But Ev had known a few fellows who had lived and hunted all their lives in Maine and who still had to be pulled by a search party or who finally made it out on their own only by dumb luck. Delbert McCready, whom Ev had known since childhood, had been none of these. Del had gone into Big Injun Woods with his twelve-gauge on Tuesday, November 10th, 1947. When forty-eight hours had passed and he still hadn't shown up, Mrs McCready called Alf Tremain, who in those days had been the constable. A search party of twenty went into the woods where the Nista Road petered out at the Diamond Gravel Pit, and by the end of the week it had swelled to two hundred.

They were just about to give Del-whose daughter was, of course, Hazel McCready-up for lost when he stumbled out of the woods along the course of Preston Stream, pale and dazed and twenty pounds lighter than he had been when he went in.

Ev visited him in the hospital. “How'd it happen, Del? Night was clear. Stars were out. You can read the stars, can't you?”

“Ayuh.” Del looked deeply ashamed. “Always could, anyway.”

“And the moss. “Twas you who told me about how to read north by the moss on the trees when we was kids.”

“Ayuh,” Del repeated. Just that. Ev gave him time, then pressed.

“Well, what happened?”

For a long time Del still said nothing. Then, in a voice which was almost inaudible, he said: “I got turned around.”

Ev let the silence spin out, as difficult as that was.

“Everything was all right for a while,” Del resumed at last. “I hunted most of the morning but didn't see no fresh sign. I sat down and ate m'dinner and had a bottle of my ma's beer. Made me sleepy and I napped. I had some funny dreams… can't remember “em, but I know they was funny. And, look! This happened while I was sleepin”.”

Del McCready raised his upper lip and showed Ev a hole there.

“Lost a tooth?”

“Ayuh… it was layin in the crotch of m'pants when I woke up. Fell out when I was sleepin”, I guess, but I ain't hardly ever had any trouble with my teeth, at least not since that one wisdom tooth got impacted and damn near killed me. By then it coming on dark

“Dark!”

“I know how it sounds, don't you worry,” Del said crossly-but it was the crossness of someone who is deeply ashamed. “I just slept all the afternoon away, and when I got up, Ev-”

His eyes rolled up to meet Ev's for one miserable second and then shifted away, as if he could not bear to look his old friend in the eye for longer than that one second.

“It was like somethin” stole m'brains. The tooth fairy, mayhap.”

Del laughed, but there hadn't been much humor in the sound. “I wandered around for a while, thinking I was following the polestar, and when I still hadn't come out on the Hammer Cut Road by nine o'clock or so, I kinda rubbed my eyes and saw it wasn't Polaris at all, but one of the planets-Mars or Sat'n, I guess. I laid down to sleep, and until I came out along Preston Stream a week later, I don't remember nothing but little bits and pieces.”

“Well…” Ev halted. lt sounded entirely unlike Del, whose head was as level as a carpenter's plane. “Well, was you panicked, Del?”

Del's eyes rolled up to meet Ev's, and they were still ashamed, but there was also a leaven of real humor in them now. “A man can't stay in a panic for a whole week, I don't b'lieve,” he said dryly. “It's awful tirin”.”

“So you just…”

“I just,” Del agreed, “but just what, I don't know. I know that when I woke up from that nap my feet and my ass was both asleep and all numb, and I know that in one of those dreams it seemed like I heard somethin” hummin'-the way you can hear power lines hum on a still day, you know-and that's all. I forgot all m'woodcraft and wandered around in the woods like somebody who'd never even seen the woods before. When I hit Preston Stream I knew enough to follow it out, and I woke up in here, and I guess I'm a laughingstock in town, but I'm grateful to be alive. It's God's mercy that I am.”

“You ain't a laughingstock, Del,” Ev said, and of course that was a lie, because that was exactly what Del was. He worked at overcoming it for nearly five years, and when he saw for sure that the barbershop wits were never going to let him live it down, he moved up to East Eddington and opened a combination garage and small engine-repair shop. Ev still got up to see him once in a while, but Del didn't come down to Haven much anymore. Ev guessed he knew why.

Sitting in his rented room, Ev closed the compass up as tight as it would go and drew the tiniest circle yet, the smallest the compass would make. There was only one house inside this marble-sized circle, and he thought: That house is the closest one there is to the center of Haven. Funny I never thought about it before.

It was the old Garrick place, sitting there on Derry Road with Big Injun Woods widening out behind it.

Should have drawn this last circle in red, if no other.,

Frank's niece, Bobbi Anderson, lived on the Garrick place now-not that she farmed, of course; she wrote books. Ev hadn't passed many words with Bobbi, but she had a good reputation in town. She paid her bills on time, folks said, and didn't gossip. Also, she wrote good old western stories that you could really sink your teeth into, not all full of make-believe monsters and a bunch of dirty words, like the books that fellow who lived up Bangor way wrote. Goddam good westerns, people said.

Especially for a girl.

People in Haven felt good about Bobbi Anderson, but of course she'd just been in town for thirteen years and people would have to wait and see. Garrick, most agreed, had been as crazy as a shithouse rat. He always brought in a good garden, but that didn't change his mental state. He was always trying to tell someone about his dreams. They were usually about the Second Coming. After a while it got so that even Arlene Cullum, who sold Amway with the zeal of a Christian martyr, would make herself scarce when she saw Frank Garrick's truck (plastered with bumper stickers which said things like IF THE RAPTURE'S TODAY SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL) driving down the village's Main Street.

In the late sixties, the old man had gotten a bee in his bonnet about flying saucers. Something about Elijah seeing a wheel within a wheel, and being taken up to heaven by angels driving chariots of fire powered by electromagnetism. He had been crazy, and he had died of a heart attack in 1975.

But before he died, Ev thought with rising coldness, he lost all his teeth. I noticed it, and I remember Justin Hurd just down the road commenting on it and… and now Justin's the closest, except for Bobbi herself, that is, and Justin also wasn't what you'd call a model of sanity and reason. Few times I saw him before I left, he even reminded me of old Frank.

It was odd, he thought at first, that he had never put together the run of peculiar things that had happened within those two inner circles before, that no one had. Further reflection made him decide it really wasn't so strange, after all. A life -particularly a long one-was composed of millions of events; they made a crowded tapestry with many patterns woven into it. Such a pattern as this-the deaths, the murders, the lost hunters, crazy Frank Garrick, maybe even that queer fire at the Paulsons'-only showed up if you were looking for it. Once seen, you wondered how you could have missed it. But if you weren't…

And now a new thought dawned on him: Bobbi Anderson was perhaps not all right. He remembered that since the beginning of July, perhaps even before, there had been sounds of heavy machinery coming from Big Injun Woods. Ev had heard the sounds and dismissed them-Maine was heavily forested, and the sounds were all too familiar. New England Paper doing a spot of logging on its land, most likely.