Wil had learned to accept Roosevelt’s ways but he thought he never would understand why it seemed so natural for Roosevelt to lecture a man that way. Wil was a few years older than Roosevelt and he’d spent nearly ten years guiding city hunters through the woods and tapping maples and building boats and delivering coal but still he thought of himself as a youth; here Roosevelt was as undersized as a half-grown teen-age boy, frail and sick and much given to unseemly boasting and unsolicited advising—but men seldom laughed to his face; they paid attention when he spoke. It sure was a mystery.

Uncharacteristically Roosevelt fell silent. The wolf chorus carried on. Wil Dow endeavored to smile; but pretend as he would, the howling put a chill in him.

Roosevelt said, “Of course there is nothing to fear when there is nothing to live for.”

“Got your baby child to live for,” Sewall replied in a gentle voice.

“My sister can take care of little Alice better than I can. She’ll be just as well off without me.”

Uncle Bill Sewall poked up the campfire and pounded the dottle from his pipe into his palm, reversed the bowl and refilled it from his pouch. He wiped the underside of his tobacco-stained mustache and when Roosevelt went into a coughing fit, by common habit Wil and his uncle ignored it.

When the wheezing subsided, Uncle Bill said, “I guess you won’t always feel that way. Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”

Roosevelt’s face lifted an inch. “I’ve heard that before. Who said that?”

“You did.”

Roosevelt took his saddle close by the fire and propped himself against it. For a while he stared at a blank page in his notebook. Then he began to write. When he was finished he took his blanket a few yards from the fire and sat wrapped like an Indian with his back to the flames, looking at the stars. He had left the notebook behind, within Sewall’s reach. Without turning his head he said, “You may want to read that.”

With a raised-eyebrow glance of surprise at Wil, Uncle Bill reached for the notebook. He squinted to read it in the firelight; he considered it for a while and then closed his eyes, sat breathing deep and slow, and finally passed the notebook to Wil Dow.

Alice Hathaway Lee. Born at Chestnut Hill, July 29th 1861. I saw her first on October 18th 1878; I wooed her for over a year before I won her; we were betrothed on January 25th 1880, and it was announced on Feb. 16th; on Oct. 27th of the same year we were married; we spent three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others; on Feb. 12th 1884 her baby was born, and on Feb. 14th she died in my arms; my mother had died in the same house, on the same day, but a few hours previously. On Feb. 16th they were buried together in Greenwood.

For joy or sorrow, my life has now been lived out.

Wil Dow closed the notebook and put it back where Roosevelt had left it. The little New Yorker still sat with his back to them, coughing violently. It sounded saw-tooth painful.

He met Uncle Bill’s glance and nodded his head to indicate he understood Roosevelt’s purpose. It was clear enough: Roosevelt never wished to hear or speak of his departed wife and mother again.

On the following hot afternoon they moved the herd across more of the high plain. When a sod-roof cabin came in sight Roosevelt trotted back to join the two Maine woodsmen. “Take the herd for ten minutes, Bill. I want to do business at this house.” He pulled awkwardly away, dragging high at the reins. “Come along, Wil, if you care to meet one of the famous locals.”

Wil rode at Roosevelt’s stirrup toward the unpretentious soddy. A short heavy woman stood in the door holding a rifle. When she saw the two men guide their mounts carefully around the perimeter of her tidy vegetable garden she illustrated her approval by setting the rifle away inside the door.

Roosevelt said, “Are you Mrs. Reuter?”

“I am. Mostly they call me ‘Old Lady Reuter’ which I take to be a compliment on the maturity of my character, as I’m hardly forty years of age.”

Wil Dow was not accustomed to hearing ladies admit their ages aloud.

“My name is Theodore Roosevelt.”

“Heard of you.”

“This is Wil Dow, in my employ.”

The woman made a gesture. “Come in. You mustn’t mind the untidiness of my house.” She had a deep hoarse voice. She wore a proper bonnet and a heavy bodice and a wraparound overskirt but no bustle.

In the dark it was a moment before Wil Dow could make out detail—a good cherrywood table, a foot-powered loom, several lithographs on the walls, a small pump organ: the place was homelike and he was surprised.

Roosevelt said, “Why it’s a splendid house, Mrs. Reuter. Splendid.”

The woman made a bit of a curtsy. “You’re very gallant. Won’t you sit down? I have some tin airtights of peaches and apricots.”

“Many thanks, madame, but as you see we’re driving a thousand steers into the Bad Lands. I’m afraid we can stay only a few moments. They’ve told me you make the finest deerhide clothing in Dakota.”

“Whoever could have told you such a thing? My, what exaggeration.” A coquettish smile was startling on the woman’s broad sun-browned face; Wil Dow laughed aloud. She made a face at him. If she was gruff she was also full of fun.

Roosevelt said, “I want to have a suit of fringed buckskin.”

“Then you’ll have one.” She found a coiled measuring tape and began to span the scale of his bones with matter-of-fact swiftness.

Roosevelt said, “A handsome suit that I can show off to my friends back East. Perhaps a bit of Indian design work. I shall bring my own hides to you next week. They’re hanging now—”

“I use only my own,” the woman said. “I kill them, I cure them, I sew them. Then I know what I am doing, and you know what you are getting.”

Roosevelt held his tongue. His retreat surprised Wil Dow; it reminded him what low spirits his employer was in. After a moment Roosevelt said to the woman, “You must eat a great deal of venison—or waste it.”

“What I can’t eat I give to the Indians, who haven’t got sufficient ammunition of their own. It’s a sin to waste good meat.”

“My sentiments,” Roosevelt agreed. “If you kill an animal you’ve a responsibility not to waste any part of it. When we’re hungry we kill but I despise a man who’ll kill a beast for a trophy or a single taste of its flesh.”

Mrs. Reuter looked him in the eye with mischievous challenge. “What I heard was that Theodore Roosevelt was in the habit of mounting stuffed animal heads on his walls. What I heard was, Theodore Roosevelt likes to kill for sport.”

“And animal rugs on my floors—blankets for the divans—horns for hatracks—leather for my furniture and game meat in my belly and cured jerky in my pack. I’m a student of naturalism and I am experienced in taxidermy, and when I kill an animal I use every portion of it. Anything less would be an offense to Nature.”

Wil Dow examined a patterned Indian blanket that hung from the low ceiling, dividing the cabin into two rooms. He’d heard Mr. Roosevelt’s discourses on naturalism before; there were things that interested him more. He said to the woman, “Any wild Indians around here?”

“Not so wild any more,” Mrs. Reuter said with regret in her voice. To Roosevelt she said: “They say you’re Dutch.”

It took Wil Dow a moment to catch up with her abrupt change of topic.

Roosevelt said, “From Holland by ancestry, long ago. I am an American.”

“My husband’s name is Johann. They call him Dutch.”

“Dutch Reuter. We met last year when I was here hunting.”

“He’s a good man sometimes, my husband, but being Dutch—”

“In fact I think he’s Prussian, isn’t he? Or Bavarian?”

“Isn’t it all the same? Being Dutch he’s not just stubborn. He’s impossibly, irrationally, inexorably obstinate. I’m used to dealing with your sort, Mr. Roosevelt.” She beamed at him.