Alice Munros Best

her condition, during the first half-year.
    Several other women had thought themselves capable of the same thing. She found traces of them. A belt – size 26 – a jar of cocoa butter, fancy combs for the hair. He hadn’t let any of them stay. Why them and not me? Bea asked him.
    “None of them had any money,” said Ladner.
    A joke.
I am slit top to bottom with jokes.
(Now she wrote her letters only in her head.)
    BUT DRIVING OUT to Ladner’s place during the school week, a few days after she had first met him, what was her state? Lust and terror. She had to feel sorry for herself, in her silk underwear. Her teeth chattered. She pitied herself for being a victim of such wants. Which she had felt before – she would not pretend she hadn’t. This was not yet so different from what she had felt before.
    She found the place easily. She must have memorized the route well. She had thought up a story: She was lost. She was looking for a place up here that sold nursery shrubs. That would suit the time of year. But Ladner was out in front of his trees working on the road culvert, and he greeted her in such a matter-of-fact way, without surprise or displeasure, that it was not necessary to trot out this excuse.
    “Just hang on until I get this job done,” he said. “It’ll take me about ten minutes.”
    For Bea there was nothing like this – nothing like watching a man work at some hard job, when he is forgetful of you and works well, in a way that is tidy and rhythmical, nothing like it to heat the blood. There was no waste about Ladner, no extra size or unnecessary energy and certainly no elaborate conversation. His gray hair was cut very short, in the style of his youth – the top of his head shone silver like the metallic-looking patch of skin.
    Bea said that she agreed with him about the students. “I’ve done some substitute teaching and taken them on treks,” she said. “There have been times when I felt like setting Dobermans on them and driving them into a cesspit.
    “I hope you don’t think I’m here to persuade you of anything,” she said. “Nobody knows I’m here.”
    He took his time answering her. “I expect you’d like a tour?” he said when he was ready. “Would you? Would you like a tour of the place yourself?”
    That was what he said and that was what he meant. A tour. Bea was wearing the wrong shoes – at that time in her life she did not own any shoes that would have been right. He did not slow down for her or help her in any way to cross a creek or climb a bank. He never held out a hand, or suggested that they might sit and rest on any appropriate log or rock or slope.
    He led her first on a boardwalk across a marsh to a pond, where some Canada geese had settled and a pair of swans were circling each other, their bodies serene but their necks mettlesome, their beaks letting out bitter squawks. “Are they mates?” said Bea.
    “Evidently.”
    Not far from these live birds was a glass-fronted case containing a stuffed golden eagle with its wings spread, a gray owl, and a snow owl. The case was an old gutted freezer, with a window set in its side and a camouflage of gray and green swirls of paint.
    “Ingenious,” said Bea.
    Ladner said, “I use what I can get.”
    He showed her the beaver meadow, the pointed stumps of the trees the beavers had chewed down, their heaped, untidy constructions, the two richly furred beavers in their case. Then in turn she looked at a red fox, a golden mink, a white ferret, a dainty family of skunks, a porcupine, and a fisher, which Ladner told her was intrepid enough to kill porcupines. Stuffed and lifelike raccoons clung to a tree trunk, a wolf stood poised to howl, and a black bear had just managed to lift its big soft head, its melancholy face. Ladner said that was a small bear. He couldn’t afford to keep the big ones, he said – they brought too good a price.
    Many birds as well. Wild turkeys, a pair of ruffed grouse, a pheasant with a bright-red ring around its eye. Signs told their habitat, their Latin names, food preferences, and styles of behavior. Some of the trees were labelled too. Tight, accurate, complicated information. Other signs presented quotations.
    NATURE DOES NOTHING USELESSLY . – ARISTOTLE
    NATURE NEVER DECEIVES US ; IT IS ALWAYS WE WHO DECEIVE OURSELVES .
    – ROUSSEAU
    When Bea stopped to read these, it seemed to her that Ladner was impatient, that he scowled a little. She no longer made comments on anything she