“I heard Miss Pauline describing how her mother was treated for pneumonia,” I said.

“And that made her well?”

“No,” I said, hesitating. “She died anyway.”

My father’s spirits had risen when we returned an hour later with a handsome catch. I had picked spruce needles to boil down for tea, and while I was occupied, Tim came upon a porcupine, unfrightened behind its fortress of quills. He killed it with a stick and gingerly brought it back to camp, where my father was sipping some of the refreshing spruce tea.

“This lazybones will give us plenty of fat,” Tim said. “I’ll toss him in the fire and burn off the quills to make him easy to clean.”

“No,” my father said in a low voice. “That won’t work. You’ll have to skin him out very carefully. Make your incision along the belly and be sure you don’t get a quill in your hand. It can fester.”

Tim took almost an hour to skin the porcupine. It was hard going, but later that night we agreed it was worth the effort, because the roasted meat and especially the liver, which was large enough to serve each of us a generous portion, was as delicious as pork. My father ate heartily, and this gladdened me. I started to come around to Tim’s suggestion of the flu.

Again, as we lay under the stars, warming ourselves at the cheerful fire, my father told us more stories of his adventures in the woods. Yet for all my new hope, I couldn’t help but notice that he seemed to be addressing his words more to me than to Tim. Yet Tim was our woodsman. I had never had any real talents for the outdoor life. I might remember what my father said, but it would take Tim to carry out his suggestions. I could never in a million years have skinned our supper. Tim was clumsy and slow, but with proper guidance, he had gotten the job done.

“You would be surprised at the half-baked things I have seen men lost in the woods do,” my father was saying. “Why, would you believe that one man out of three, one who has been lost for days and who comes out onto a wilderness road, a strange road, one that is not the one he is looking for, will actually turn back into the woods, and get himself more lost because he has found the wrong road? That is silly—and don’t forget it.” He stared at me. “You won’t forget it, will you, Miss Lizzy?”

“No, Father,” I said. “I will try to remember.”