Brother must have passed through the years in a hurry, remembering his father bringing him here as a boy. "A ways back," Brother said in his clipped North Saugus fashion, outlander, specific, no waste in his words. Old Oren Bentley, it had been told us, had walked five miles through the unknown woods off Route 16 as a boy and had come across the campsite, the remnants of an old lodge1, and a great curve in the Pine River so that a mile's walk in either direction gave you three miles of stream to fish, upstream or downstream. Paradise up north.
His Venerable Self nodded again, a man of signals, then said, "Knowed him way back some. Met him at the Iron Bridge. We passed a few times." Instantly we could see the story. A whole history of encounter was in his words; it marched right through us the way knowledge does, as well as legend. He pointed2 at the coffeepot. "The boys'll be off, but my days down there get cut up some. I'll sit a while and take some of thet." He said thet too pronounced, too dramatic, and it was a short time before I knew why.
The white wicker rocker went into a slow and deliberate motion, his head nodded again. He spo
