A tanager drew a line of scarlet through the trees, and burned from a bough before them. In an instant the Inger’s hand was raised, and he had aimed. But in that second, his arm was struck aside, the shot glanced harmlessly among the trees, and the bird flashed safe to the thicket. He looked round at her in open amazement. “What did y’ do that for?” he demanded. “What did you want to go and kill him for?” she cried. He considered this: what _had_ he wanted to kill that red bird for? “He was such a pretty little fellow,” she said, but instead of a rebuke, this seemed to him a reason. “Yes,” he seized it eagerly. “That’s why. You want to get up close to ’em.” “But if they’re dead....” she protested. “You want to get up nearer to ’em,” he repeated. “Don’t you see? It’s the only way you can.” She said nothing. She was walking before him now, and he watched her. She had braided her hair, and he liked the way the bright braids moved on her shoulders when she walked, and hung against the hollow of her waist. She must have braided her hair, he reflected, before he woke. Then he remembered the blanket which he had found folded across his shoulders. She must have found it, unstrapped it, covered him as he lay. He longed to let her know that he knew, but he could not bring himself to recall the time. “She seems to do everything so careful,” he thought, and remembered the red bird and tried to fathom her care for that. When she stooped to pick up a shining stone, he laughed out. “See!” he said. “You want to pick up that stone to see it. Well, I wanted to kill the bird—to see it.” “But the bird was alive!” she exclaimed. He stared at her. “What of it?” said he. “Look at the lots of ’em there are!” She said nothing. “Who’d miss it?” he argued. “Who wants it? You always kill things.” “I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know why. But it don’t seem right.” Women were like that, he reflected. They hated blood. But—a bird! It was unfathomable. High noon found them on the summit of Whiteface, looking down upon the crouching shoulders of the east foothills. Where they stood, the sun beat hotly, and the bare rocks and the coarse growth lay in intense brooding quiet. Everything there was flat, as if the long pressure of the sun had told, like weight. Electrically, the Inger’s spirits returned to him. Here on the height, kindling fire, boiling water, spreading food, were no such business as these had been to him down on his little shelf. Here everything had a way of being that was hitherto unknown to him. When their table was spread in the shade of a pine, and the wood duck roasted slowly over the fire on a spit which he had fashioned, he stood up and surveyed their work, and his look fell on the girl, sitting relaxed, with loosely fallen hands, the sun striking her hair to brightness. For a moment he let himself watch her, and catching his look, she smiled, as she had smiled when his eyes had met hers as he woke.