leaned into the traces, leaving hoofprints three inches deep. No gasoline tractor, Aaron mused, could ever pull itself through soil so rich and damp. Geilsgrefte, horsepower, was best exerted by a horse, he thought.

The brown earth-smells were good. Aaron kicked apart the larger clods, fat with a planet-life of weather and rich decay. This land would take a good deal of disking to get it into shape. His neighbors, who'd done their heavy plowing just after last fall's first frost, were already well ahead of him. He stabled Rosina at sundown, and went in to sneak a well-earned glass of hard cider past Martha's teetotaling eye.

Musa the carpenter brought his son home well after dark. Waziri had had adventures, the old man said; dancing, gambling on the Fool's Wheel, sampling fonio-beer, celebrating his own young life's springtime with the earth's. Both the old man and the boy were barefoot, Aaron noticed; but said nothing: perhaps shoelessness was part of their spring-festival.

Waziri a bit geschwepst with the beer, tottered off to bed. "Thanks to you, friend Haruna, that boy became a man today," the carpenter said. He accepted a glass of Aaron's cider. "Today Waziri's wallet jingled with bronze and copper earned by his own sweat, a manful sound to a lad of fifteen summers. I ask pardon for having returned your laborer in so damaged a condition, brother Haruna; but you may be consoled with the thought that the Mother's festival comes but once in the twelve-month."

"No harm was done, brother Musa," Aaron said, offering his visitor tobacco. "In my own youth, I sometimes danced with beer-light feet to the music of worldly guitars; and yet I reached a man's estate."

Offered a refill for his pipe, Musa raised a hand in polite refusal. "Tomorrow's sun will not wait on our conversation, and much must be done, in the manner of racers waiting the signal, before the first blade breaks the soil," he said. "Good night, brother Haruna; and may Mother grant you light!"

"Mother keep you, brother Musa," Aaron murmured the heathen phrase without embarrassment. "I'll guide your feet to your wagon, if I may."

Aaron, carrying the naphtha lantern, led the way across the strip of new-plowed soil. Set by frost into plastic mounds and ridges, the earth bent beneath his shoes and the carpenter's bare feet. Aaron swung Musa's picket-iron, the little anchor to which his horse was tethered, into the wagon, noticing that it had been curiously padded with layers of quilted cloth. 

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