Incident at Twenty-Mile

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Dedicated to Owen Wister and Frederic Remington; the first for creating the mythotypic characters and the distinctive motivational values that power the narrative engines of the Western genre, and the second for establishing its visual vocabulary. Between them, they provided the idioms and the inspiration, not only for all subsequent writers of the genre, but also for the Western film, from John Ford to Sergio Leone.

February, 1998

St. Etienne de Baпgorry

THE COMING OF AUTUMN to Vermont never fails to stir an irresistible wanderlust in me. Something minor-key and seductive in the fading melancholy of the season, something in the tart-within-sweet taste of old-fashioned pippins, in the smell of bonfires, in the rustle of ankle-deep leaves, makes me yearn to hit the road; and for me the direction of "going" is west, just as "coming back" means returning to New England. Perhaps this homing instinct is a tidal tug in my eleven generations of Puritan blood, but I suspect it has even more to do with the unnumbered generations of my Iroquois ancestors.

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