The Abenaki knew everything about it--green depths of spring and balsam-pungent air, ardent stillness of forest summer afternoon, autumn explosions of gold and scarlet, and all the ways for men on an errand of killing to travel through it in silence when the ground was white and the evergreens bowed down and the northern lights a wavering of madness between them and the February moon. Ben was welcome in yet another world as no one else was: a world that existed only when Reuben willed it. Ru's talking-spells began when he was about six and able to find hidden hens' nests in the shed, to the sharp-faced ladies' continuing indignation. At that time the Corys still maintained the yellow-necked rooster brought as a youth from Springfield (senile and resembling Louis XIV in other ways but named Sir Pudden) who believed himself master of the shed and hated Jesse Plum's boots. He and Ranger and Bonny knew all about the nests. Ranger avoided them from a rigid sense of honor, with only a pensive lift of the white eyebrows in his black face. Sir Pudden stood about in glamorous attitudes--second nature if you have twelve wives, all of them cloth-heads. Bonny entered the shed in those days on a moral tiptoe, never certain whether the armed truce with Sir Pudden was still in force. Sir Pudden, to Reuben's extreme sorrow, regretfully became soup in the year 1699. Even sorrow was grist for Ru's talk-mill. Bemused by the chickens' personalities, Reuben elaborated names for all of them--Martha, Patience, Hoobah, Binega, many others. Every new batch of fluff-balls drove him to a dither of vicarious maternity. At night he kept Ben awake with flowing tales in which these names acquired quasi-human characters who could range up and down in a special world with horizons of Reuben's choosing. In the conventionally documented world nobody ever chopped William Stoughton into small red gobbets. That vinegar-blooded Saint, deputy governor during the witchcraft frenzy of 1692 and again later, died in 1701, but not in the small red gobbets Duchess Hoobah made of him in one of Reuben's narratives. The conventionally documented Stoughton would not have been interested to learn how an obscure Joseph Cory, remembering 1692, had loathed him out loud in the presence of wide-eared children. It didn't matter. The past of one, or two, or two thousand years, the fluid present, the future that can exist only in myth, all came to focus in Reuben's here-and-now, in the theme and variations of a small clean mouth chirping in the dark.