“I don’t know. Maybe she did at one time.”

Smyley got into the Jeep. “Somebody was telling me-did you used to be a doctor or something? Psychiatrist, they said.”

“Yes.”

“What the hell are you doing up here then?”

“My job.” Mackenzie watched him shake his head in disgust and drive away. Then he went inside the cabin and unpacked the supplies. He gave the dog a Milk Bone and went up the ladder into the tower and did a binocular sweep of the mountain forests. He recorded the sweep in the log and checked the radio, broke open the new decks of cards and laid out a double-pack board of solitaire.

The newspaper story kept intruding on his contentment. Finally he climbed down to the cabin and read the story again.

The dog heaved herself on ancient limbs to the larder and he gave her another Milk Bone. She didn’t eat it. She took it outside, perhaps to bury it.

Once every three weeks I see a newspaper, he thought, and I had to pick this one. Odds of twenty to one.

He read it twice. Duggai was a sort of bad tooth that Mackenzie seemed compelled to keep biting and prodding with his tongue.

He went outside and the dog brought him a stick; Mackenzie spent ten minutes throwing it for the dog to fetch; the dog was too old to do more than trot after it. Afterward MacKenzie went back up to the tower, moving up the ladder with a grace that betrayed quite well-tuned muscular coordination for a physique barely shy of fifty years’ age. It was just about all he had to do-calisthenics and isometrics. Otherwise sedentary in the fire tower he’d have gone to atrophy-constant head colds and bellyaches like Wilder or flaccid fat like Smyley, the relief man. Smyley was a reader; doing the circuit from tower to tower he always had his knapsack filled with paperbacks. Wilder was a deep thinker who worried a great deal about ecology and the world; with nothing to do in the towers but worry about Armageddon it wasn’t surprising Wilder had heartburn and sinus trouble. And me? I just get musclebound-in body and mind.