Publisher's Synopsis
Night entered the clearing from the scrub. The low tangled growth of young oak and pine and palmetto fell suddenly black and silent, seeming to move closer in one shadowy spring. The man told himself there was nothing to fear. Yet as he walked towards his cabin, naked and new on the raw sand, darkness in this place seemed to him unfriendly.
He thought, "Time I get me a fence raised tomorrow, maybe 'twon't seem so wild, like."
Light still hung raggedly above the hammock west of the cleared acres. Here and there a palm shook its head against the faint orange of the sky, or the varnished small leaves of a live oak were for a moment luminous. There was an instant when the hammock reared back against the west; when the outline of each tree-top was distinct; when the clearing gathered about it the shreds of twilight. Then there was no longer scrub or clearing or hammock. Blackness obliterated them with a great velvet paw and crouched like a panther on the cabin doorstep.
The man tested the security of the split rails that formed a temporary pen about his hogs. The grey mule was hobbled and the scrub milch cow tethered. The chickens clacked and fluttered in the coop that must hold them until a proper roost was built. After the fence was raised, they could all run free. He stood by the coop a moment. His thoughts stirred uneasily in his mind, milling like the fowls. He could not be sure that he had done well to move his family here, across the river. He had not made a good living in the piney-woods. Only the knowledge of his native Florida wife and of his neighbours, her kin, had kept him to the few crops that would yield on that grey shifting land. His family of five was of an age now to help with the crops. He had exchanged pine-land for scrub, with a precarious fringe of hammock.
