Often in the course of that journey, Rudy wished he hadn't been so successful in avoiding the efforts of a well-meaning school system to educate him. Most of what he learned seemed to him to be not magic at all, only a prerequisite course in knowledge he should have had but didn't: how plants grow, and why; the shape of the land and the sky; the motions of the air, and why wind blows as it does; how to meditate, to still the restlessness of the mind and focus it on a star, or a flame, or a single wisp of grass twisting in the wind; how to listen; and how to see the subtle differences in the silence and emptiness of the plains, the variations in the shapes of pebbles, the subtle shifts of wind and colour and the pitch of the ground. Besides being a wizard, Rudy figured, Ingold must be at least an Eagle Scout, for he understood survival, how to set

up a camp unseen, how to find water in the dry places, and how to scrounge food from this most barren and unyielding of countrysides.

As they walked, Ingold would occasionally stop to pick a plant from the roadside or point one out where it grew in the arroyos that laced the land as they moved south. After he had pointed out such a plant and described its growth and uses if any, Rudy found he had damn well better be able to repeat back everything about that plant. As a sometime artist, he had learned to observe; and after studying eight or ten different plants, he found he knew what to look for when he came across new ones. After a time it got to be a game, and he would seek them out for himself, asking Ingold about the unfamiliar ones and coming to the sudden enlightenment that any biology major could have introduced to him years ago - namely that there are similarities of structure and function in different groups of living things. The orderliness of it amazed and delighted him, as if he had walked for twenty-five years in a world of black and white and, turning a corner, had discovered colour.