The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart, -
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

William Wordsworth
"A Poet's Epitaph"

Strawberry, California, April, 1859

It was close to midnight. Leah and Rachael sat side by side on the back porch steps, keeping their vigil and speaking together from time to time in low, worried tones. Rachael had brought out their wool coats and some warm cider against the nighttime chill of the mountain air, but otherwise neither woman had left off their watch over the dark woods. A little ways off, heard but unseen, a mockingbird sang a continuous, chaotic string of borrowed and stolen calls, whistles, chirps, and warbles. Rachael sighed in annoyance.

"I swear, that bird will just keep showing off and making noise twenty-four hours a day until mid-summer. Did you know, Leah, at least five of those calls that bird is imitating don't exist anywhere in nature except in Heath's imagination? He got it in his head to make some up and whistle 'em while he was working outside, see if he could get the mockingbird to pick 'em up. So now not only does the bird yell outside our windows all night long for three months out of the year, but half of what he's singing is gibberish. Although who knows, maybe the girl mockingbirds don't care what language he's speaking."

"I did not know that," Leah laughed softly, and Rachael was glad to hear it. Temperamentally easygoing and optimistic, Leah was usually the one who would raise everyone's mood in times of trouble. Rachael, on the other hand, had a serious, quiet - some might say brooding – nature, and when Leah was down, she worried that she wouldn't know how to cheer her up or ease her mind.

Leah gave her a sad smile, knowing what Rachael was trying to do. "Tonight it seems that mockingbird is watching for Heath right along with us, so right now, I don't mind his gibberish at all."

They both turned as they heard a familiar step coming around the side of the cabin.

"Didn't even bother to go inside," Hannah said. "Knew I'd find you two girls waiting on the back step, staring into the woods." Her voice was low and uncharacteristically strained. She stepped into the lamplight to face the two younger women, and Leah caught her breath at the grim expression on Hannah's face. Rachael felt her own mouth go dry, and she put an arm protectively around Leah's shoulders as she braced herself for bad news.

"Hannah –" Leah made herself speak, even though she suddenly felt as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs. "Hannah, what is it? Did you hear something in town? What is it -" She broke off, gasping. Her hands and face felt numb and she tried to slow her breathing down.

"I heard. It was them three animals that came after you, Leah, they went huntin' after Heath. One of the town boys, that Mitch, he saw which way Heath'd gone trapping and led them to where they could catch him out in the woods."

"Oh, God –"

"Now listen – it's not good, but it ain't all bad. From what I could hear, they found him, they chased him, but they didn't catch him. They were mad he got away. They think he jumped into the river." Hannah held up a hand to continue as Leah began to express her relief. "Leah, honey, I know that stretch of the mountains – I roughed it out there alone for a good long stretch 'fore I came to Strawberry, trying to keep out of the way of the gold-crazy men pouring up the rivers with their killin' and their sickness. I know that ridge. Stanislaus runs on this side, the Tuolumne runs on the other. It's a long, steep way down. Those drifters – they think –" Hannah paused, but she knew there was no easy way to say it. "They think Heath jumped to kill himself. To get away from them." She saw both women flinch – and she saw Rachael's face hardening into rage. She thought that was a good thing, right now, because she needed these two girls to stick right hard by each other and watch each other's backs, and they needed to be ready to shoot to kill if it came to that.

Hannah took a breath and went on, her voice now grounded and resolute. "They think he did, but those animals don't know nothin'. And neither do we. So I'm going to go look for him."

Barkley Ranch, November, 1874

Heath rolled the badge over in his hand as he and John walked to join the women over by Hannah's cabin. It was smooth and heavy, a simple circle enclosing a five-pointed star. You have a job to do, you step up, and you figure it out. That's what you've always done. He resolutely repeated John's sensible words to himself as he walked, hoping they would eventually stick. The words sounded right, they made sense, and Heath knew there was a time when he would have known them to be true. Would not have needed to hear John or anyone else tell him so.

A time when he would have had no need to go tearing off into the night on his horse.

That time was no more, it seemed. Now, things start slashing in at him from the edges of his vision, they leaned in to whisper in his ear. It helped, he knew, to move; last night, pacing along the walls of the cabin, he thought he'd gotten a good – albeit white-knuckled – grip on himself.

Yeah, I thought I did.

For a moment there, he'd even considered sitting back down. Almost. He'd started to ease up his mental death-grip on the here-and-now and was turning to rejoin the group at the table, when the whispering suddenly shrieked in his ear. He felt the snap of the burning firewood in his bones, loud as cracking timber, and for a moment he felt he was falling right through the floor of the cabin. It took a huge effort right then not to run out the door and away from those worried eyes. Somehow he managed to mumble some excuse and keep himself to a walk getting himself outside and most of the way to the barn.

Maybe even all the way. Problem was, he had no memory of going into the barn, no memory of saddling his horse, no memory of riding out. None. Knew nothing, until who knows how long later, when he found himself winded, deathly sore and dead tired, sitting his lathered horse out in the dark without a clue where he was.

Not only where, but when; Heath came back to himself with no sense of time. That could hardly have scared him more than if he'd found himself dropped in the middle of the ocean. He had never appreciated, until recently, just how much he relied on his innate, imperturbable sense of time to keep himself grounded.

But I'm sure learning that now, ain't I.

If it hadn't been for a near-full moon and his reliable, intelligent horse, Heath might not have figured his way home till sunup. As it was, he had shaken the reins loose and let Charger's common sense take them both in the right direction. At some point the steady rhythm of time came back to him, a connecting, unspooling silver thread running through his mind. He imagined himself running it gently through his fingers as he made his way forward. Here I am. Here I am, he'd thought, and he found the words strangely calming. By the time the cabin came back into view he felt pretty much like himself again, but utterly drained. He knew by then it was half past one in the morning, and he knew he'd been away for almost four hours. He saw Rivka running out to meet him, and wondered, as he often did, just how it was that he'd been so blessed to have her in his life.

Almost four hours gone, he'd thought. Not just away, out, missing – I was four hours gone. What the hell do I do with this?

He said nothing about it. He didn't have the words. He was just too worn out, and it sounded too crazy to speak about even to him. He put it away, and gave himself to the comfort of her arms. Later that night, he'd dreamed of Tuolumne, dreamed of falling. He wanted to close his eyes to all of it, slam the door shut and lock it, but he hadn't been able to so far, and he couldn't shake a feeling that there was something he needed to remember, something he needed to see -

He glanced up at John, then up ahead to the four women waiting for them at the cabin. He heard a horse approaching fast and saw Nick riding in from the direction of the house.

John looked up as well. "Glad he made it. He told me last night he wanted to ride with us as far as the south boundary road to Angel's Camp."

Heath nodded, not surprised. He was glad to see him - and glad, scattered as he was, that he could still mostly predict what his big brother was going to do. "There's some flooding where Cherokee Creek comes onto our land, and we've had to do plenty of fence repairs up that way. Besides, he's probably already gotten Jarrod to tell him everything he knows, and being Nick, he's gonna want to get his two cents in on what the plan is."

"Yep, I expect you're right on all counts," John agreed. "Got to get you up to speed as well. But for now let's go get a bite to eat before we get on the trail, what do you say?"

Heath managed a smile, tried to relax. Figure it out, Heath. That's what you've always done. He closed his fist around the badge, feeling the grooved edge digging into his palm, and shoved his hands in his pockets.

You have a job to do. "Sounds good, Marshal. Let's go."

North Fork, Tuolumne River, April, 1859

And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind.

Deuteronomy 28:65

Where's the sky, I wish I could see the sky -

His eyes were wide open, he could feel that, but everything was black. There was no light, nothing to see, except when he tried to move. He had a pounding headache, and the blackness seemed somehow to pulse in rhythm with his skull. He tried to move, but as before, that only brought meaningless flashes and zigzags of light that revealed nothing. Nothing but pain that flared and wrapped around his head; nausea filled his chest and throat. He moaned, squeezing his eyes closed, though that altered nothing of what he could see.

He heard voices now, muffled and garbled behind the ringing in his ears. He couldn't understand what they were saying. Some were angry, dangerous. Some were gentler. And there was a child's voice: clearer, closer, speaking words he didn't understand.

People. There are people here. In the dark?

He moaned again as pain lancinated through his head, and he began to feel some of his other injuries.

"Me-weh? Me-weh –" The child's voice again. Calling to him? He opened his eyes, looking for the child, or the spot of blue sky, or something – anything -

"Me-weh," he heard again, and a small gentle hand touched the side of his face. The child said more things he didn't understand, but he seemed to be calling excitedly to the other people around him. He could feel people moving around him where he lay.

People in the dark? He felt a rising, humming terror. The slightest movement was excruciating. Eyes wide open, he saw nothing. They're not in the dark. I can't see.

"Me-weh," the child sang softly in his ear, and small fingers wiped the tears from his face. "Me-weh."