“Why do they call you Hodag?” she asked him, her eyes big like atoms being split. She was tiny (everybody was tiny next to Hodag, but she especially) but she was strong. He could lean on her when he was tired. He could not lean on very many people. She never complained, and she held her own walking through the brush and bramble. She always looked out for poison ivy. Again she asked him, like asking a mountain, “Why do they call you Hodag?”
He said that he didn’t really know, seeing that a Hodag ought to be half-alligator and half-alley cat (but bigger than a lion) with prehistoric claws and a beastly lizard tongue. “Probably just a komodo dragon had somehow gotten loose up there in the woods, only no one seen one of them around here before. Fire-breathin’ and all that, tearin’ up the trees. None of that. Just a dragon escaped from the zoo is all.” He was no monster, she thought, and she put her hand on his arm. She was impressed by his ability to see through bullshit. He was impressed by her ability to identify flowers. She was impressed by his ability to play left guard. He really liked the way she didn’t mind being alone. She was in awe of his ability to protect things. She wondered if he could pull trees from the ground and snap them in half. She wondered if he would protect her. He wondered if she wanted him to tell her the stories that his grandfather had told him, about hunting hodags and playing blackjack with Paul Bunyan and trading furs with the Indians. She did want to hear those stories, but he kept quiet, afraid that she would not.
She knew that there was something marvelous going on, way up there in that head of his, and that one morning, on a bed of twigs with their eyes on the level, he would tell her everything.
