"Your people?" Meg asked.

"A tribe," said Ezra, "that lives in the prairies east of here, in a kinder land than this one. When we left, they offered horses and great stores of supplies, but we took none of them. We have a better chance of finding what we seek if we travel naked of all convenience. We carry nothing but a flint and steel with which to make a fire."

Cushing asked, "How do you manage to eat?"

"With great apology to our friends and neighbors, we subsist on roots and fruits we find along the way. I am sure our plant friends understand our need and harbor no resentment. I have tried to explain to them, and though they may not entirely understand, there has been no censure of us, no shrinking away in horror."

"You travel west, you say.

"We seek the strangeness of these plants somewhere in the \Vest."

"We also travel west," said Cushing. "Both of us may be seeking different things, but what you tell us makes it seem we may find what each of us seeks in the same location. Would it be agreeable for you to travel with us? Or must you go alone?"

Ezra thought for a moment. Then he said, "It seems to me that it might be proper for all of us to go together. You seem plain and simple folk, with no evil in you. So we will gladly travel with you upon one condition."

"And that condition?"

"That occasionally, on the way, I may stop for a while to talk with my friends and neighbors."

West of the river, the land heaved up in tortuous, billowing surges to reach the dry emptiness of the high plains.

From where he stood, Cushing looked down to the yellow streak of river, a smooth and silky ribbon of water that held in it something of the appearance of a snake, or of a mountain lion. So different here from what it had been during the days they had camped upon its bank, resting for this, the final lap of their journey—if, indeed, it should be the final lap. Viewed close at hand, the river was a sand-sucking, roiling, pugnacious terror, a raucous, roistering flood of water that chewed its way down across the land. Strange, he thought, how rivers could have such distinctive characteristics—the powerful, solemn thrust of the upper Mississippi; the chuckling, chattering comradeship of the Minnesota; and this, the rowdy bellicosity of the Missouri.

Rollo had lit the evening fire in a swale that ran down a slope, selecting a place where they would have some protection from the wind that came howling and whooping from the great expanse of prairie that stretched for miles into the west. Looking west, away from the river, one could see the continuing uplift, the rising land that swooped and climbed in undulating folds, to finally terminate in the darkness of a jagged line imprinted against the still-sunlit western sky. Another day, Cushing figured, until they reached the plains country. So long, he thought, it had taken so long—the entire trip much longer than it should have been. Had he traveled alone, he'd be there by now, although, come to think of it, traveling alone, he might have no idea of the location of the place he sought. He pondered for a moment that strange combination of circumstances which had led to his finding of Rollo, in whose mind had stuck the name of Thunder Butte; and then the finding of the geological-survey maps, which had shown where Thunder Butte—or, at least, where one of many possible Thunder Buttes—might be found. Traveling alone, he realized, he might have found neither Rollo nor the maps.

The progress of the expedition had been slower since the addition of the old man and the girl, with Ezra digging holes in which to stand, to talk with or listen to (or whatever it was he did) a patch of cactus or a clump of tumbleweed, or flopping down into a sitting posture, to commune with an isolated bed of violets. Standing by, gritting his teeth, more times than he liked to think of, Cushing had suppressed an impulse to kick the old fool into motion or simply to walk away and leave him. Despite all this, however, he had to admit that he liked Ezra well enough. Despite his obstinate eccentricities, he was a wise, and possibly clever, old man who generally had his wits about him except for his overriding obsession. He sat at nights beside the campfire and talked of olden times when he had been a great hunter and, at times, a warrior, sitting in council with other, older tribal members when a council should be

needed, with the realization creeping on him only gradually that he had an uncommon way with plant life. Once this had become apparent to other members of the tribe, his status gradually changed, until finally he became, in the eyes of the tribe, a man wise and gifted beyond the ordinary run of men. Apparently, although he talked little of it, the idea of going forth to wander and commune with plants and flowers also had come upon him slowly, a conviction growing with the years until he reached a point where he could see quite clearly he was ordained for a mission and must set forth upon it, not with the pomp and grandeur that his fellow tribesmen gladly would have furnished, but humbly and alone except for that strange granddaughter.

"She is a part of me," he'd say. "I cannot tell you how, but unspoken between us is an understanding that cannot be described."

And while he talked, of her or of other things, she sat at the campfire with the rest of them, relaxed, at peace, her hands folded in her lap, at times her head bent almost as if in prayer, at other times lifted and held high, giving the impression that she was staring, not out into the darkness only but into another world, another place or time. On the march, she moved lightly of foot—there were times when she seemed to float rather than to walk—serene and graceful, and more than graceful, a seeming to be full of grace, a creature set apart, a wild sprite that was human in a tantalizing way, a strange, concentrated essence of humanity that stood and moved apart from the rest of them, not because she wished to do so but because she had to do so. She seldom spoke. When she did speak, it was usually to her grandfather. It was not that she ignored the rest of them but that she seldom felt the need to speak to them. When she spoke, her words were clear and gentle, perfectly and correctly spoken, not the jargon or the mumbling of the mentally deficient, which she at times appeared to be, leaving all of them wondering if she were or not, and, if so, what kind of direction the deficiency might take.

Meg was with her often, or she with Meg. Watching the two of them together, walking together or sitting together, Cushing often tried to decide which of them it was who was with the other. He could not decide; it was as if some natural magnetic quality pulled the two of them together, as if they shared some common factor that made them move to each other. Not that they ever really met; distance, of a sort, always separated them. Meg might speak occasionally to Elayne, but not often, respecting the silence that separated them—or the silence that, at times, could make them one. Elayne, for her part, spoke no oftener to Meg than she did to any of the others.

"The wrongness of her, if there is a wrongness," Meg once said to Cushing, "is the kind of wrongness that more of us

I

should have."

"She lives within herself," said Cushing.

"No," said Meg. "She lives outside herself. Far outside herself."

When they reached the river, they set up camp in a grove of cottonwoods growing on a bank that rose a hundred feet or so above the stream, a pleasant place after the long trek across the barren prairie. Here, for a week, they rested. There were deer in the breaks of the bluffs that rimmed the river's eastern edge. The lowlands swarmed with prairie chicken and with ducks that paddled in the little ponds. There were catfish in the river. They lived well now, after scanty fare.