If you asked Nellie, Lawrence had gotten it wrong. For him the high desert morning was relaxing, not energizing; very nearly anesthetic, in fact. The thin, dry air, the crisp, brilliant light, the rolling, open, pinyon-dotted foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, all made him feel sleepy and content, as sleek as a pampered house cat. Sleek and reflective and, on this particular morning, a shade melancholy.

He was reflecting on the first WAFA meeting, ten years earlier, as he worked the soil. “Rather unpleasant associations,” Frieda had said, and she’d been putting it mildly. Damn unpleasant was the way he would put it. What else could you call it when you’d been responsible, no matter how unintentionally, for the death-the violent, unnecessary death-of the man to whom you owed very nearly everything important you had?

He leaned back on his heels, trowel at rest. Miranda’s letter would have gone out to all forty or so WAFA members. For four of them-and only four-the mention of Whitebark Lodge would create those same “rather unpleasant associations.”

He wondered what they were thinking about right now.

Callie Duffer was thinking about-or at least talking about-the self-esteem needs and personal-growth potential of an anthropology student named Marc Vroom, who was in considerable danger of flunking out of Nevada State University in his first graduate semester. As departmental chair, she felt she was required to declare her opinions.

“Surely you see,” she told the three faculty members gathered in her office, “that failing this young man would solve none of his problems.”

“Well, it’d go a long way toward solving mine,” Harlow Pollard grumbled.

Callie swallowed down a surge of irritation. Had he said it with a hint of humor, even sardonic humor, she might have smiled. But Harlow was about as humorous as a codfish, and not so very much quicker on the uptake. Still, what was the point of getting annoyed? The man was to be pitied, a simplistic dinosaur incapable of comprehending the new dynamics of the educational suprasystem and the role of academics as change-agents. Poor Harlow still thought that he was there to teach anthropology, period. A living argument, Callie thought, against the tenure system.