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were selective, choosing to play on only a few and apparently haphazard moments. She remembers her older brother, Sean, how he would skate the frozen edge of Walden Pond on knives he had tied to his boots. She remembers waiting for him on the bank, her hands buried in a timber muff, too cold to stay, too stubborn to leave, his face red with wind, her eyes following the white ridges he made in the ice with the blades.
    She looks up across the room to the boy, Jake, pouring himself into the fragile outpost of a page. He is a small dent in her library, a misplaced nick against the rosewood chairs, the whalebone buggy whips crossed above the mantle, and the ivory jagging wheel pie crimpers with their serpentine designs. She knows that he was born in 1905, the year the Sinn Fein party formed; the year Einstein published his theory of relativity to overthrow assumptions of absolute space; the year Harry Rhodes from Westport Harbor drowned in a back eddy off the Nubble rock and washed up at the breakwater in his seersucker suit.
    She studies the boy’s dark and roughened face, the dirt that has set into his fingertips. His hands are small, warped by the salt and long hours of digging quahogs on the flats.
    She asks him about the work he does with his father, the work of clearing fields and building walls. She tells him about a colleague of her husband, a famous paleontologist who went to live in a small hut in the Alps to study the behavior of ice. For five years, he tracked the path of a glacier. He learned its flood across young mountains: how in its river state, it would cover the outcrops of rock and tear them loose, and as it continued on its journey south, it would use those bits of moraine lodged into its underside like small abrasive tools to scratch and smooth the landscape it was passing through.
    In exchange, the boy begins to confide in her. He tells her that he has seen stones sprout from the earth like carrots, rutabagas, dandelions. They are a kind of weed, he explains. Every year there are fields that he and his father clear. They pile boulders onto a stone boat hitched to a team of Spud Mason’s mares. They draw those rocks to some other point in the village and lay them down into a new double-tiered wall. Every spring, he tells her, they will be hired to go back to clear the stones that have hatched again in the same fields they left empty the year before.
    He falls silent and looks away from her back to the book in his lap, and she remembers a three-faced stone head, Celtic and crude, that her mother had kept on the kitchen windowsill of the house in Connemara to bless the demons out of food. She remembers how the campion grew on the sea shingle banks and the corncrakes staggered like ghosts through the hayfields. She remembers a story her father told her once about a blackbird who laid an egg in the hand of a saint. She watches the boy across the room as he squeezes the sap from the words. He pushes deep into the white regions outside of syntax and past language, peeling slowly through the pages, a traveler crossing snow.

CHAPTER 5
Jake
    H e is not like Wes. He is not a hunter. He does not know how to shuck the weight out of his shadow until it is a thing noiseless and separate from himself. He does not move through the landscape with that same kinesthetic understanding of the rhythm of trees, boulder drift, the laws of camouflage. He cannot walk through the salt marsh without impact. He does not sense the shallows where fish hide. He cannot read storms in the gravel ballast that has been sliced out of the belly of a cod.
    His brother, Wes, wears the woods like a skin. Wes knows how to slip across a meadow without bending light, how to dissolve into the shuffle of dry leaves. He can tell the weight of a rutting buck from the depth of the wound its antlers leave in a swamp maple. He can smell the oil in a mink pelt before there is a trace of scat. He can sliver a trout in one cut. The knife moves gently, as if