Of course he was lying. He’d always been a liar. I know where and what I’m at, thought Professor Clifton Agnuus, looking out at his first class of the year. What the hell, you can only get caught, and what do they do then?

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For nearly a month, from a cliff shoulder on Pressburn Hill, August rain and sun taking turns at him, birds accepting him, Brisque Validarn watched the house on Bretton Heights, watched every movement, change of light, visit and departure.

One of the passengers getting off the Grimsby stage, a young man of perhaps twenty years of age, somewhat handsome, was strangely hatless and frowning.

December gave us both a gray day, thick as hardpan, sitting-down thick, a neutral sadness runningpole to pole, a day that cried for work or laughter.

In the heart of Chicago’s new butchering center, in a ramshackle apartment in a ramshackle house, a truly destined cowboy was born to a hard-working Scots-born butcher and his wife.

He had never belonged anyplace, and that realization was slowly dawning on him

From the west the late afternoon sun was resplendent on the grass, reflections shimmering in waves, comfort oozing in the land.

“The moon loves you, Dad,” says Jasper James (“Jeep,”) who was practically born in a seat of an old ’56 Jeep relegated to the farm, which is where Jasper got his nickname.

When we fished the Pine River, Ed LeBlanc, Walter Ruszkowski, Brother Bentley and I, for thirty-some years, coffee was the glue, to be sure; the morning glue, the late evening glue, even though we’d often unearth our six-packs of beer from a natural cooler in early evening, a foot down in damp earth, away from animals on a night out, dread scroungers on the move.

The gang from the boatyard, by God you had to love ‘em, the lot of them, every man jack of them; braised, poured, scratched, abraded, welded, mucked about by all of life, you had to love ‘em