“You peel the potatoes,” she said. “We’ll add them half an hour before everything else is done.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said, putting a dozen small potatoes in a bowl of water to soak. I didn’t—and don’t—like peeling potatoes, but if they are to be eaten, someone has to peel them. Miss Pauline smiled at me.

“You’re a real help around the house,” she said.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“You’re going to make some boy a good wife,” as if that were the greatest compliment she could pay. I suppose it was.

I dug the knife into a potato to take out the eyes, wishing Miss Pauline wouldn’t keep talking about boys and getting married. But she was wound up like the Edison player. She spent the next hour asking me if there was any special boy at school I liked and if any of the other girls were “keeping company.” You may think that was strange, since I was only thirteen, but you must remember that in those days a girl married early, often at fifteen or sixteen, and she was an old maid at twenty. As I may have said, Miss Pauline seemed terribly old to me. There was gray in her hair, yet she was only thirty-one that year we took the canoe trip.

We added the potatoes and some carrots to the venison roast and went outside where it was cool. My father and Indian Pete were talking.

“Wait one week,” Pete was saying. “I’ll go with you.”

“I can’t,” said my father. “Hunting season starts the twenty-sixth, and I’ve got a party from Long Island.”

Pete frowned. “No like. Suppose you get sick? Two young’uns by themselves, what they do?”

My father smiled. “Very well, I think. But I won’t get sick. Why should I, on this trip of all trips? I wish you could go, Pete, but only because we’d have fun together. Can’t you postpone your client?”

Pete shook his head. “Him important man. World come to end if he don’t get home to stock market.”

My father laughed. “What’s he paying you?”

“Heap wampum,” said Pete, straight-faced.

“Come on, noble savage. Don’t beat around the bush.”

“Ten dollars a day,” said Pete. “And I charge him two-fifty for the canoe. He brings his own grub, and Indian Pete eats good.”

My father whistled. The going rate for guides was five to six dollars a day. Even that was high in those times when ten dollars a week was a good wage for a working man.

“You must know where the body’s hidden,” said my father.

“No,” said Pete. His voice was clear and free of any Indian accent. “I just look the other way when he shoots a deer out of season.”

My father sniffed the fragrant air. “Well”—he smiled—“we’re glad you did.”

“You no understand,” said Pete, putting on his Indian voice again. “Client, him shoot deer, leave it. No can cut off horns, either, because they still in velvet. He shoot just to shoot.”