It rained just before dawn, then the sun rose inside the mist on the hills and through my window I could see the pale green shapes of cottonwoods swelling in the wind and a lone black bear running past Lucas's tent, as though the pinkness of the morning had caught it in a dishonest act.
Doc came into my bedroom and set down a cup of coffee for me on the nightstand and pulled up a chair next to my bed.
"That ATF agent, Rackley, the one who was hassling you?" he said.
"What about him?"
"He called while you were still asleep. He left this number," Doc said.
"He must be an early riser," I said.
"Why you been sleeping with L.Q.'s gun on your nightstand the last couple of nights?"
"I sent a letter to Wyatt Dixon and told him a few things about Witherspoon, including the fact he had AIDS."
Doc nodded reflectively. "Where'd you come by all this information?" he asked.
"Temple got ahold of Witherspoon's welfare and juvie records. I made up the stuff about AIDS."
Doc got up from his chair and propped his hands on the windowsill and stared out at the morning.
"I thought I had an iron bolt through both temples," he said.
I shaved and brushed my teeth and dressed and called the number Amos Rackley had left.
"Meet me inside the University of Montana football stadium in a half hour," he said.
"What for?"
"I have something for you. You bring anybody with you, I'm gone."
I drove through Hellgate Canyon and took the university exit and parked by the stadium. A half dozen hang gliders were floating on the breezes high up on Mount Sentinel, their shadows swooping across the green slopes beneath them. I walked into the great emptiness of the stadium and saw Amos Rackley sitting twenty rows up on the fifty-yard line.
He wore shades and a brown rain hat and an open-neck checkered shirt and khakis and sandals with white socks. He could have been an academic who had strolled off for a moment's respite from his summer classes. For the first time I noticed a religious chain around his neck.
"Open your shirt for me, would you?" he said.
"That's a little silly, isn't it?" I said.
"So you don't have to be offended," he replied, and waited.
I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it out of my trousers and turned in a circle.
"Sit down and let me explain something, although you probably already know the drill," he said. A manila envelope rested on his knees. "All federal law enforcement agencies use informants. A good agent flips the right guy and puts a lot of nasty people in the gray-bar hotel chain. But once in a while an agent gets too jacked up on a case and forgets he's allowed a sociopath to run loose with a baseball bat."
"You're talking about Lamar Ellison?"
"As time went by we became more and more convinced he and some other bikers tried to kidnap Cleo Lonnigan's child. The father probably showed up and the bikers killed them both. We couldn't prove it, though, so we gave Ellison a long leash and used him."
"Except you didn't nail anybody and Carl Hinkel probably had other children kidnapped and sold to perverts, including Sue Lynn's little brother?"
Rackley looked out at Hellgate Canyon and the wind bending the ponderosa along the edges of the cliffs and the hang gliders that hovered and dipped against the immense blueness of the sky.
"I quit the Bureau," he said. "There are two signed and notarized affidavits in this envelope. One is from Sue Lynn Big Medicine, admitting she set fire to Lamar Ellison. The other statement is from me, describing her role as an informant for the ATE If anyone wants to question either her or me, I wish them good luck, get my drift?"
He placed the envelope in my hands.
"They'll come after you," I said.
"Could be. I doubt it. A stock brokerage doesn't prosecute the employees it fires for embezzlement." He got up from his seat and removed his hat and ran his hand through his close-cropped hair, then replaced his hat and looked at the panorama of mountains that enclosed the city.
"I hear the Canadian Rockies are great this time of year," I said.
"I've always been a flatlander. Stay away from Carl Hinkel's compound, Mr. Holland, unless you want to end up on a recording."
"You finally got a wire inside?"
"Put it this way. I've got the sense somebody unscrewed Wyatt Dixon's head and spit inside it. You don't happen to know anything about that, do you?"
"Not a thing," I said, my gaze fixed straight ahead.
He walked down the cement steps to the exit. He didn't look back.
Wyatt Dixon had a simple vision of life. You ate your pain, you shined the world on, and you accepted inequity as the natural state of man. The only unforgivable sin was personal betrayal.
The paling of the sky at dawn, the place the sun occupied at noon or twilight, the rain or ice or drought that wore away the surfaces of the earth had nothing to do with a man's fate. You took your first breath with a slap. If you were lucky, your mouth found a teat before you starved. You grew out of your own excretions and ate what you were given, carried slop to hogs, shucked chicken feathers in scalding water, split smokehouse wood, chopped and picked cotton, punched and dehorned cows, shot mustangs and wild burros for dog food contractors, and maybe put your seed in a Mexican girl inside a bean field. Then, one morning, at age fifteen, you walked past the waiting school bus to the train tracks and climbed aboard a freight that carried you all the way to Big D and an Army enlistment center.
Wyatt liked the Army. He liked the food, the good clothes, the PX beer, the access to fine guns. The problem was the Army didn't like Wyatt. Or at least the black mess sergeant didn't after Wyatt asked him if he had a tail tucked inside his pants.
The base psychiatrist said Wyatt had antisocial tendencies. The mess sergeant probably agreed after Wyatt broke his nose with a bottle behind a bar in San Antonio and cut his stripes off and stuffed them into his mouth.
While he was in the stockade waiting for his uncle to show up with a birth certificate, Wyatt tried to figure how to avoid getting himself jammed up like this again. He finally figured it out. Stay off the computer.
He traveled the country as a roustabout for a tent preacher, milked rattlesnakes for a veterinarian in West Kansas, slaughtered cattle below the border, daily pumped a hard rubber ball five hundred times in each palm, and by age twenty-one was a fullblown rodeo clown, fearless, twice hooked and slammed into the boards, able to knock a horse unconscious with his fist or snap a steer's spinal cord with his bare hands.
Beer-joint women kissed his fingers and men feared them. He chewed cigars like plug tobacco, sewed his own wounds, asked no favors, drank tequila like water, borrowed no money, carried all of his possessions in a cardboard suitcase, read a new comic book every night, wore two-hundred-dollar hats, and stitched an American flag as a liner inside the duster he wore in rainy or cold weather.
But it was the greasepaint grin that bothered his rodeo cohorts. When Wyatt wiped the grease off his face, the lunatic expression was still there, accentuated by eyes that were full of invasiveness and light that had no origin. A female barrel racer claimed he raped her. The board members of the RCA tried to ban him from the circuit.
So what? The good life was always there, sleeping in a bedroll under the stars, sometimes shacking up in a trailer, carrying plenty of cash, drinking beer and eating Mexican food whenever he wanted and grilling steaks in roadside parks up in the high desert. Everybody loved a cowboy. This was a great country, by God.
The only problems in life came from disloyalty. That's what Carl Hinkel didn't understand. A man who claimed to be a patriot and should have known better. But Wyatt knew that under the pose of the Virginia gentleman Carl was weak and dependent. That in itself was forgivable. But ingratitude and disrespect were a form of betrayal, and that was not.
After Carl had called him "boy" and Wyatt had rubbed Carl's nose in it, Carl had tried to straighten it out in the dining room, in front of a half dozen others. Big mistake.
Wyatt was at the steam table, bagging up a lunch to eat out on the riverbank.
"I can't abide a soldier sassing me like that, Wyatt,* Carl said.
"Is that right?" Wyatt said, without looking up from the sandwich he was making.
"You were out of line, son," Carl said.
Wyatt filled the side of a butter knife with mustard and layered it on his sandwich bread, nodding, as though digesting a profound statement.
"Would you hand me those 'maters, Carl?" he said.
Carl gestured to a boy behind the steam table, who picked up a platter of sliced tomatoes and tried to give them to Wyatt. Wyatt ignored him.
"You got what some folks might call a serious character defect, Carl. You cain't cut it on your own. That's why the airborne run you off. That's why you got to surround yourself with a bunch of sawed-off little pissants don't know their own mind. Now get the fuck out of my face."
At DAWN Friday morning Terry woke in his shack above the Clark Fork and saw Wyatt standing against the window, inside the shack, the blue-green softness of the pines and the mists off the river rising up behind him. The fire in the woodstove had gone out and the room was cold, the air brittle. Terry hugged the quilt around him and sat up on his bunk. The German dagger Carl had given him lay on the table in the center of the room, the swastikas on the white handle as bright as drops of blood.
"I knowed a preacher who used to say, 'Fool me oncet, shame on you. Fool me twicet, shame on me,'" Wyatt said. He wore a heavy long-sleeve crimson shirt, with his purple garters on the arms, and tight jeans and his flat-brimmed black hat with the Indian band around the crown.
"I don't know what I did wrong, Wyatt. I don't know why you're mad at me."
Wyatt picked up the dagger and eased it halfway out of the sheath. The chromed blade clicked with light. Why hadn't he put the knife under his pillow? Terry thought. Why did Wyatt have to put his filthy hands on it?
"Carl promoted you?" Wyatt said.
"I'm information officer, if you want to know."
"Going over to Idaho? Meet all them groups at Hayden Lake?"
"Maybe. If Carl tells me to."
Wyatt sat down in a chair and fiddled with the German dagger, never removing it all the way from the sheath. Then he tossed it to Terry.
"I noticed you been coughing a bit. I'm gonna introduce you to a woman used to be a whore down by the railway tracks," Wyatt said. "Why do I want to meet her?"
"She thinks she might know you from the clinic. You call to mind a woman looks like she was just dug up from a cemetery?"
"I don't know what's going on, Wyatt."
"I'll pick you up at seven. Maybe we'll check out the Voss girl again. Or maybe that female private detective. I told Mr. Holland he'd know when it was my ring."
"Carl says it's a bad time for stirring anything up." "Seven o'clock," Wyatt said.
THAT SAME MORNING Temple and I ate breakfast together in a cafe across from the train yard, then walked down Higgins toward the river. Two city police cars had pulled up in front of a saloon, their flashers on, and two uniformed officers had gotten out and were approaching a man who sat like a pile of wet hay on the curb. The officers slipped their batons into the rings on their belts and leaned over and tried to talk with the man on the curb.
It was one of those moments when, if your life is fairly sane and you're able to greet the day with a clear eye and enjoy the simple pleasure of reading the newspaper over a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, you thank the Creator or Yahweh or the Great Spirit or the Buddha or Our Lord Jesus you are not the wretch whose fate seems so awful that no reasonable human being could deliberately choose it for himself.
Xavier Girard's clothes looked as if they had been stolen off a washline. His face was puffed, his eyes like sliced beets; his mouth hung open as though he had just witnessed a train wreck. He vomited between his legs, then stared stupidly at the splatter on his tennis shoes.
But even from across the street and in his drunken state Xavier recognized me and pushed himself out of the policemen's grasp and stumbled into the traffic, where he was almost hit by a milk truck.
He came toward me, waving his arms, a vinegary stench welling up from his armpits.
"Molinari's goons ripped up all my disks. These fucks won't do anything about it," he said, swinging one arm backward to indicate the two policemen who had followed him into the street.
"They look like decent guys. Talk it over with them later," I said.
"Fuck 'decent.' Tell Molinari my new book is titled The Cuckold Shoves His Horns Through the Greaseball's Heart," Xavier said.
The two policemen got him by each arm again and walked him back across the street, then one of them recrossed the street and stepped up on the curb.
"You know this guy?" he asked.
"Yep."
"We got a full house. You want to take care of him?" he said.
"Nope," I said.
"I had a feeling you might say that."
Later, Temple and I went back to her motel. I sat in a stuffed chair and turned on CNN while she went into the bath and brushed her teeth. When she came out I noticed she had taken off her earrings and her gold watch and the barrette from her hair. The blinds were closed but the sunlight glowed around the edges of the slats and touched her face and accentuated the girl-like quality of her mouth and the mysterious beauty of her eyes, which I had never understood, no more than you can understand the strange hold a tree-shaded green river can have on you, the way that its depths, the thickness of its color, and the warmth of its current can swell above your loins and arouse an undefined longing in you that makes you feel you do not know who you really are.
I stood up from the chair and removed a small blue velvet box from my pocket.
"What's that?" she asked.
"I happened to be passing by the jewelry store yesterday and this caught my eye."
She looked up at me, and I saw the color grow in her cheeks and her face become smaller and her eyes fix mine in such a way that I could hardly look back at the box in my hand.
I opened the top against the stiffness of the spring and removed the ring and lifted her hand and put the ring on her finger and slipped it over the knuckle and folded her fingers down into her palm.
"You can take it back if it doesn't fit. Or, if you don't want it, we can just return it and get a refund," I said.
"Get a refund?"
"Yeah, I sort of did this without taking a vote."
She pushed one loafer off, then the other, and stood on top of my feet and tilted her head sideways and closed her eyes and placed her mouth on mine. Then her arms were around my neck and she tightened her stomach and breasts against me, and when she took her mouth away from mine her eyes were open, as though she doubted her power to take my heart. I kissed her again and ran my hands down her back and breathed the fragrance of her hair and skin and the perfume on her neck. I took off her blouse and unbuttoned her jeans and pulled back the bedspread and laid her down on the sheets and removed her socks and worked her jeans off her legs and sat beside her and kissed her breasts, her nipples, her throat, her eyes and cheeks, her baby fat, her back, her hair, then I stroked the inside of her thighs and traced her sex and the smooth taper of her stomach and hips and the perfect lines of her breasts.
"Billy Bob?" she said.
"What?"
"Do you want to take off your clothes?"
I undressed and lay beside her, then I looked once more into the green mystery of her eyes and I finally knew what it was that made her eyes different from any other woman's on Earth. Their depth had no bottom; they went straight into the soul, and they contained no guile, no fear, no regret, and no doubt about the intentions of her heart. I leaned over and took one of her nipples into my mouth and worked my palm under the small of her back and entered the space between her thighs, where her hand received my sex and placed it inside her while her mouth parted and only a whisper of sound came out. Then I was inside Temple Carrol again, the feathery touch of her breath against my cheek, her fingers deep into my back, and I felt the two of us slip as one into a valley of buttercups and green grass and sun showers that she had created for both of us simply by widening her thighs and raising her knees and turning her face like a new flower up to mine.
An hour later, while Temple was in the shower, the phone rang on the nightstand.
"This is the front desk. Was Ms. Carrol expecting a guest?" a young man's voice said.
"Not that I know of. Is something wrong?" I said. "A man cruised through the lot twice. He stopped by your door. He backed up and down, like he was trying to see through the window."
"What kind of car did this guy have?"
"You can see for yourself. He's parked across the street. In a red car with the radiator showing."
I went outside and walked to the edge of the street and looked through the traffic into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Wyatt Dixon stared back at me from behind his steering wheel. His face was mirthless, the idiot's grin gone, his features like dried putty. He threw whatever he was eating out the window, onto the pavement, and started his engine and rumbled into the street. He turned his head and stared at me for only a second, but I think I saw the real Wyatt Dixon for the first time. The downturned mouth, the hollow eyes, the sensual flesh that had hardened against the facial bones, were like a Stygian image from a dream suddenly released into daylight.
Temple walked up behind me and glanced up and down the street.
"Who was that?" she asked.
"A guy who's been looking for a bullet a long time," I said.
On the way home, passing through the little town of Victor, Wyatt Dixon saw Carl Hinkel's truck parked in front of the barbershop. Wyatt Dixon pulled into the grocery down the street and bought a half-gallon container of ice cream and sat bare-chested on the high sidewalk in the shade of a tack and feed store and ate the ice cream with a metal spoon. It was a fine day, the mountains shining in the sun, the breeze cool on Wyatt's skin. But he couldn't enjoy it, not even the ice cream that slid in cold lumps down his throat. One obsession had haunted all his thoughts, ruined his sleep, woke him in the morning like a vulture on his bedpost, and tainted every moment and pleasure in his day.
The woman at the clinic had given him both an oral and a blood test. But it would be three weeks before he could receive even tentative assurance that he was not HIV positive, and the nurse had said something about an incubation period that would delay any certain knowledge of his status for another three months.
Wyatt wanted to tear Terry Witherspoon apart. But that was too easy. Terry expected abuse, got high on it, and used it to feed his bitchiness. Wyatt had special plans for Terry, a date with destiny that'd make him wish his mama had stuffed him hot and smoking down the family honey hole. But in the meantime he had plenty of substitutes to do a number on. Mr. Holland and his girlfriend were ripe for some fine-tuning and that war hero, Dr. Voss, could use straightening out as well. But right now Wyatt's mind was on Carl, who had convinced all his neighbors he was a stomp-ass paratrooper. Right.
Carl came out of the barbershop, his boots shined, his seersucker slacks pressed, a Stetson at a rakish angle on his head, his western-cut coat puffing open in the wind.
Wyatt cleaned off his spoon in his mouth and dropped off the high sidewalk into the street and stuck the spoon down into the side pocket of his jeans. Carl stood in the shade of the nineteenth-century brick-front buildings and gazed at the Bitterroots rising up out of pastureland into the sky. Always posing as the patriarch, Wyatt thought, the gentleman rancher who turned no patriot from his door, the prophet who gave voice to folks who'd had their rights stolen by the government.
Maybe it was time Carl got a lesson in humbleness.
Wyatt squeezed his scrotum and started toward the barbershop, when a maroon Cadillac convertible and a tan Honda pulled up on each side of Carl's truck and four greaseballs got out and approached Carl with smiles on their faces, like they were all old friends. The greaseballs formed a circle around him, a couple of them glancing over their shoulders to see if anyone had taken notice, Carl flinching in the middle of the circle like one of the greaseballs was about to pop him in the face.
Well, ain't this a pistol? Wyatt thought. He removed a toothpick from his hatband and leaned back against the coolness of the elevated sidewalk and cleaned his fingernails while Carl was bundled into the Honda. For just an instant Carl seemed to look between two of the men pushing him into the backseat and see Wyatt watching him. Wyatt laughed to himself and slipped the toothpick into his mouth and walked up the cement steps into the grocery store, past the sign that said no shirt, no shoes, no service, and pulled a six-pack of beer from the cooler and paid the clerk.
Outside the store window, one of the greaseballs got into Carl's truck and started it up, then the truck, the Honda, and the maroon convertible pulled onto the highway and caravanned toward Stevensville.
Wyatt walked back outside and ripped the tab off a can of beer and drank the can half empty, leaning over so the foam would not run down his bare chest. The mountains were a deep blue-green now, the valley floor as golden as the inside of a whiskey barrel. Wyatt stepped aside for an overweight woman and removed his hat.
"Howdy do, ma'am. Would you set out here and drink a beer with a rodeo cowboy that has been blown away by your beauty?" he said.
"Excuse me?" she said.
He squeezed her bottom and left her stunned and outraged on the sidewalk.
But Wyatt's mind was already on other things. He crushed his beer can in his hand and tossed it into the street and fired his car up. A man shouldn't have to die if he loved the world as much as Wyatt did, he thought. Brought down by a piece of queer bait who couldn't pick a half sack of cotton without a diagram. He wanted to rip the steering wheel off the column. Instead, he drove slowly down the street, waving good-bye to the woman he had violated on the sidewalk.
It took me several hours to get the sheriff on the phone.
"Say all this again," he said.
"Dixon was cruising the parking area in front of Temple Carrol's room. Then he stationed himself across the street so he could watch the motel. He left when I went outside."
"Seems a bad time for him to be making a move," the sheriff said.
"Dixon doesn't consult with a psychiatrist before he hurts people."
"Something else is going on, ain't it?"
"He thinks he might have AIDS."
"I hate to even ask how you know this."
"I wrote him a letter and gave him a few speculations to study on."
There was a long silence.
"You know anything about Carl Hinkel being kidnapped?" he said.
"No."
"He went to Victor to get his hair cut. A fellow with him went inside the bar to shoot pool. He says when he come out a little boy told him a bunch of men threw Hinkel in a car and took off with him."
"Boy, that breaks me up."
"You been putting glass in these people's heads, Mr. Holland. Now it's done turned around on you. I don't want to listen to your whining."
"You left Dixon on the street, Sheriff. If he comes around me or mine, I'm going to kill him."
"Oh, I'm sure you will. You stay home today. You stay away from these people. And you stay out of my business," the sheriff said. His voice was like a heated wire when he hung up the receiver.
Terry Witherspoon had taken two showers that afternoon but couldn't get clean. As soon as he dried himself and put his clothes on, a smell like soiled kitty litter rose from his armpits. He tried to eat a can of Vienna sausages and vomited in the backyard.
He had never been so frightened in his life.
Wyatt had said seven o'clock. Terry wiped his face and mouth with a soiled towel and looked at the slanting rays of the sun through the pines, the flecks of gold on the river's surface down below, the bats that were already flying through the evening shadows.
If he had a car, he would run. If he had a phone, he would ring Carl. But he was trapped in an eighty-buck-a-month shack that was worse than the shack he grew up in, at the mercy of Wyatt and his craziness. Where had everything gone wrong? Why had Maisey treated him the way she did? Why did a Mobbed-up guy like Nicki Molinari, a real player on the Coast, want to beat the shit out of him over a kid and his father getting killed on the Clearwater National Forest?
Terry's head throbbed.
He went out into the railed dirt lot behind the shack and stood listening to the sounds of birds in the trees, the crack of a stick under a deer's hoof, the tumble of water in the river down below, the muttering of an owl up a larch that was shaggy and black with moss.
Nobody could be this alone, he thought. These feelings would pass. Maybe it was just a stomach virus. He wasn't a coward. Ask the queens he'd beaten cross-eyed with a sock full of sand.
Down the road he heard Wyatt's car coming hard, the engine roaring, rocks ricocheting like bullets under the fenders. Terry's throat trembled when he took a breath. If he only had the.22 rifle. But that damn lawyer had splintered it across a tree trunk.
He faced the road just as Wyatt turned into the yard, a cloud of cinnamon-colored dust drifting across his car into the light that slanted through the pines.
Wyatt cut the engine and stepped out on the ground in a new pair of striped black trousers, a hand-tooled belt with a gold bucking horse embossed on the huge silver buckle, a heavy, long-sleeve, snap-button cotton shirt, a new white Stetson with a gray feather in the band, a shined pair of oxblood Tony Lamas powdered with dust. He had just shaved and rubbed talcum on his neck and cologne on his cheeks, and for some reason he looked more handsome than Terry had ever seen him.
"You ready to ride?" Wyatt asked.
"You say an Indian woman knows me from the clinic?"
"Don't worry about that now. You know ole Carl disappeared? Too bad that happened just after he promoted you."
"Disappeared?"
"He'll probably turn up. I got a chore for you tonight."
"What?"
"You're gonna do the Voss girl. Then we're both gonna do that lawyer."
"No, sir," Terry said, shaking his head, one hand on the top rail of the fence, his eyes averted.
"Say that again."
"The ATF and the FBI are all over the place, Wyatt."
"That's when they least expect it. I got it all planned. Get in the car."
Wyatt removed his hat and combed his hair and waited, his manner casual, the setting sun pink on the taut surfaces of his face. Then Terry knew, without any doubt, that if he got into the car with Wyatt, he would be driven to a place in the woods from which he would never return.
"I'm staying home tonight," he said.
Wyatt grinned and approached him.
"Terry, you never could figure out when good things was happening in your life. That Indian woman I was talking about? I showed her a picture of me and you just a little while ago. She seen you in the clinic, all right, but you was in there to get fixed up after them greaseballs stuck you in the batting cage. It's time to have some fun."
What Wyatt had said to him made no sense at all. Wyatt was walking closer to him now, rolling an unlit cigar in his mouth with his fingers, his eyes possessed of a curious gleam, as though he were both amused by Terry and enjoying a fantasy about Terry's immediate fate.
He pinched Terry's sleeve, tugging slightly on the cloth.
"Don't wrinkle your nose at me, boy. Hop in the car. You're gonna like it," he said.
"I got to go to the bathroom first," Terry said.
He walked down the fence line toward the shack, tapping his hand on the top rail. His single-bladed pocketknife was stuck at a forty-five-degree angle in the corner post, where he had thrown it that morning. He reached out and grasped it by the wood handle, hefted it once so that the blade dropped across the calloused cup of his fingers, then whirled, whipping his arm backward, flinging the knife into Wyatt's chest.
Wyatt stared at him stupidly, then grabbed the top fence rail with one hand and fitted his other around the knife's handle. His lips formed a cone and he sucked air in and out of his mouth, as though a piece of dry ice were burning his tongue. He tried to pull the knife from his chest, but Terry pushed it in deeper, bending it sideways to widen the wound, hammering the flat of his fist on the knife's butt like a man driving a spike into wood.
Terry felt the blade snap off at the hilt, felt himself lose balance, then realized he was only inches from Wyatt's face now, staring into Wyatt's eyes, the broken handle of the knife clenched impotently in his palm, his fingers warm with Wyatt's blood, his whole life laid out behind him like a railroad track that had brought him to this particular moment and place, his heart bursting with the terrible knowledge that he had only seconds to remove himself from Wyatt's reach.
Then Wyatt's left hand seized his throat and lifted him up into a vortex of sunlit pine needles and blue sky and mountain peaks that were so high no air existed on their slopes.