and Al went out, Tammie always went with him.

Ted turned up the drive and was halfway to the house when Tammie came flying back to meet him. They went to the shed in the rear; Al would be working. Ted peered through the open door and his father, shaping another stretching board, glanced up to greet him.

"Hi, Ted!"

"Hello, dad!"

"No work today?"

"That's right."

Al bent his head to hide the question in his eyes. Something had happened and he knew it. His voice was a little too casual as he said, "Figgered when Tammie fetched my tobacco pouch that he'd made up his mind to go 'round pickin' up after me."

"No, I found it beside the road and sent Tammie with it. You should put a string on that pouch and tie it to your britches."

"Guess I'd ought. Tammie and me took a whirl down the crick to look for mink sign. Must of lost my pouch on the way back."

"Find any sign?"

"There'll be mink on the crick this year. I can take a string of pelts and leave enough so there'll also be mink next year."

"Now that's just swell!" Ted bit his tongue. Wanting to keep his troubles to himself by appearing gay and careless, he'd leaned too far in that direction and been over-emphatic. Al raised his head and searched his son's face with wonderfully gentle eyes.

"Want to tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"What happened to you."

"Oh," Ted forced what he tried to make a casual laugh, "Thornton fired me."

Al remained calm. "He what?"

"Thornton gave me the gate, the bounce act, ye olde heave-ho. He said, in short, that I was never to darken his kitchen towels again."

Al said, "Come off it, Ted."

Suddenly Ted's misery and heartbreak were too great a burden to bear alone. He fought to keep his voice from quavering and his lower lip from trembling.

"That's right. I've been fired."

"Want to tell me why?" Al did not raise his voice.

"I—I wouldn't shoot Damon and Pythias for Thornton."

Al arched surprised brows. "Why's he want those two bucks?"

"He's going to expand Crestwood. He said that if he had one or both of those heads to put on the wall, it would be written up in every paper in the state. He said they'd help bring guests."

"Boy, seems to me like you went off half-cocked."

"What do you mean?"

"Thornton's takin' a lot for granted to think that you, or anyone, could get either one of those bucks. But if you wanted to hunt 'em, and if you did get one, 'twould do no harm to give it to him. 'Twould save your job for you."

"That would have been different," Ted said wryly, "but that wasn't what he asked. He wants both bucks before the season opens."

"So?" Al was almost purring. "And you turned him down?"

"That's right."

"You don't aim to change your mind?"

"No."

"Not even to get your job back?"

"Not even for that."

"You're sure now?"

"I'm sure."

"That bein' the case," Al said, rising, "I think I'll go down to Crestwood and have a little talk with Mr. Thornton. You stay here with Tammie."

When Al Harkness climbed into his old pickup truck and pressed the starter, his thoughts went back thirty-six years. The Mahela had been young then, and he'd been young, and that, he'd told himself a thousand times since, was probably the reason why he'd also been blind. It was not that he'd lacked eyes, very keen eyes that could detect the skulking deer in its copse, the grouse in its thicket and the rabbit in its set. But he hadn't seen clearly what was right before his eyes.

At that time, the road to Lorton had been a mud track in spring and fall, a dusty trace in summer and impassable in winter. Nobody had needed anything better. The only car even near the Mahela belonged to Judge Brimhall, of Lorton, and excitement ran at fever pitch when the respected judge drove his vehicle to Danzer, seven whole miles, without breaking down even once!

Lorton and the Mahela itself had been almost as far apart as Lorton and New York were now. Even when the road was good, a traveler had needed a whole day to go the fifteen miles to town and back. Whoever had extensive business in Lorton might better figure on two days for the round trip. The dwellers in the woods had been inclined to sneer at the town folk as sissified and, in turn, were sneered at for being hicks.

There'd been seven families in the wilderness; the Harknesses, the Delberts, two families of Staceys and three of Crawfords. All of them had gardens, a milk cow, a few chickens, a couple of pigs and a team of horses or mules. But all this was only secondary—the Mahela itself fulfilled most of their wants. It was a great, inexhaustible larder, provided by a benign Providence who had foreseen that men would rather hunt than work. Al remembered some of the hunts. His father, George Stacey and Tom Crawford had shot thirty-three deer in one day and sold them all in Lorton. Two days later, they shot twenty-nine more.

There weren't that many deer when Al came of an age to hunt. His elders were at a loss to explain the scarcity, unless some mysterious plague had come among the animals. Never once did they think of themselves and their indiscriminate, year-round slaughter as the "plague." On Al's thirteenth birthday, he shot a buck and a doe. They were the last deer taken in the Mahela for the next thirteen years.

It wasn't an inexhaustible larder at all, but just a place that could be depleted by always thoughtless and often vicious greed. Then had come the change.

The Game Department, the Lorton paper announced, had purchased deer from a state that still had some. In the hope that they'd multiply and rebuild the vast herds that had once roamed there, twenty of them were to be released in the Mahela. There was to be no hunting at all until such time as there were sufficient deer to warrant a hunt, and game wardens were to enforce that regulation.

It hadn't been easy. Bitterly jealous of what they considered their vested rights, the natives of the Mahela had resisted the game wardens. There had been quarrels and even a couple of shootings. But the wardens had won out and the deer had come back.

There were as many as there'd ever been and perhaps more. Protected by strict and sane laws, they flourished. Seven families had all but exterminated the Mahela deer. Now four thousand properly regulated hunters a year couldn't do it, and this Al Harkness had seen.

He thought of the families—still the Harknesses, the Delberts, the Crawfords and the Staceys, who lived in the Mahela. With the exception of Al and Ted, who observed the game laws to the letter, most of them took more than their share of the Mahela's wildlife. Smoky Delbert was an especially vicious poacher who belonged, and one day would land, in jail. But, with game wardens on constant patrol, even Smoky could no longer indulge in wholesale slaughter.

There was, Al had always conceded, some excuse for the Crawfords and the Staceys. Al was the only Mahelaite who'd held on to the entire family acreage. Glad to raise money any way he could, the Staceys and Crawfords had sold theirs, all but a homesite and garden patch, and the proceeds were long since exhausted. Most of the men worked at day labor and their employment was never certain. Always struggling, there were times when they would have no meat at all if they did not shoot an occasional deer. That condition would not endure. Since all the younger people left the Mahela, preferably for some brightly lighted city, as soon as they possibly could, the Staceys and Crawfords who remained were not going to last forever.

But if there was some excuse for them, there was none whatever for Carl Thornton. Comparatively wealthy, certainly he was in no danger of going hungry. Educated, he must understand what conservation meant. Supposedly intelligent, he must know that nobody at all could take what he wanted simply because he felt like taking it, or for his own advantage, and still hope to leave