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    By the age of eight, Charlie was crazy about horses. Maybe it was even earlier, but during that summer it came to a crisis, as things often did with Charlie and his enthusiasms. The problem began with Bat, the old one-eyed mule who was owned by Leonard Waits but seemed to spend most of her time at Silver Hill. Bat and Charlie were close, if such a thing could be said about a pale blond boy and a brown mare mule. But the fact was that they spent a lot of time with each other. The mule often jumped out of whatever pasture she happened to be in to end up where Charlie was. She even met the school bus—or at least she was usually there when the bus arrived. Many folks refused to accept the idea that a twenty-five-year-old mule would actually wait at thebus stop for a seven-year-old boy, and the fact that it often happened was written off as coincidence. Charlie talked to her just the way he would a human, and while he was on his own two feet she did almost anything he wanted. Most of the time she even followed him around loose, without a lead line, more or less like a dog.
    But the relationship did not extend to riding.
    The first problem was that she had a high, straight backbone that was so uncomfortable that even with a pillow Charlie could hardly bear to sit on her. The next problem was that when he was on her back, he had virtually no control over her. The way the friendship seemed to work was that when Charlie was on the ground and she could see him out of her one eye, their special relationship held. But when he was on her back and she couldn’t see him—because of the blinkers on the old work bridle—he became just another human being. Most of the time she wouldn’t even move. Mule nature took over. This theory was offered up by Jimmy Price who was considered an expert on horses because he had a mare named Princess who would lie down and roll over on command. Lacking any better authority, his theory was accepted. And so Bat fell from grace as transportation and, more important, as the embodiment of the romance of riding.
    The summer Charlie was to turn eight, the woods on the far side of the farm next to the railroad were to be logged. No one was sure why. ProfessorJames surely didn’t need the money. There had to be something, some reason, but nobody knew what it was, not even Matthew.
    A white man named George Maupin, who lived ten miles west at the foot of Burdens Mountain, had the contract in the beginning. George was only five foot six, but he was absolutely square and the physical power implied in his shape was true. He always wore a businessman’s hat, summer and winter. He had sweated right through it for so many years that the band was two shades darker than the rest of the hat. George was an old-fashioned logger. That meant that he had two strong workhorses, a beat-up six-ton truck with a log rack, a huge two-man chain saw with a four-foot cutting bar, his own strength, and the need for one other strong man.
    Before the war came, George had been doing fine. Landowners hired him to go into old woods, take out the biggest trees for saw logs, leave the rest, and not make a mess. In those days George had four horses and could move really large logs. It was a time before we got used to the woods being torn up by skidders and bulldozers.
    George’s branch of the Maupin family was native to the area around the village. There were three brothers, but the home farm next to the village was not big enough for one family, let alone three, so George, just before the war, had bought a little place in Burdens Hollow at the foot of the mountain. It was not really a farm, just a rocky fifteen-acre pasture with a loghouse and barn, with the beginning of Burdens River running through the pasture. It was a mountain farm—there were black snails in the stream, the kind found only in mountain creeks and rivers.
    When George got home from the war, he wanted to pick up where he’d left off. But now there was