A thicket of reasons led them up the mountain, and Dellarobia’s insistence was one strand of it. Bear and Peanut Norwood’s mistrust of the logging company, and possibly of each other, comprised the rest. Four men in hard hats had flagged the boundaries of the section proposed for logging and declared that it was up to the Turnbows and Norwoods to see that property lines were respected. The hard-hat men, who were subcontractors for the real decision-makers in California, came from Knoxville in a panel truck that said Money Tree Industries. Suspicion was only natural.

Cub rallied to repair the all-terrain vehicle so they wouldn’t have to make the hike on foot. It took four of his buddies and nearly a week of evenings to replace the broken axle. Dovey observed to Dellarobia that there was no end to the amount of effort a man would put into saving himself some work. On a Friday morning the expedition piled onto the ATV with Cub at the wheel, Bear riding shotgun, and Peanut Norwood in the cargo bucket hugging his knees, insufficiently shaped like a bale of hay to fit in there very well. Dellarobia stood at her kitchen window watching the squat vehicle crawl up the steep pasture slope like a broad, flat toad with three men clinging to its back. Her life had become some kind of fairy tale, in which her family members set off one by one to meet their destiny on the High Road. She couldn’t have said what she hoped the men would discover up there, but her distraction was acute. Ten minutes after they left, she found herself folding clothes from the dirty-laundry basket while the clean ones sat in the dryer.

Less than an hour passed before the men came back, astounded, to collect their wives as witnesses.

There was no question of everyone riding in the vehicle. They would have to walk. Dellarobia surprised herself by asking to go along, despite the sticky fact of Cordelia eating cereal in her high chair, and Preston needing to be picked up from kindergarten at noon. She asked anyway. Dovey was off work that morning and could come over to mind the kids. Cub made his parents hold their horses while they waited the ten minutes it took for Dovey to get there. Cub was surprisingly resolute on Dellarobia’s behalf.

Her heart raced as they mounted the hill, on various accounts. Mostly for the strangeness of reenacting this walk she’d so recently taken with outrageous intent, this time with husband and family in tow. It felt like a reality show, poised to expose and explode her serial failures. The wife who keeps having inappropriate crushes, falling off the marriage wagon, if only in her mind. They navigated the mud at the top of the pasture where the sheep had beaten down the perimeter, cursed with their certainty of greener grass on the other side. Like herself, she thought, when she’d last slipped through this gate. Like a dog in a yard, pacing the edges of her confines to the tune of “Get me out of here.” Cub held the gate open for her, and she couldn’t meet his eyes.

Beefy, ruddy-faced Bear led the way, the platoon leader. He’d served in the military ages ago and carried certain vestiges: the haircut, the weight lifting, the blood pressure. He’d held on to a muscular build, despite his weight and age, and the natural supremacy that went with a frame of six feet, four inches. Hester bought his trousers from a place called Man of Measure, on rare shopping trips to Knoxville. Cub was nearly as tall but managed to fit into regular Wranglers, size 38–36, which to Dellarobia sounded more like the shape of a TV screen than a man. She assumed it was the tour in Vietnam that accounted for the difference in men like Burley Turnbow Sr. and Jr., so similar in their dimensions and opposite in bearing. Like those boxes that guaranteed they were equally filled, but contents may have settled. She could hear Cub huffing and puffing now as he brought up the rear, saying little. The two older men gave him no chance. Bear and Peanut Norwood were talking a lot but failing to explain anything, mostly contradicting one another’s accounts or declaring no explanation was possible. Cub was the first of them to say they thought it was insects.

Hester wheeled on him. “If you’re hauling me up this mountain to look at a bug, son, I will slap you nakeder than what you were born with.”

Cub pressed on, despite the threat. “It’s not regular bugs, Mother. It’s something pretty. Wouldn’t you say it was, Dad?”

Bear and Norwood, if they could agree on nothing else, both stated that was true, it was awful pretty. Or would be, if there weren’t so many they covered up the place.

“You won’t believe it,” Cub warned. “It’s like something taking over the world.”

They took the High Road in single file and the men settled down, directing their energy to the climb. A gobbler called from high on the ridge and a female answered, wild turkeys getting down to their family business. Normally one of the men would have wished aloud for his rifle, but today no one did. Dellarobia couldn’t remember a sadder-looking November. The trees had lost their leaves early in the unrelenting rain. After a brief fling with coloration they dropped their tresses in clumps like a chemo patient losing her hair. A few maroon bouquets of blackberry leaves still hung on, but the blue asters had gone to white fluff and the world seemed drained. The leafless pear trees in Hester’s yard had lately started trying to bloom again, bizarrely, little pimply outbursts of blossom breaking out on the faces of the trees. Summer’s heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in its turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved. The world of sensible seasons had come undone.

At least there was no rain at the moment. Dellarobia was happy to feel warmth on her shoulders through her jacket, and a strength of daylight she’d all but forgotten, even now as they entered deeper woods. The sky was not blue but the cold white of high clouds in a thin reflective sheet. She could have used her prescription sunglasses, if she could remember what junk drawer they were in. But definitely, she was wearing her glasses today. Whatever was up here, she planned to see it clearly. She spied some ribbons of orange flagging tape dangling from the trees, but the men were paying no heed right now to boundaries. Bear kept them moving at a clip. Dellarobia was next to last in the line, behind her mother-in-law and ahead of Cub. She was dying for a rest or a smoke, ideally both, but would drop dead before she’d be the one to ask. She had barely been invited. Peanut Norwood gripped his chest in a promising way, so maybe he’d make them stop. Forget about wiry Hester in her yellow cowboy boots. Onward Christian soldiers. Dellarobia averted her eyes from Hester’s skinny bottom in sagging Levi’s, and trusted that Cub was finding her own rear view more pleasing. Whenever she complained of being so small, Cub told her she was a sports car: no junk in the trunk, but all you need for speed. Maybe that’s how he was keeping his feet moving. Back before marriage, she’d known the power of being physically admired, changing the energy of a room by walking into it. She wondered if that was her problem, missing that. Falling for guys who flattered her. It seemed so shallow and despicable, she hoped that was not the measure of her worth. She peered off through the woods, seeing nothing altered in the last two weeks except for a greater barrenness among the trees. And herself, of course. Nothing had changed except every conscious minute and a strange fire in her dreams.