Marjorie stepped out of the boat and Nick pulled the boat high up the beach.

Nick heard the oarlocks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist.

“Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” asked Nick.

You see, Nick, babies are supposed to be born head first but sometimes they’re not.

“If you see Nick, dear, will you tell him his mother wants to see him?” his wife said.

She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty.

Nick’s father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.

Nick’s father went into the kitchen and poured about half of the water out of the big kettle into a basin.

Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row.

Nick pulled hard on one oar so the boat would turn and the bait spinning far behind would pass where the trout was feeding.

Each time Nick set a heavy slab of driftwood across the butt of the rod to hold it solid and propped it up at an angle with a small slab.

Nick, standing in the door of the kitchen, had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian’s head back.

Ten years later there was nothing of the mill left except the broken white limestone of its foundations showing through the swampy second growth as Nick and Marjorie rowed along the shore.

Nick caught three of them with his hands and cut their heads off and skinned them while Marjorie chased with her hands in the bucket, finally caught a perch, cut its head off and skinned it.

Then Marjorie rowed the boat out over the channel-bank, holding the line in her teeth, and looking toward Nick, who stood on the shore holding the rod and letting the line run out from the reel.

Nick’s father always assumed that this was what would happen, and hired the Indians to come down from the camp and cut the logs up with the crosscut saw and split them with a wedge to make cord wood and chunks for the open fireplace.