigg to jump for it; though it was very close, it was too likely that he would kick the boy’s fingers in the process of stepping there. So instead, Rigg knelt on his rock and then let himself topple forward, planning to catch the boy’s rock with his hands, making a bridge of his body.

Only something strange happened. Time nearly stopped.

Rigg had been in tense situations before. He knew what it was like when your perceptions became suddenly keener, when every second was more fully experienced. It felt at such times as though time held still. But it did not really happen that way. As Father explained it, there were glands in the human body that secreted a substance that gave greater strength and speed at times of stress.

This was not the same thing at all. As Rigg let himself fall forward, an operation that should have taken a second or less, it was suddenly as if he were sinking slowly into something very thick. He had time to notice everything, and while he could not turn his eyes any faster than he could move any other part of his body, his attention could shift as rapidly as he wanted it to, so that anything within his field of vision, even at the edges, could be seen.

Then his attention was engaged by something far stranger. As time slowed down, so did the paths he saw in the air. They thickened. They became more solid.

They became people.

Every person who had tried to cross these rocks at this place became, first a blur of motion, then solid individuals, walking at their real pace. Whoever he concentrated on, he could see walking, jumping, leaping his or her course across the rocks. As soon as he focused his attention on someone else, the other people all became a streak of movement again.

So in mid-fall, he became aware of, concentrated on, a barelegged man who was standing right in the middle of the rock to which the young boy was clinging. The man’s back was to him; but because Rigg was falling so slowly, he had plenty of time to register that the man was dressed in a costume rather like those on the old fallen statues and crumbled friezes of the ruined buildings where the newer of the two old bridges had once rooted into the cliff.

Rigg realized that he was going to fall right into the man. But he couldn’t be solid, could he? This was just part of Rigg’s gift, weirdly changed in this moment of fear, and the paths were never tangible.

Yet this man looked so real—the hairs and pores on his calves, a raw place where something had scraped against his ankle, the frayed and half-opened hem of his kilt, the drooping band of embroidery only half-attached to it. Once the man had dressed in finery; now the finery had become rags.

Whatever ill-fortune had come upon the man, the fact remained that at this moment he was in Rigg’s way. Rigg thought: The people I’m not paying attention to become blurs of motion. If I turn my thoughts away from him, he, too, will become insubstantial.

So Rigg tried to focus on a woman who had tried to make the leap to this same rock, but had slipped and fallen immediately into the current and been swept over. He did this—and saw the horror on her face, flashing almost immediately to the death look of an animal that knows there is no escape. But then she was gone, and his attention returned at once to the man in front of him. If he had become insubstantial for a moment, he was solid enough now.

Rigg’s forehead smacked into the man’s calf; he felt the force of it, yet he was moving so slowly he could feel the texture of the man’s skin on his forehead and then, as Rigg’s head was compelled to turn, the abrasion of the hairs of his leg on Rigg’s face.

Just as Rigg’s face was forced to turn in order to slide down the man’s leg, so also the weight of Rigg’s head and shoulder striking the man caused his leg to buckle, and the man twisted, started to topple forward.