No one even heard the knock at the door-if there was one. The first they knew that they had a visitor was when he spoke.

"This is what comes of having a kitchen built right onto the house."

Arthur Stuart looked up. It was Alvin's younger brother Calvin.

Calvin shook his head. "Burn himself on the stove?"

"Don't know," said Arthur Stuart.

"Hasn't Alvin taught you anything?"

Arthur Stuart seethed, but stuck to the subject. "It's something with his foot."

Calvin knelt down across from Arthur and began to examine Papa Moose. "This looks like a club foot," said Calvin.

Arthur Stuart looked up at Mama Squirrel, raising his eyebrows to say, Isn't it wonderful to have a real doctor here to tell us what we already knew.

Mama Squirrel was not, however, in the mood for sarcasm. "Who are you, sir? And get your hands off my husband's foot."

Calvin looked up at her and grinned. "I'm Calvin Maker, the brother of a certain journeyman blacksmith who's been living in your house, I think."

Now that really did make Arthur Stuart mad. Calling himself a maker, as if that was his profession, when Alvin didn't make no such claim, and him ten times the maker Calvin would ever be!

But Arthur held his tongue, since there'd be nothing gained by going to war with Calvin.

"I'm getting the lie of the bones in his foot. The muscles have grown up all wrong around the bones." Calvin palpated the foot some more, then pulled off the thick stockings.

"What are you doing?" demanded Mama Squirrel.

"I can't believe Alvin's been in this house so long and didn't do a blamed thing about your husband's foot."

"My husband gets along just fine on his foot the way it is."

"Well, he'll get along better now," said Calvin. "Got everything back in place." He stood up and offered his hand to her. "It'll take him some getting used to, but in a few weeks he'll be walking better than he ever has in his whole life."

"A few weeks?" said Mama Squirrel, ignoring his hand. "Maybe you're all proud of your miracle working, but you might have thought to ask if this was a convenient day to go fixing up his foot. We've got miles to walk tonight! And for weeks to come."

"And he was going to do that with a club foot?" said Calvin.

Arthur Stuart knew, from the slight snideness now creeping into Calvin's tone, that he was irked by Mama Squirrel's lack of gratitude.

"Some folks," said Mama Squirrel, "is so proud of their knacks that it just don't occur to them that other folks might not want them to do their public demonstrations on them."

"Well, then," said Calvin, "I'm pretty sure I remember how the club foot was. I think I can put it back."

"No you can't," said Arthur Stuart.

Calvin looked at him with cool, amused hostility. "Oh?"

"Because his foot had already been changed before you got here," said Arthur Stuart. "That's what made him cry out with pain and fall down. Something moved all the bones around while the foot was still all strapped up. And that was a good five minutes ago."

"How interesting," said Calvin.

"So you see," said Arthur Stuart, "the bones the way you found them when you knelt down here, that ain't how they was."

Calvin shook his head sadly. "Arthur Stuart, does Alvin know you've been trying to heal this poor man without him even asking?"

"I've done no such thing!"

"If you knew how his foot was before, and how it was different when I got here, that says you been doodling around in there," said Calvin. "Don't deny it, you've always been a bad liar."

"How do you know what I've always been."

"Oh, then I suppose you're a good liar," said Calvin. "Not a thing I'd have expected a body to be proud of, but there you go." Calvin went to the door and looked out into the back yard. "Mind if I use your privy? It's a long time since I left the riverboat as brought me here, and I could use a pissoir."

Mama Squirrel gestured for him to go ahead. As soon as he was gone, she knelt again beside Papa Moose. "He did it, didn't he?" she said. "Before he even walked in the door."

"He likes to make grand entrances," said Arthur Stuart. "And he loves to show Alvin up, if he can."

"Daring to cause my husband so much pain. Do you think we don't know what Alvin is? Do you think we couldn't have asked him to fix that foot iffen we'd wanted it done?"

"Calvin's never going to admit he done it," said Arthur Stuart. "So you might as well work on helping him learn to walk with his foot this way. Have you got the other shoe to this pair?"

"Other shoe? Pair?" Mama Squirrel snorted. "He's never bought a pair of shoes in his life."

"Well, is this the only shoe he's got?"

"He has another, for Sundays."

"Let's get it on his other foot."

"They don't match."

"One shoe on and one foot bare match a good bit worse," said Arthur Stuart.

Mama Squirrel sent a couple of children to go look for Papa Moose's Sunday shoe. Then she turned back to Arthur Stuart. "I don't reckon you'd know how to wake my husband up."

"I don't mess around inside people's heads or feet," said Arthur Stuart. "Besides, Calvin didn't do all that good a job. It's still a mess inside his foot, even if it is shaped mostly right on the outside. I think when Papa Moose wakes up, there's gonna be a lot of pain."

"Best let him sleep then," said Mama Squirrel. "I just. I... ever since I knowed him, I never seen Papa Moose laid out like that. In all these things that've been happening, I never been scared till this moment."

"When Alvin gets himself back here, he'll make it OK," said Arthur Stuart.

"Oh, I hope so, I sure do," said Mama Squirrel.

"We might as well get back to loading up the pokes," said Arthur.

And in moments, the children were back to loading up with food. The extra clothing, all unloaded now, was left in a pile in the parlor. "For the poor," said Mama Squirrel.

Arthur wondered if she had some definition of the word poor that didn't include her and her huge hungry family.

Alvin sat on the damp bank near Dead Mary's house, his bare feet in the water, watching a gator glide by. The gator had given him a passing thought-Alvin saw it in his heartfire, that Hash of hunger. But Alvin asked him to search somewhere else, and the gator obligingly moved along.

Well, to put it precisely, Alvin put the idea of the gator getting its guts ripped out into its mind, and associated it with the sight of Alvin, and the gator flat-out skedaddled.

It's a good thing to be able to scare away gators, thought Alvin. I could go into it fulltime and make a profession of it. They could call me Gator Al, and they'd always ask me how come I never wore gator-skin boots or a gator-skin belt, and I'd say, How can I get me a gator skin, iffen the gators won't come close to me?

Sounded to him like a better job than his current employment, which right now looked like having the responsibility for saving the lives of hundreds of people without a clue of how to actually do it.

He'd poked himself a couple of times with his knife to draw blood, which was a kind of embarrassing thing to do in the first place. It made him feel like he was just a couple of steps away from a Mexica sacrifice. He let the blood drip into the murky water and then felt it dissipate and vanish.

He had done this once, on the Yazoo Queen, but not with river water. It was with drinking water, already pure. The blood had nowhere to go, it mixed with the water immediately and Alvin had been able to shape it as he wanted. But how to make something out of an almost infinite body of water, filled with impurities?

More blood? Open a vein? An artery?

How about opening a gator's artery, how about that?

No, he knew that wouldn't do at all. The maker is the one who is part of what he makes. If there was one thing he knew, it was that.