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Peckham, who was tending the pin and who was looking not at him or the hole but in a small exquisite courtesy allowing his eyes to go unfocused and gaze at a middle distance. The green broke to the right. He did not know whether he was going to hit the ball five feet or fifty feet. It was as if the game had fallen away from him and he was trying to play it from a great height. He felt like a clown on stilts. Lewis Peckham cleared his throat and now Lewis was looking at him and his eyes were veiled and ironic (as if he not only knew that something was happening to him but even knew what it was!) and he putted. The ball curved in a smooth flat parabola and sank with a plop.
    It was a good putt. His muscles remembered. When the putt sank, the golfers nodded briefly, signifying approval and a kind of relief that he was back on his game. Or was it a relief that they could play a game at all, obey its rules, observe its etiquette and the small rites of settling in for a drive and lining up a putt? He was of two minds, playing golf and at the same time wondering with no more than a moderate curiosity what was happening to him. Were they of two minds also? Was there an unspoken understanding between all of them that what they were doing, knocking little balls around a mountain meadow while the fitful wind bustled about high above them, was after all preposterous but that they had all assented to it and were doing it nevertheless and because, after all, why not? One might as well do one thing as another.
    But the hawk was not of two minds. Single-mindedly it darted through the mountain air and dove into the woods. Its change of direction from level flight to drop was fabled. That is, it made him think of times when people told him fabulous things and he believed them. Perhaps a Negro had told him once that this kind of hawk is the only bird in the world that can—can what? He remembered. He remembered everything today. The hawk, the Negro said, could fly full speed and straight into the hole of a hollow tree and brake to a stop inside. He, the Negro, had seen one do it. It was possible to believe that the hawk could do just such a fabled single-minded thing.
    Lewis Peckham did not offer to help him find his ball. He knew why. Because Lewis had helped him on the last hole, seventeen, where he had also sliced out-of-bounds and to do so now would be unseemly. In a show of indifference Lewis permitted him the freedom to look or not to look for the ball, to drop or pick up. It was a nice calculation. Your ordinary pro would make a great sweaty show of helping out.
    It was not his regular foursome. It was not an ordinary golf game.
    The first time he had sliced out-of-bounds, Lewis had gone through the fence with him and shown him something odd. At the base of a low ridge, they were halfheartedly poking at weeds, hoping to turn the new Spalding Pro Flite, when Lewis stopped and stood still.
    â€œYou notice anything unusual about that tree?” asked Lewis, nodding toward a flaming sassafras, not a tree really but a large shrub. The red three-fingered leaves caught a ray of sunlight and turned fluorescent in the somber laurels.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œPut your face next to it.”
    He did, expecting to smell something, perhaps licorice. Smelling nothing, he plucked a leaf for sucking, tasted the licorice stem. Lewis held a branch aside as if it were a drape at a window.
    â€œNow?”
    â€œNow what?”
    â€œYou still don’t notice anything?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œCome closer.”
    There was nothing to come closer to except a shallow recess in the rock of the ridge.
    â€œNow?”
    Something stirred against his cheek, a breath of air from the rock itself, then as he leaned closer a steady current blew in his face and open mouth, not like the hot summer breeze of the fairway, but a cool wet exhalation smelling of rocks and roots. His mouth tasted minerals.
    â€œWhere does that come from, a cave? I