“All depends. They’ve already started south. But seems like there’s always a bunch that don’t leave soon enough. They’ll find our lakes frozen and no forage. I’ve seen the lakes freeze up fast enough to catch them by the legs overnight. Then the foxes come out and feed.”

Miss Pauline said: “How can you be sure from just a few flock of early geese?”

“Can’t really say. Man gets a feeling. Just like the other animals. Can’t explain it, can’t talk it away. It just happens. How do the geese know when to fly? They just do. I’ve seen them go over when it was so hot it’d melt butter in the springhouse. Next week, we’d get a hard freeze. They know—and so do I.”

“Animals have instinct,” she said. “I don’t hold with that in man. Man is a superior being. He is ruled by reason and logic.”

“Be that as it may,” my father said, “but we’re going to have us an early winter, and it’s going to be a long, hard one. There’s going to be a winterkill such as we ain’t seen in twenty years.”

“All right,” Miss Pauline agreed. “We’ll have plenty of wood and food. I have faith in you, Michael.”

He looked down at his shoes. “What I’ve been meaning to say, Pauline, is that this may be the last year we’ll have a chance to see deer herds the way they are now. If we get a bad winterkill, it’ll bring the herds down to nothing, and by the time they build up again—say five, six years—we’ll have so many tourists you won’t be able to find a beaver dam without ten people standing on it clicking their Kodaks.”

“What are you getting at, Michael?”

My father looked at me and then at Tim. “I’m thinking about the kids,” he said. “Times are changing. Things will never be the same again. I saw it coming, but I hoped that Lizzy would be grown and married before we ever had to admit it.”

“Admit what?” Miss Pauline asked.

“That we’re outdated. We’re country people in a city world. Another twenty years and this country is going to be concrete highways from one end to the other. Henry Ford will go down in history as the man who ruined the U.S. of America.”

“I notice you still drive your Ford,” she said, smiling.

My father grinned back. “If you can’t lick’em, join ’em. But our time is coming, Pauline. Before then, I want our kids to have something to remember.”

She put her knitting aside. “The canoe trip,” she said. “You’ve still got that on your mind.”

This was the first I’d heard of any canoe trip. I looked at Tim. He shook his head. He didn’t know either.

My father said: “If they’re going to see the way this country is and have something to remember, the time is now. The winterkill this year will hit the wildlife so bad, it won’t come back, not soon enough to do Tim and Lizzy any good.”