It doesn’t matter how much there is to steal, even pennies, robbers will take it. A pair of robbers terrorizing the countryside. The countryside is open. Everyone felt the burden of their crimes; they felt many burdens. In the winter wind, we shivered. The shivering leaves. So, the robbers had their spree, and everyone worried about themselves. Simple sensations are private, they are mine alone.

The old farmer and his wife were not as strong as they had been, and neighbors helped when they could. The thing imposes itself. We forget and also do not forget. For the coffin and the cradle and the purse are all against us. The neighbors dragged the old folks out, but they were dead. The thatch fire had not killed them. They had been struck with an iron bar. Shivering blinking with the whole body. Shivering open.

The alarm is abroad and everyone is looking doubtfully at strangers. The image he sees in the mirror is not him.  The robbers murderers kept moving, hiding in the daylight and keeping in the shadows at night, on their way out of the county. That is to say, menaced. They were headed fo the county line and the great boundary forest that could give them some cover.

In their bloodiness, they have forgotten something about this route. Hunted by a posse, scared, thinking only of escape and rest, they forgot that no one ever took this way to the forest after dark—especially with a bad conscience. Animal world. Energy world. Rock world. In the presence of the mirror, he is confused and turns away to the objects that for him are fundamental. 

But they enter the forest and remember. The Black Dog of the western woods, who could smell the guilt on death’s garments, whose master is death. The image he sees in the mirror is a kind of compliment, and his master’s caress recalls him to his body.