1st Part

When travelers (who were few) approached, the old man would go inside, shutter the windows and bolt the door, and wait for them to move on. Sometimes they tried to break in, but the cabin was durable, and eventually even the most peristent went away. Afterward, he'd go outside to clean any mess left behind, then return inside and lock the door once again, in case the visitors came back. They never did.

It wasn't that he was inhospitable so much as that he no longer took interest in what went on beyond his mountain. The trees and the river and the sun and the cold were enough.

He was not a hermit of the ordinary kind. He had learning, and enjoyed music, and before he left the city was known as a conversationalist of wit and perception. His wife had been very beautiful, and his daughter likewise, both charming and healthy and happy. When he moved them to the remoter lands beyond the city everyone thought it would be short-lived, but when years passed and neither the man nor his family returned, they knew he would not come back.

What he wanted was wisdom, he said. Then he packed what couldn't be sold and was needed for life in the wild, and left for the mountains. People laughed; others contemplated and conjectured; a few cried. He was a good man, and well liked. His company, and that of his wife and daughter, would be misssed. But that was the way of the city: people came, and they left, and there was nothing permanent or altogether significant.

The girl died first. She contracted a fever, which turned her lungs bad, and by the end she was coughing up blood and unable to eat. The man walked to another city for medicine, but nothing worked and one night in February she sat up, coughed, and fell back as pale and as stiff as a spruce plank. She was buried under her favorite tree.

Mother and father grieved, naturally. They lost sleep, and they worked less, and evenings were often spent in silence staring at the floor. Neither wanted anything so much as to have their girl back; they were too apathetic even for suicide. Finally the woman ate so little that she died, and the man put her underground beside the bones of their daughter, two empty shells from which not enough life had been scraped. He didn't even weep at the second passing.

People no longer interested him after that. He was almost afraid of them, as though what appeared to be flesh and blood was actually the form of Death, or mere ghosts sent to haunt him. He developed a routine that involved neither music nor reading, two of his favorite things when times were good. He ate mechanically, slept without dreams, and never changed his expression from a flat, uncomplicated stare.

What made him wait for the solitary man walking up the path to him on a gentle June evening? Even he could never tell. But he stopped in the cabin yard until the man stood an armlength away, looking into the hermit's black eyes with a pair as lavender as the fading sky, smiling a little, seeming to have come a long distance just to see the lonely man.