The dark-eyed, dark-haired boy sat on the large rock in the moonlight, knees pulled up against his chest, turning over in his mind his soul’s most secret treasures—the angry private thoughts his father must never, ever, guess.

I loved Ma first.

Fact, as certain as any such thing could be. He’d loved Inger from the moment he first saw her, when she’d turned those big blue eyes and that warm smile on a sick little boy and made him feel better at once. It was Pa who’d tried to push her away, snapping like the whipped dog life was trying to make of him in those days. Fighting off the one thing that wanted to save him.

Ma loved me first.

Suspicion, but Adam had few doubts he was right. Inger had given her love to him almost as quickly as he had loved her. There was the “medicine,” first of all, and then she had followed him to the lonely boardinghouse room and played the music box for him, and stood up for him to Pa, even when Pa frightened her. She had been frightened, and angry, too. Her love for Pa came later. Adam knew that, just as he knew she had loved his Pa more in the end. Perhaps because of that, he treasured all the more the knowledge that Pa had not been the first Cartwright man in her heart.

I loved Ma more.

This was the unforgiveable thought, one that only months ago he would never have dared to consider—yet now it seemed as unquestionably true as either of the others. Adam didn’t want another mother, didn’t feel he needed one. He’d promised Inger after she died that he’d take care of Hoss for her, and he had; Hoss didn’t need a mother either. Now Pa had come home from New Orleans with another woman, another wife because Inger hadn’t been enough for him. Adam knew why. He lived on a ranch, he knew what drove the bulls and the stallions when they made the new calves and the foals. When Pa looked at Marie that way (and he was not going to call her ‘Ma,’ whatever he was told to do!) it made Adam’s stomach turn. His Pa was not an animal. They’d tried to make him one once, and Inger, his real Ma, had rescued him. A woman who was turning his Pa back to a beast was nothing that belonged on the Ponderosa, nothing Adam could love.

There was a noise behind him, and Adam snapped his head around to see Marie. She settled on the ground beside his rock, apparently not worried about staining her fine dress. “Do you mind my coming here, mon p’tit? It is very beautiful, the lake.”

“I don’t mind, ma’am,” Adam lied. His father wouldn’t tolerate any other response, he knew.

At least she didn’t chatter. They sat in silence, watching the moonlight on the rippling water. A huge stag elk came out of the trees to drink, and Marie caught her breath, then spoke at last. “He reminds me of your father, Adam.”

“My Pa’s no animal!”

“Of course not,” she said gently. “But if we can see animals in people, and be ashamed, why shouldn’t we sometimes see people in animals and be glad? Look at him, Adam. See the deep chest? The pride in what he’s won, and holds? The strength? And yes, mon p’tit, the love? Isn’t that like our Ben?”

Adam had looked again, and this time saw what she meant. As the elk turned his head towards them, Adam felt the same shiver he always had when under his Pa’s intent stare.

She must love him very much to understand that….

With that thought, the heavy rocks of his secrets began, slowly, to crumble into sand.

*****

The dark-eyed, graying-haired man settled gingerly on the rock and pulled his knees up against his chest, turning over in his mind his most secret thoughts—the angry private sorrows he must never, ever, share.

My brother is dead.

Fact, undeniable. The headstone was behind him, next to Marie’s; he’d read the inscription so often he no longer needed to see it. Tears couldn’t wash the truth of it from his memory.

My pa is dying.

Suspicion, this, but most probably true. Dr. Martin—and why did it seem he had aged so much more gracefully than Pa?—wouldn’t commit himself, but his very evasiveness told Adam the worst. It was as if a mountain was about to shatter into dust and blow away.

I should never have tried to come home.

A guess, but thinking back over the last few days, and especially the last hour or so, it was hard to argue with that fear. Elizabeth, clutching the unfortunate Spot in her arms, screaming at everyone to leave her alone. Linda, after Elizabeth had finally been put to bed, pale and complaining of headache, head turned away from him to hide her tears. Pa thundering out his displeasure with his granddaughter’s behavior. Jamie’s look of horrified surprise, touched with disappointment. Joe—and despite all the letters, all that Adam had been told, it was impossible not to feel that Joe was the only brother he had left—Joe not even there. Joe gone chasing after justice for the wife Adam had never known, the baby Adam had not been told was on the way. Disloyal as his third sorrow was, it was somehow the most persuasive of them all, and knowing that tore at Adam’s heart unmercifully.

He looked out over the lake, turning his back on the pair of headstones, and saw a graceful white bird at the shore’s edge. A heron, or perhaps a crane…he’d never studied birds as closely as he had the animals around him.

It reminds me of you, Marie….

Gradually Adam began to populate that shore with the memory of other creatures he had watched in other times. The massive, proud stag elk Marie had compared to his father. A giant bear ambling down to the water to fish. A mule deer, delicate in appearance yet swift and eager to defend what was his.

A wildcat, sleek and dark and solitary, as much at home here as any of the others.

Although he did not know it, Adam’s frown had softened; one side of his mouth was beginning to twitch upwards in a smile.

He reached for the flat, heavy stones of his grief and sent them skipping out over the moonlit surface of the lake.