He knelt next to the kennel and traced with one finger the long track. Its delicacy surprised him, a hoofmark like a stretched Valentine's heart, the cleft narrow. But the creature's power was shown by the gash in the chain link and the head of the Black-and-Tan bitch, crushed on the concrete. A course of blood had darkly frozen between her abdomen and the drain. The young Setter whimpered and nipped as he coaxed it from its house.

There had been, already, talk in town. It amused but at the same time irritated him: the way that farmers, intent to fix nature into patterns, blew up adversity. The heavy thunder-storm became an omen of flood, the odd dead shoat meant epidemic, ruin. Now this. A marauder which had gutted a few sheep and ripped through a flock of pondfowl was already a bear or wolf, which they would hope to kill as quickly as possible. All in the interest of their degenerate beasts and stock-still crops, and their myths that grew like weeds— tractors overturned in the night, a child fright-frozen by "a thing so big she couldn't see the barn behind it," "a horse thrown over the pasture wall," windows torn from casings.

Like everyone, alas, he himself depended on the farmers' obsessions, so knew the flaws in his own mythology in which he sometimes exchanged greetings over the centuries with some fellow chipping flint to a point. He had a notion of the kinship between poet and hunter-gatherer, but could not articulate it—even to himself—without repugnance at either his own pretension or stuffiness. All he really knew was that the predator saw things that others didn't.