Just over 110 miles of twisting river, it was. Sometimes swollen and foaming around them, other times snagged and vicious with overhang from the banks. The flow could rise three feet in the night, frothing with driftwood, fallen timber, and rubbish. And the bizarre people! Jug-swilling maniacs calling out from fortified bluffs-the last of the beaver trappers drifting like leaves in long birchbark canoes-flatboats covered in skins, writhing with children and clattering pots.

Hephaestus read, whittled, and chewed to pass the time (trying to keep ideas for new inventions from filling his mind),while Rapture would point out to Lloyd the hollyhocks and the yellow spikes of toadflax.

By the time they reached Louisville and Holava had traded in some of their Ohio cargo for a load of burley tobacco and cured meat, Lloyd had filled his notebook with elegant scribbles of ospreys with shad clutched in their talons and an idea for a huge barge to be pulled by swimming buffalo.

But the farther the family got from Zanesville the more strained their sense of family became. Hephaestus missed his tools and his inventions. Rapture missed her herbs and concoctions. Lloyd missed his secret link with his dead sister, and the ability not just to draw things but to make them. Texas seemed a world away. They reread the magical letter and hardened themselves for the next phase of their journey, each of them wondering where the elusive presentiment of deepening shadow came from-whether it came from within them or moved on larger, darker wings across America itself.

There was something in the wind that no one quite understood, and so could not talk about in any of the mélange of languages that swirled around like junk in the river.

The Sitturds were puzzles to themselves even. Were they intrepid adventurers reaching out for the bounty of a new day? Or cowardly bankrupts fleeing like frightened beasts?