VI 
The Missing Tooth 
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 
