Four Star Words from Annie Proulx's "Rough Deeds"

Finally, in this clinging miasma of stinking hair and dust, his mother, choking blood, had lain on the floor, as his father's black legs scissored away into the night, and Duquet began his struggle to get away from France, to become another person.

Uncle Robert felled a big pine, and when it smote the ground it broke off a branch that bent double and then sprang to gouge my leg.

After all the injustices he had suffered, after all he had done--crossing to the New World, learning the hard voyageur trade and how to read and write and cipher, working out a way to use the forest for his fortune, all the business connections he had made--these Maine vermin had come to steal his timber.

After all the injustices he had suffered, after all he had done--crossing to the New World, learning the hard voyageur trade and how to read and write and cipher, working out a way to use the forest for his fortune, all the business connections he had made--these Maine vermin had come to steal his timber.

The gibbous moon rose.

He sat with Dred-Peacock in the taproom of the Pine Dog, a pleasant tavern with a sign showing an eponymous carved mastiff, now their favored meeting place, as the Sign of the Red Bottle had burned in a conflagration that took half the wharves and several ships.

He sat with Dred-Peacock in the taproom of the Pine Dog, a pleasant tavern with a sign showing an eponymous carved mastiff, now their favored meeting place, as the Sign of the Red Bottle had burned in a conflagration that took half the wharves and several ships.

I have not made his acquaintance, but I've heard much deleterious talk concerning his ways.

The work continued all night by the light of enormous bonfires, cat-footed men running out onto the heaving carpet of logs to hook and prod their property to shore. Impossible to put a canoe into that maelstrom.

In the rich autumn light, the deciduous trees stunned with xanthine orange and yellow.

After all the injustices he had suffered, after all he had done--crossing to the New World, learning the hard voyageur trade and how to read and write and cipher, working out a way to use the forest for his fortune, all the business connections he had made--these Maine vermin had come to steal his timber.

Inside Duquet, something like a tightly closed pinecone, licked by fire, opened abruptly, and he exploded with insensate and uncontrollable fury, a lifetimes's pent-up rage.

And, as if that were not enough, word came that Forgeron was ill with a fiery skin inflammation and the quinsy, a putrid sore throat that forced him into his bed.