She didn’t know why she felt so, but simply looking at them, it was as if she had won something or been given something. She felt her throat thicken with silent laughter which she quickly repressed. Whatever did they think they were doing, she wondered, just sitting there like that? They were not even holding their fishing poles. Instead, each had secured the big end of his pole in the giving leaf mold earth and sat, Leon with his hands slack in his lap, Floyd with hands loose at his sides. Leon’s back was supported comfortably by a stump. Floyd had his against the trunk of a tree that grew close to the water’s edge.

Neither bored nor diverted, she sat watching them for a quarter hour. Suddenly Floyd’s pole bent at its thin end, and instantly, as if he were part of the pole’s action before he touched it, Floyd was on one knee and one foot, the pole in his hands. Leon got to both feet as Floyd brought up and swung onto the bank a broad-tailed, broad-bodied bream. The fish flopped briefly in the dry leaves before Floyd, with Leon now beside him, unhooked it. He held the thrashing fish by the gills.

“Big one,” she heard Leon say.

Floyd trotted along the bank and returned with their earlier catch; four bream of various sizes strung on a thin, forked tree branch Leon had cut after landing the first fish of the morning nearly an hour ago. Floyd added the new one, which was still twitching, and replaced the forked branch in the water a little way away.

“Let’s smoke,” Floyd said then.

Each boy felt in his pockets and found a corncob pipe. Leon drew a cloth sack from his hip pocket, and they filled the pipes with what Clovis almost certainly knew was not real tobacco, but what was called rabbit tobacco and grew wild. Floyd held both pipes while Leon searched again in his pockets and found a flint and an old Indian arrowhead. Even at her distance Clovis knew what it must be; plenty of arrowheads were turned up whenever a field was dug or plowed, and they were commonly used to strike fires.

Leon got a blaze of leaves going and nursed it, keeping it small. Each boy lighted a dry twig from which he then lighted his pipe. The rabbit tobacco burned unevenly, and the pipes often had to be relighted. The sweet, pungent smoke drifted toward Clovis and caused her stomach to jump, making her realize she was hungry and that it must be getting on to the noon dinnertime.