“Going to work on the railroad.” He kept gazing mildly and curiously at me. “Shovel out those tracks. That work they talked about in chapel this morning. You remember.”

“Have a nice day at it, anyway,” he said.

“I will. You too.”

“I will if I find what I’m looking for—a beaver dam. It used to be up the Devon a ways, in a little stream that flows into the Devon. It’s interesting to see the way beavers adapt to the winter. Have you ever seen it?”

“No, I never have seen that.”

“Well, you might want to come sometime, if I find the place.”

“Tell me if you find it.”

With Leper it was always a fight, a hard fight to win when you were seventeen years old and lived in a keyed-up, competing school, to avoiding making fun of him. But as I had gotten to know him better this fight had been easier to win.

Shoving in his long bamboo poles he pushed deliberately forward and slid slowly away from me down the gradual slope, standing very upright, his skis far apart to guard against any threat to his balance, his poles sticking out on either side of him, as though to ward off any interference.

I turned and trudged off to help shovel out New England for the war.

We spent an odd day, toiling in that railroad yard. By the time we arrived there the snow had become drab and sooted, wet and heavy. We were divided into gangs, each under an old railroad man. Brinker, Chet and I managed to be in the same group, but the playful atmosphere of the apple orchard was gone. Of the town we could only see some dull red brick mills and warehouses surrounding the yards, and we labored away among what the old man directing us called “rolling stock”—grim freight cars from many parts of the country immobilized in the snow. Brinker asked him if it shouldn’t be called “unrolling stock” now, and the old man looked back at him with bleary dislike and didn’t reply. Nothing was very funny that day, the work became hard and unvarying; I began to sweat under my layers of clothes. By the middle of the afternoon we had lost our fresh volunteer look, the grime of the railroad and the exhaustion of manual laborers were on us all; we seemed of a piece with the railroad yards and the mills and warehouses. The old man resented us, or we made him nervous, or maybe he was as sick as he looked. For whatever reason he grumbled and spat and alternated between growling orders and rubbing his big, unhealthy belly.

Around 4:30 there was a moment of cheer. The main line had been cleared and the first train rattled slowly through. We watched it advance toward us, the engine throwing up balls of steam to add to the heavy overcast.

All of us lined both sides of the track and got ready to cheer the engineer and passengers. The coach windows were open and the passengers surprisingly were hanging out; they were all men, I could discern, all young, all alike. It was a troop train.

Over the clatter and banging of the wheels and couplings we cheered and they yelled back, both sides taken by surprise. They were not much older than we were and although probably just recruits, they gave the impression of being an elite as they were carried past our drab ranks. They seemed to be having a wonderful time, their uniforms looked new and good; they were clean and energetic; they were going places.

After they had gone we laborers looked rather emptily across the newly cleared rails at each other, at ourselves, and not even Brinker thought of the timely remark. We turned away. The old man told us to go back to other parts of the yard, but there was no more real work done that afternoon. Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

The day ended at last. Gray from the beginning, its end was announced by a deepening gray, of sky, snow, faces, spirits. We piled back into the old, dispiritedly lit coaches waiting for us, slumped into the uncomfortable green seats, and no one said much until we were miles away.

When we did speak it was about aviation training programs and brothers in the service and requirements for enlistment and the futility of Devon and how we would never have war stories to tell our grandchildren and how long the war might last and who ever heard of studying dead languages at a time like this.

Quackenbush took advantage of a break in this line of conversation to announce that he would certainly stay at Devon through the year, however half-cocked others might rush off. He elaborated without encouragement, citing the advantages of Devon’s physical hardening program and of a high school diploma when he did in good time reach basic training. He for one would advance into the army step by step.

“You for one,” echoed someone contemptuously.

“You are one,” someone else said.

“Which army, Quackenbush? Mussolini’s?”

“Naw, he’s a Kraut.”

“He’s a Kraut spy.”

“How many rails did you sabotage today, Quackenbush?”

“I thought they interned all Quackenbushes the day after Pearl Harbor.”

To which Brinker added: “They didn’t find him. He hid his light under a Quackenbush.”

We were all tired at the end of that day.

Walking back to the school grounds from the railroad station in the descending darkness we overtook a lone figure sliding along the snow-covered edge of the street

“Will you look at Lepellier,” began Brinker irritably. “Who does he think he is, the Abominable Snowman?”

“He’s just been out skiing around,” I said quickly. I didn’t want to see today’s strained tempers exploding on Leper. Then as we came up beside him, “Did you find the dam, Leper?”

He turned his head slowly, without breaking his forward movement of alternately planted poles and thrust skis, rhythmically but feebly continuous like a homemade piston engine’s. “You know what? I did find it,” his smile was wide and unfocused, as though not for me alone but for anyone and anything which wished to share this pleasure with him, “and it was really interesting to see. I took some pictures of it, and if they come out I’ll bring them over and show you.”

“What dam is that?” Brinker asked me.

“It’s a … well a little dam up the river he knows about,” I said.

“I don’t know of any dam up the river.”

“Well, it’s not in the Devon itself, it’s in one of the … tributaries.”

“Tributaries! To the Devon?”

“You know, a little creek or something.”

He knit his brows in mystification. “What kind of a dam is this, anyway?”

“Well,” he couldn’t be put off with half a story, “it’s a beaver dam.”

Brinker’s shoulders fell under the weight of this news. “That’s the kind of a place I’m in with a world war going on. A school for photographers of beaver dams.”

“The beaver never appeared himself,” Leper offered.

Brinker turned elaborately toward him. “Didn’t he really?”

“No. But I guess I was pretty clumsy getting close to it, so he might have heard me and been frightened.”

“Well.” Brinker’s expansive, dazed tone suggested that here was one of life’s giant ironies, “There you are!”

“Yes,” agreed Leper after a thoughtful pause, “there you are.”

“Here we are,” I said, pulling Brinker around the corner we had reached which led to our dormitory. “So long, Leper. Glad you found it.”

“Oh,” he raised his voice after us, “how was your day? How did the work go?”

“Just like a stag at eve,” Brinker roared back. “It was a winter wonderland, every minute.” And out of the side of his mouth, to me, “Everybody in this place is either a draft-dodging Kraut or a … a …” the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse, “a nat-u-ral-ist!” He grabbed my arm agitatedly. “I’m giving it up, I’m going to enlist. Tomorrow.”

I felt a thrill when he said it. This was the logical climax of the whole misbegotten day, this whole out-of-joint term at Devon. I think I had been waiting for a long time for someone to say this so that I could entertain these decisive words myself.