likened unto treasure buried in a field. For reasons unclear but not necessarily related to the blood juice, he imagines the fence to be the one at Chancellorsville where a Union regiment died to a man and was found by a burial brigade with apple blossoms stuck to each bloodied face.

Evasive now, he perceives the fence to be the one stopping Pickett's charge at Gettysburg or that fence at Mons in northern France which turned a war. He begins to rummage through the piled stones for spent bullets and other mementoes of a great battle. He relives the story of the Angel of Mons[1].

As he dislodges more and more stones, he showers chunks of limestone and granite backward onto the barren field. The shower of rock is somewhat reminiscent of Ungava's meteor spray or splintered debris forced down a soldier's foxhole. Perhaps a runic stone will fall from tangled roots when he burns the dead stumps of trees deciphering once and for all why men labour or think at all. The fence swirls on and on in growing amnesia becoming the very touchstone of all purpose, stones from Jericho's Wall or the passkeys taken from our material existence. Gabriel, the archangel, will sound his trumpet here, he is assured. The dead and unburied of nameless acts of toil and dread will stand a stone's breadth across this fence. The Face of God will be seen in the pact nature has made with earth and stone.

He turns and puts his hat by a tree, lifts a canteen and imagines what all might be should vegetation ever be coded and stones prophets to their accordion earth.

[1] Allied soldiers at the first battle of Mons believed certain of their numbers had escaped destruction by the intervention of a Heavenly spectre.

[14]

SEAEGGS

The reef was inviting, her languid coral nudging the breakers as they returned from sea. From the instep of the dingy, the fisherman in his broken English was advising the seated men of dangers indigenous to these waters.

"None of that hostile marine life business, Steve--keep it simple--use words he's familiar with," the man with a razor lip, Cliff, muttered to his companion. The other was busy going through the motions in heavily accented Spanish broadly emphasizing common words that lead to nods and ballyhoo, those expected currencies of behavior.

"I'm getting through," came the reply. "Seems beyond the reef, dolphins and the occasional shark gather. Good fishing, though--red snappers and groupers with anemones along the bottom--the Mexicans eat those you know--call'em seaeggs."

Cliff, only vaguely interested, beckoned Steve's attention back to that one inescapable query--was it safe to dive.

Another brief flurry of words were exchanged with the fisherman raising a bronzed arm to touch the crown of his cap. Some indecipherable Spanish mutterings followed and another burst of loud exclamations before Steve halted his forays into that basic issue of logic and pernicity. Cliff eyed the two and then spoke again.

"I don't have to catch every word of his conversation to understand the general drift of his speech. He feels some danger exists, so why chance it? Why soften his warning with your doggerel translations. Your Spanish is at least good enough to surmise what I'm instinctively feeling. Let's quit and go ashore."

"Not so fast. The water's calm here and the visibility rings like a bell. He mentioned sharks have been sighted here not that there's ever been an attack."

"Yeah, well if there's never been a problem it's because this spot is so isolated. Remember this area is no regular mecca for divers of any type. Consider its remoteness and then do a little basic thinking as to why no one has reported an aggressive White, let alone one barracuda incident. I say it's not worth chancing and I can tell by his face that even despite your bundle of pesos something has been set registering."

Steve feigned disinterest. Buckling his tanks, every nodule of perspiration shone like beaded stud marks across his back. The salt on their skins was razor sharp and the wind's jerky movement caused incessant choppy movements about the breadth of the boat's rhythm. A cross-section of moods was close to enveloping them. For one, the afternoon sun was like a bayonet shoved through the thin sky. Obtrusively red, it fumbled renewed sweat beads across each man's brow like an eager dresser's haste with an awkward button. No sooner was one silenced than another plodding moisture bead appeared. Only the Mexican could remain unmoved to droplets skidding toward the vicinity of his lower eyelid. It conjured up tales of flies crawling into the eyes of aborigines in the Outback but without any apparent discomfort to the owners of those eyes. The two Americans, distracted by their sweating, cursed the heat and the loggerheads of their situation. No flies or bobos, as they were know here, added to their misery given their great distance offshore. Their greater paralysis of the will lay in the low horizon of the shore receding, then, appearing silhouetted against blows of driven water. This, then, was the mainstay of their indecision. All that blue--the blue of shining sky married with further Wedgwood blue sea careening in a plaster paris water dish, bounced up as if up from the shadows and made renewed fear inevitable. The fisherman, quiet above all this, seemed content to let inertia make her case. He knew heat held a silent, unassailable logic. Sooner or later the water would call or repel its protégés. His task was no easier whatever their final deliberation. A long toil with stubborn currents lay ahead, whatever. The journey to shore was inescapable. And so he sat, patiently content to provide that most meager of gruel--his slight infusion of calm and warning to the strange fellows he knew only as Touristas or more profitably, "amigo," Steve and Cliff. His lines, staked for fish, would remain regardless and the thin fingers of his existence remained coiled about a routine as numbing as that the two men had pretended to escape.

Now, at first furtively, then with the fury of an immense belch only the sea could muster forth, a school of porpoises broke about the little craft. Baleful but expression-filled eyes of each beast broke with water, then took in as only an intelligent creature can, the mission of the three surface beings. Each in a return splash shimmied the dinghy making for a resurgence of what, until now, had been a barely muted panic. Yet most of that brief moment was consumed in expectation and, as suddenly as it had begun, the pregnancy of the incantation was dissolved. Slipping beneath the waves, these most human of fish returned to nurse from the ocean's depths.

"Five of them," Steve was yelling--all at least twelve feet in length. Incredible.

"See, that settles it. Porpoises are the natural enemies of sharks. A school surrounds nursing calves and will, on occasion, rupture an intruder by butting the offender's abdomen. We have no more reason to fear. Any shark is long gone."

Cliff, as if moved by the last events or his friend's logic, also appeared to have altered his position.

"See, that settles it. Porpoises are the natural enemies of sharks. A school surrounds nursing calves and will, on occasion, rupture an intruder by butting the offender's abdomen. We have no more reason to fear. Any shark is long gone."

It was now Steve's turn to renew the apprehension. The size of the animals and the crash of their drift against the boat, was sobering reality of this stretch of water's potential for the unexpected.

"Cliff, I have all the makings of a complete smart ass. All this talk of being an experienced diver--that's all armchair politics at this point. Sure, I've done my bit in pools and their like. But the immensity of this place terrifies me. Just staring down through the shades of colour, seeing the breadth of that