On such cold nights, while Ben wrestled not too urgently with eternity, the house might achieve a transitory perfection of silence. Then a contracting beam would set off a snap like gunshot. It could be real gunshot; after thin worry of listening Ben would know it was not. He might hear his father downstairs sigh and turn over in the four-poster that would not quite accommodate his long legs. Down in the fireplace an ember might pop in the banked-up ash--like a knocking, like floorboards disturbed by an otherwise noiseless footfall. Out in the shadows a village dog might bark, and Ranger in the shed boom back at him. Sometimes the gray cat Bonny, who liked to come smokefooting in and curl on the boys' bed, would take to snoring lightly. If it was a night when Jesse Plum's narrow ruddy nose was troubling him, Jesse in his lean-to might imitate anything from a waterfall to a hog-killing. Or Ben would hear the hollow baritone of an owl, the lamenting of a wolf, the nearly human scream of a mountain cat. But true silence also might arrive, and it would seem to Ben that if he could himself be silent as the dark, permitting no least sound of breath, there might come to him another moment of revelation such as he had once known--he could not quite recall the time--when he had dropped on his back in the grass, and looking up, had discovered the brilliant life of new birch leaves between him and the immortal blue of spring. * * * * * Reuben was wakeful too, but sought to conceal it by lying motionless even after his back began to itch, since the desire for talk was at present not in him. For a while he was both hurt and relieved that Ben had not reminded him to pray. But terror was latent in this; his mind winced away from it and sought the consolation of a decision: as soon as Ben should fall asleep--and Ben usually snored a little--he would get up and stand by the window and atone for the omission by offering up a better prayer than usual, one in fact that he preferred Ben not to hear, since he particularly intended to ask God's blessing on Ben himself. Once the decision was reached the comfort of it was genuine, allowing his body to relax as fear dissolved away. Unaware of the surreptitious approach of sleep, he found himself recalling things far away, wherever it is that yesterdays go, and at the same time wondered why his mind should so becloud itself with forgetting. He wanted--after a time quite eagerly wanted to recreate a certain day, the day when Jesse Plum and the Indian Meco brought in a lion. As he invited it the recollection brightened, yet remained under a nimbus of the not-remembered.