IN THE AFTERNOON HE WENT back for the rifle and the squirrels. He put the squirrels in his shirt and checked the breech of the rifle to see it was loaded and went on up the mountain.

When he came out through the stark winter woods above the turnaround the car was still there. The motor had stopped running. He squatted on his heels and watched. It was very quiet. He could hear the radio faintly below him. After a while he stood and spat and took a last survey of the scene and went back down the mountain.

In the morning when the black saplings stood like knives in the mist on the mountainside two boys came across the lot and entered the house where Ballard lay huddled in his blanket on the floor by the dead fire. The dead girl lay in the other room away from the heat for keeping.

They stood in the door. Ballard reared up with eyes walled and howled them out backward and half falling into the yard.

What the hell do you want? he yelled.

They stood in the yard. One had a rifle and one a homemade bow. This here’s Charles’s cousin, said the one with the rifle. You cain’t run him off. We’s told we could hunt here.

Ballard looked at the cousin. Get on and hunt then, he said.

Come on, Aaron, said the one with the rifle.

Aaron gave Ballard a grudging look and they went on across the yard.

You better stay away from here, called Ballard from the porch. He was shivering there in the cold. That’s what you all better do.

When they had gone from sight in the dry weeds one of them called back something but Ballard could not make it out. He stood in the door where they’d stood and he looked into the room to see could he repeat with his own eyes what they’d seen. Nothing was certain. She lay beneath rags. He went in and built the fire back and squatted before it cursing.

When he came in from the barn he was dragging a crude homemade ladder and he took it into the room where the girl lay and raised the end of it up through a small square hole in the ceiling and climbed up and poked his head into the attic. The shake roof lay in a crazy jigsaw against the winter sky and in the checkered gloom he could make out a few old boxes filled with dusty mason jars. He climbed up and cleared a place on the loose loft floorboards and dusted them off with some rags and went back down again.

She was too heavy for him. He paused halfway up the ladder with one hand on the top rung and the other around the dead girl’s waist where she dangled in the ripped and rudely sutured nightgown and then he descended again. He tried holding her around the neck. He got no farther. He sat on the floor with her, his breath exploding whitely in the cold of the room. Then he went out to the barn again.

He came in with some old lengths of plowline and sat before the fire and pieced them. Then he went in and fitted the rope about the waist of the pale cadaver and ascended the ladder with the other end. She rose slumpshouldered from the floor with her hair all down and began to bump slowly up the ladder. Halfway up she paused, dangling. Then she began to rise again.