Round Robin Hood's Barn 



dismay I met with in the open pastures, here I 

 have the sense of being watched by infinite sly 

 life. I may not come upon it in the trooping 

 shadows. It creeps warily upon the farther side 

 of some great trunk, lurks under cover, or in bur- 

 row, peers at me from above. Yet though I hear 

 no soimd save my own deadened footfall, I know 

 I am observed. 



Straight through the silence and the dimness 

 rims a belt of rock, heaved up in tumult and split 

 asimder in great slabs and clefts that are a miracle 

 of accident and poise. Along this ridge, tradi- 

 tion has it that the Indian chief. King Philip, 

 dogged by the white man, sped homeward to 

 Mount Hope to die. A strange sense of justice 

 was it surely that condemned the body of this 

 warrior to be drawn and quartered as a traitor's 

 for his fierce loyalty to these, his woods. It is 

 in his steps I walk; at first along a low outcrop- 

 ping, a reef washed over by the surge of leaves. 

 Then as the cliff mounts, my mind begins to leap 

 ahead. Somewhere to the left I remember a 

 great bowlder that has sagged and slipped until 

 it rests, a wedge, between high walls. I must 



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