scarcely three steps and snow was pouring into his sneakers over the top, and his feet became slippery and numb. Branches whipped against his face, and one caught him and cut him right above the eye. The trickle of blood was first hot and then icy cold in the wind as it ran down his cheek. Leaping over a log, Myron found that on the far side was a steep hill, which he proceeded to tumble down, head over heels. He skidded to a stop against some rocks at the bottom, and when he stood up, he found he was standing on an iced-over stream. His foot immediately broke through, and when he jerked it back, a jagged ice shard sliced through two socks and cut his ankle. The water from the frigid stream had collected in the rubber overshoe, and it was so hard to run in the sodden shoe. He tried to persuade himself that his best chance was to hide, but he knew that was not true; there was no way to hide a trail in the snow. He stood up and headed off again, again for the thick trees where something large would have trouble pushing through. The blood from the cut on his eyebrow had become diverted somehow and now spilled directly into his eye. He tried to wipe it away with one stiff and frozen hand. All the time he imagined he could hear a bear behind him, getting closer. And it was not his imagination, and the bear was there, and with one swipe it knocked him down.
VI. The Shape
“I fear me, Cuthbert, this is far from the spirit in which we a while ago agreed that men should go to the holy war.”
Cuthbert hung his head a little.
“Ay, Father Francis, men; but I am a boy,” he said, “and after all, boys are fond of adventure for adventure’s sake.”
G. A. Henty, Winning His Spurs
1.
Melodrama is my usual, if not necessarily my preferred, idiom, so you can imagine how difficult it was for me not to falsify the preceding events. How choice it would have been if, right before poor Spenser perished, he had finally found the cheese of his dreams! He reaches one hoof gingerly toward the wedge, which is emanating visible stink lines, and only then does he fall. His last words are poignant, and involve some kind of pun on Edam.
But absolute fidelity to facts, established through extensive interviews of the participants, especially young Myron in this instance, forbid my coloring of events with my usual palette. And so it is with no mendacious or even misleading rhetorical flourish that I draw back the curtain on a scene in which our hero awakens in a bed in a small round room, tastefully appointed. The red rays of the sunset stream through a small circular window. A low bookshelf squats beside the bed, like an incubus preparing to clamber into position. Entering the room are two women. One, moving as quickly and nervously as a chain smoker, is black and has the gangly limbs of a teenager; she stands well under five feet tall, and if she is wearing children’s clothing (striped shirt & purple overalls), perhaps this is why. The other is very pale, tall and slender, perhaps thirty, her blond hair cut short and her fashionable gray business skirt cut to the knee. I will go so far as to say that, in the magical and forgiving light of dusk, she is beautiful. Perhaps she looks familiar. It’s very cold; Myron’s neck is prickling, and this is what has awakened him.
“Well,” and it is the taller woman who speaks, as taller people always do, “how are we feeling today?” In the chill, her breath is faintly visible. She bends over above him, her movements slow and languid, and places the back of her hand on Myron’s forehead.
All the confusion of the moment is right then swept away by amazement that someone, anyone, is able to touch his face without flinching. And so Myron could only gape, dumbfounded as the woman explained that one of her employees had been some distance from here walking in the woods, collecting mistletoe, and had chanced to come across Myron, bloody and half frozen. As she spoke, silently the teenager, all four and a half feet of her, paced back and forth with a glass of water in each hand. Myron was tucked in tight, the heavy covers up to the chin, but his