Dr. Hawthorne spoke of Marcus Aurelius in his tent by the River Gran writing his meditations at night while during the day he and his legions fought the German tribesmen, who, Marcus believed, would someday break through the frontier and conquer Rome. All Marcus was doing was giving his people a respite, a breathing space before they were beaten. When the class had studied the Celts, Scott had learned that they’d attacked the Romans naked, just ripping off their clothes and jumping up and down and shouting. He couldn’t imagine it, though in his history book there was a picture of the Dying Gaul and he was pretty naked as well. Scott had asked Dr. Hawthorne whether the German tribesman had fought naked. “Get your mind outta the gutter,” Jimmy Lucas had told him.

“‘As a spider is proud of catching a fly, so is one man of trapping a hare, or another of netting a herring, or a third of capturing boars or bears or Sarmatians. If you investigate the question of principles, are these anything but thieves one and all?’”

Dr. Hawthorne explained that the Sarmatians were one of the tribes along the Danube that Marcus was fighting. Then he asked what Marcus meant by saying that the spider capturing the fly was no better than a thief. What was he saying about human behavior? Scott had no idea, so he kept his head down. He wanted Dr. Hawthorne to get past Marcus Aurelius and talk about his son Commodus, who was a real butcher and once killed a hundred tigers with a hundred arrows. Surely that was more interesting. From the corner of his eye he watched Dr. Hawthorne walk back and forth at the front of the room.

“Maybe he likes flies better than spiders,” said Jimmy Lucas.

“All right, we’ll try another one,” said Dr. Hawthorne, walking over toward Scott.

“‘When men are inhuman, take care not to feel toward them as they do toward other humans.’ Can anyone tell me what that means?” Nobody answered. Dr. Hawthorne tapped Scott on the shoulder and he snorted, pretending to be asleep. “All right, Scott, we’ll start with you. And don’t mumble into your armpit, if you please.”

Six

Kate Sandler and Jim Hawthorne stood in the bell tower on the roof of Emerson Hall, looking out across the playing fields to the north. It was the Thursday afternoon following Krueger’s visit and Kate had a free period after lunch. The sky had cleared in the night, but a few clouds still lay far to the east over the mountains, where the treetops were dusted with snow. The bark of the leafless birches gleamed in the sunlight. The only greens were the pines scattered on the hillside. In the distance a red-tailed hawk rode the air currents in wide circles above the trees.

Kate and Hawthorne had just made the climb up the circular staircase that rose from the building’s fourth-floor attic. As they leaned their elbows on the wall, their breath made cottony shapes in the cold air. Both wore coats. The supports holding the roof formed an open square window, actually four joined windows facing in four directions. A dozen feet below was the wooden scaffolding where workmen were repairing the slate on the dormers, though no workmen had been seen for several days. Two fat gray pigeons paraded across the weathered lumber and cooed impatiently. All around was a vastness—to the north and east spread the national forest, and more forest lay to the west; to the south lay the tree-lined road to Brewster, and farther on—just a smoky blur on the horizon—was the small city of Plymouth.

Hawthorne turned to take in the entire panorama, stepping around the bell, which hung from a double chain. From the brace supporting the bell, a rope descended through a hole in the floor. “Incredible,” he said. Sunlight glittered on the lenses of his glasses.

“Too bad you weren’t up here during the height of color,” said Kate. “I felt like a smudge on a painter’s palette.” She wore a blue scarf with her red mackinaw and her black hair was gathered in a ponytail.

A white laundry truck with red lettering made its way up the driveway to the school. Dead leaves blew across the lawns. Three miniature students were throwing a football over by the gymnasium. Then, from far in the distance, Hawthorne began to make out the faint barking of dogs—a high chatter off to the west. They both looked.

“They’re over there in the woods,” said Kate, pointing. At first they saw only the empty playing fields and distant trees.

The barking got closer, a blended yapping that gradually began to separate itself into individual sounds, a baying and shrill yelps. The barking had a breathlessness, almost a hysteria. Then Kate stretched out an arm. “Look there.”

A deer burst from the trees on the western side of the playing fields. Trailing after it were eight dogs—so small from this distance that it was impossible to identify their breed or even color. One dog after another kept leaping at the deer, jumping at its belly. The deer would swerve and the dog fall back. If there was blood, they were too far away to see it.

Neither Hawthorne nor Kate said anything. The deer and the dogs raced along the edge of the field, weaving between the sunlight and shadow, becoming bright, then dark again. Away from the trees, the deer was able to draw ahead, its shape becoming increasingly horizontal as it picked up speed. The dogs were falling back. Hawthorne could almost see their pink tongues lolling from the sides of their mouths. Then the deer plunged again into the trees with the dogs in pursuit. In a moment it was as if they had never been. The distant barking grew fainter.

“They catch the deer in the trees,” said Kate matter-of-factly.

“Does it ever get away?”

“Very rarely. At least that’s what George says. He was always eager to have me go hunting with him. Anyway, the dogs can keep it up longer. They try to rip the deer’s stomach and get its intestines. Sometimes twenty or thirty feet will be dragging behind the deer. Eventually it collapses. Often the dogs eat the intestines even before they kill the deer.”

“They show no mercy?” asked Hawthorne, half seriously.

Kate smiled. “It doesn’t exist in that world.”

Hawthorne continued to look at the spot where the deer and the dogs had disappeared into the trees. “Destructivity is the result of an unlived life,” he said, mostly to himself.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a quote from Erich Fromm. ‘Destructivity is the result of an unlived life.’ It’s applicable to human beings but not to dogs.”

“What does he mean by ‘unlived’?”

Hawthorne leaned back against the wall, facing south, as if he felt more comfortable looking in that direction. “Let’s say someone has experienced a violent trauma or betrayal: a child has been raped by a parent or has witnessed the destruction of someone he loves or has been so traumatized by the possibility of beatings and punishments that he’s afraid to act. If the trauma is great enough, that person’s life may become frozen, emotionally frozen, even though he still gets up in the morning, is busy all day, and goes to bed at night. But there’s this empty space that begins to fill with rage, rage toward everyone—the perpetrator, the people in the world who haven’t suffered, even toward himself. Then he just wants to destroy, hurt others the way he was hurt. The rape victim becomes a person who rapes, the victim becomes a brutalizer.”

“Do all rape victims become rapists?”

“Of course not, but in many cases it happens, especially if the victim’s young enough. It’s far more common with boys than girls. I know of a serial killer who killed at least fifteen young women. He was young, handsome, and intelligent. His mother had been a high-class specialty prostitute catering to sadists and masochists. Some of her clients paid extra to have her son witness the beatings and abuse that she gave and sometimes received. This didn’t turn the boy into a killer of young women, but it was an influence, a bias, that pushed him in that direction. The awfulness in his past created this vacancy, an unlived life, a space where nothing could exist except violence.”