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Shores of the fjord curved back and forth, and the green-grey water widened until the Ocean. Arctic Three white hares with up-pricked bouncing and leaping across the snow in snow-pyramid stood its at the head of the to In the A silent anxiety. it became went ears great white opposite Skull Point with fjord, low orange sky-bar on the horizon (soon the sun would go away the night, for the winter; you would not see it until April), for and the sharp translucent purple ridge of Axel Heiberg Island was like a knife- edge slicing the evening, slicing your heart open with the sun was painfully orange, about to vanish into the last ridge, and there was freezing breeze; the a purple-grey sea-calm snow was knee-deep, and its V beauty, and in the island's below you despite the a tiny white iceberg floated before the great white headland that you stood on, and the island on and on northwards through the pack-ice contorted until it was mountains to struggle over where you could stand homesick and frozen around you .

Dandelions and blueflax in the meadow; in a sandier spot you came across the reddish- danced orange treasures of Indian paintbrush. You ran uphill through the tunnels of white aspen and reached another hot yellow meadow browsing with bees, and more aspen forest whose creamy trunks were as smooth which was littered with the grey trunks of windblown trees, some hollow, some swarming with ants, and after much labor among the snapping twigs you came to the crest of the hill and there was a grassy dome where mulleins grew as high as your head and inside each one was a white moth and the blades of mountains rose purple-grey, high above the rolling hills, whose grass was soft like yellow corn-dust, and the smell of dust was good and clean, and there was snow on Humphreys Peak; and you ran laughing down and down again, past a dead black witching-tree with branches like ribs, like the branches in Gualala, like the branches everywhere, and you and then as poles, continued east, with blue shrubs, and sunlight a steep slope of evergreen forest, it flat ridges in the distance speckled with greyish- was night and then morning and the patches of on the chaparral made it and there were clouds over the gold; mountains with cloud-stuff eternally bursting from them in a frozen explosion of purity, and you saw a purple scorpionweed and then trees and dust and mountains.

You pretended that your friends were there, but you didn't believe yourself; you 23 felt all very THIRTEEN STORIES AND THIRTEEN EPITAPHS You longed for San Francisco as Ken still longed for Satoko with her little mouth and glistening white upper teeth and the dear little hairs in her nostrils and the freckles on her nose, her pale broad cheeks, her black eyes watching him as she kissed him but Ken would have lost. — known what to do in Mexico; he'd start taking pictures and in five minutes everyone would be eating out of his hand.