Bellefleur Read Online Free PDF

castle, and everyone’s awed admiration —everyone’s, that is, except Gideon’s. Gideon could not help but wish from time to time that he had broken the creature’s neck, on that stormy night. For it seemed (though why it seemed so, no one knew) that everything began on that night. And, once begun, it could not be stopped.

The Pond
    M ink Pond, a half-mile north of Bellefleur Cemetery. In a stand of hemlock and mountain maple and ash. In a sun-dappled secret place.
    Mink Pond, where Raphael Bellefleur, the twelve-year-old son of Ewan and Lily, played and splashed about and swam, and spent long hours lying on the small raft he had fashioned out of birch logs and wire, staring into the water. Most days it was clear, and he could see to the muddy bottom seven or eight feet below at its deepest.
    Mink Pond, a pond so new and so secret that the older Bellefleurs knew nothing about it. If someone asked Raphael where he’d been all morning and he said, in his rapid indistinct murmur, Oh, nowhere—the pond, his grandfather Noel would assume he was talking about a pond just the other side of the old pear orchard. There’s plenty of bass there, his grandfather said, and I’ve seen herds of white-tails browsing there, one time more than thirty-five, I counted them, the biggest old buck with an antler spread of three feet, I swear!—but you know, boy, that pond’s a home for snapping turtles too and those buggers are dangerous. He poked Raphael with his forefinger, chuckling. D’you know what a snapping turtle can do to a young boy wading?—or fool enough to swim? And as Raphael blushed red, and yearned to escape (for he was a shy child who rarely raised his voice, and made every effort to avoid the raucous company of the other boys), the old man laughed crudely, pressing his hands against his little potbelly, which strained against his vest and trousers, rocking from side to side. D’you know what one of them hefty old buggers can do, snapping away at nice warm tender meat dangling in front of him?
    Mink Pond, which was Raphael’s discovery, down behind the graveyard where none of the children played. The day after Mink Creek flooded, wild from melting snow up in the mountains, flooded more than any of the other creeks that flowed into Lake Noir, Raphael tramped out in his rubber boots, blinking against the glare of the sun, his hands stuck in his pockets for warmth though it was April and nearly spring and the terrible winter was said to be over. (Up in the mountains there were great gorges and valleys packed with snow, people said. There were glaciers of such cruel dense silvery -blue ice, jammed in sunless ravines, that perhaps they would never melt and there would be a new Ice Age, and what then?—would the Bellefleurs have to travel about by sleigh, as in the old days, or walk with snowshoes everywhere, like old Jedediah?—would tutors have to live in the manor to instruct the children, or would there be no education at all?) But the snow did melt, and the creeks did go wild, and overflow their banks, and as the warm spring rain fell the ice-locked world of the highest mountains groaned and gave way and turned to water that rushed downhill, fiercely downhill, in hundreds of runs—Laurel Run, Bloody Run, Hare Run, Columbine Run—spilling into rivers and creeks, headed for the lake, and then for lower ground, and, it was said, for the ocean hundreds of miles away, which the children had never seen. Raphael, studying the handsome old globe in the library (it was so large that not even big-armed Ewan could reach all the way around it and touch his fingertips together), could not even find Lake Noir, and grew dizzy at the thought of the ocean’s immensity. With something so big, he told his cousin Vernon, you would have to spend your entire life just making your mind equal to it. . . . I don’t ever want to see the ocean.
    Mink Creek in less turbulent seasons was a wide meandering creek where Bellefleur horses