This time we made a proper camp, with the big canvas fly overhead and everything unpacked and distributed according to purpose. I smiled as Tim drew the chore of peeling the potatoes, while I helped lay and start the camp fire. My father produced a surprise from inside his pack—a mixture of vanilla and sugar which, when combined with cold water from the creek, formed a brew almost as tasty as the pop we had enjoyed at the Blue Mountain Lake garage. When everything was ready to eat—the fish floured and salt and peppered, the potatoes soft and steaming, and the coffee fragrant in the blackened pot—my father allowed Tim and me to have half a cup of coffee each, weakened by almost as much condensed milk from a can.

It was a fine meal. For dessert we had little squares of maple candy which had also appeared miraculously from my father’s private pack. He had been thinking specially of us when he prepared this trip. I lay on my comfortable blanket, cradled by the softness of the thatched spruce branches, and watched him near the fire, his jaw lean and shadowed by the dancing flames. He was smoking his pipe. Even now, when I remember my father, that is how I see him.

The stars were bright through the trees. I could see the Little and Big Dippers, and the Seven Sisters, and the Milky Way. We talked quietly of many things—of the second cow we hoped to get next spring, of the rumor that soon there would be a new school in which each grade would have its own room, of Tim’s hope to run his own trap line for extra money that winter. There was nothing of great importance that we said, but all that we spoke was close and dear to us, and there was no interrupting outside voice such as a television set or stereo record player to distract us.

Tim cried: “What was that?” pointing at the sky. I sat up and stared. For a moment I saw nothing, then I saw a swift streak of light move rapidly across the patch of darkness.

“A falling star!” I said.

My father nodded. “Yes,” he said, “this batch usually comes around the middle of October.”

“How can that be?” I asked. I knew what a falling star was, but I had never heard of showers of them at that time, and I don’t think my father had either. Yet with a woodsman’s observations, he knew that the Orionids, which were the ones we were seeing now, always came in mid-October, and that the Deminids would come in December, and that in April you could count on the Lyrids. He knew neither their names nor their origins, but had come to accept and expect them at their appointed times.

“Maybe,” he promised, “I’ll show you something even prettier in the morning—if you don’t mind getting up early.”

“What, Father?” I asked. But instead of giving in, he put his finger beside his nose and smiled.