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before replacing them. Then I put it aside and lay on the bed and wished I had a cigarette until it was time to wake my client.
    A light fog was rolling off the lake and collecting in the hollows when we turned off the highway and started on foot down White Road. My jacket was still damp; I moved my shoulders around inside it to generate some heat. Under a ragged milkwater moon the big man at my side looked like a shadow cast by me and was making about that much noise. Giants have more practice at being quiet than the rest of us.
    The road was fine sand, which is all there is up there besides rock, flanked by sixty-foot pines as silent as cemetery monuments. It was too cool even for mosquitoes. We were the only things stirring in a cerecloth stillness that seemed unnatural. Each tree concealed another ghost clad in peacoat or breechclout, leggings or French tunic. It made me want to walk faster and whistle.
    The distance seemed much longer than a mile. It was probably about that. A light hung in the trees like the last pear of autumn, disappearing as the trunks came between, then appearing again closer. We rounded a slight bend and then we were standing at the end of a rutted drive terminating in the sort of slant-roofed board-and-batten hovel that hunters used to build before the area became more popular with vacationers. The battered truck whose driver had tried to seal us off on US-41 was parked in front of it with its plank bumper pointed toward the road. An older white Buick sat next to it with one red fender and its wheel wells gone lacy with rust. No new black Monte Carlos here.
    DeVries bent down and whispered, “Think they got dogs?”
    “Everyone up here has dogs.”
    We started up the drive, feeling the ruts with our feet before trusting our weight. The yard, really a bare clearing in the forest, was littered with rusting engine parts and empty oil cans. Keeping the Dodge going was costing them more over the long run than a new truck. Nearing the lighted window I gestured to DeVries to hold his position and covered the rest of the distance in a crouch.
    I put an eye to a corner. The air was just cool enough to fog the glass and I cleared a peephole with my thumb. Inside, the place was all one room with a big quilt draped over a clothesline at the back, probably masking the beds. It had a new rug on the floor and some worn furniture and a black-and-white TV set with snow on the screen and a stereo in an expensive walnut cabinet that looked new. I wondered how long it would he before the downstater who belonged to the stereo visited his cottage and found it missing. But I was more interested in the girl who was watching TV .
    She was a brunette of about twenty, very pregnant, in a housedress with sunflowers on it, sitting on a stiff kitchen chair with her hands folded on top of her massive belly and her legs splayed. She was barefoot, which seemed appropriate, and the nipples of her swollen breasts were plainly visible through the thin material of the dress. Although she was staring at the screen she didn’t appear to be paying attention to what was going on there. If the sound was on at all it was turned too low for me to hear it through the window. I waited until I saw her breathe, then withdrew to tell DeVries what I’d seen, keeping my voice low.
    “The men must be around,” he said. “Their vehicles are here and I don’t figure them to be big for walking.”
    “Keep an eye on the front. I’m going to get a look at what’s behind that quilt.”
    I was almost around the corner of the building before I remembered what I’d said about dogs. A big shepherd with more wolf in it than domestic pet came bounding around from the back, dragging a chain and yammering fit to shake the needles off the pines. Ivory teeth flashed in its black muzzle. I drew the gun and backpedaled, aiming between its eyes. Just then it came to the end of its chain with a wham. It strained forward with its hackles standing, barking