“Easier said than done,” my father answered.

“Walk downhill until I cut across a fresh game trail and follow it to a stream.”

“How do you know you aren’t going the wrong way?” Tim asked.

“If the trail’s getting stronger, I’m headed toward water. Once I find the stream, I follow it until it cuts a trail, which it always will sooner or later.”

“All right,” my father agreed. “Now, how will you know whether you’re headed in or out on the trail?”

“I’d watch where other trails joined it. If they branch off in front of me like a ‘Y,’ I’ll be going into the woods. But if they come in in front of me, like an upsidedown ‘Y,’ then I’m headed out.”

My father looked at me quietly. “That’s very good, Lizzy. Where did you learn that?”

“I heard it once.”

“Do you remember everything you hear?” My father had never paid much attention to my schoolwork.

Miss Pauline broke in. “The girl remembers every word she hears. Trouble is, she doesn’t always understand what she remembers.”

My father shook his head. “That’s a new one.” He lit his pipe and exhaled smoke. “Well, I’m right proud of both of you. I think you’ll do all right.”

Miss Pauline put away her knitting. “Time for bed now,” she said.

We said goodnight and went off to bed.

But I couldn’t go to sleep for a long time. I lay there in the dark, wondering what it would be like to be lost in the woods.

Looking back, knowing now what was to happen, it would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that my father had some supernatural instinct about the future and had therefore set out to prepare us for the ordeal of our interrupted journey. But I don’t think that was so. He was a professional guide, accustomed to taking nothing for granted. He knew from having lived with us that Tim and I were at home in the woods, but that was not enough, for my father was a careful man. He set himself to reinforcing our knowledge.

Our canoe was a fifteen-footer, hand-made from canvas and mountain ash by our neighbor, Indian Pete, who had traded it to my father some years back for two boxes of shotgun shells and an axe. It was wider in the beam than the usual Indian canoe, nearly fifty inches. Consequently it was stable in waters that would roll a more narrow craft. Pete had made the canoe without the usual center thwart, so it wasn’t possible to carry it with two paddles lashed to form a yoke. But in the Adirondacks a wooden yoke has long been used to carry the heavy guide boats. It can be adapted to canoes, which is what my father did. He cursed it in a gentle way, too, because when the canoe was over his head on a long portage, it tended to sway like a seesaw, which it wouldn’t have done with lashed paddles.