VI 



THE snow had melted from the river meadows, leav- 

 ing them flattened, faded, and stained with mud, a 

 dull, dreary waste in the gray February. I had stopped 

 beside a tiny bundle of bones that lay in the matted 

 grass a dozen feet from a ditch. Here, still show- 

 ing, was the narrow path along which the bones had 

 dragged themselves ; there the hole by which they 

 had left the burrow in the bank of the ditch. They 

 had crawled out in this old runway, then turned off 

 a little into the heavy autumn grass and laid them 

 down. The rains had come and the winter snows. 

 The spring was breaking now, and the small bundle, 

 gently loosened and uncovered, was whitening on the 

 wide, bare meadow. 



89 



