“He took the pistol. If he comes back, we don’t have any way to protect ourselves.”

“It wouldn’t have been much help anyway. Neither of us could shoot a man.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Tim said darkly.

We went back inside and without enthusiasm began cleaning up the mess our unwelcome visitor had left.

Several days passed, and the trapper owner of the cabin did not appear. We watched the lake anxiously every day, not sure whether we wanted to see a boat or not. Our first impulse, after the escaped convict (for that’s what we had decided he was) had gone, was to pack as much as we could carry and move back into the woods. But the weather was fierce. Now I knew that somewhere across that lake there was a trail, and I didn’t want to return to the trackless wilderness. We decided that one of us would watch the lake at all times. If we saw the convict returning, we would hide in the woods. Naturally this decision was unrealistic, since we soon grew lax at our lookout.

Tim became fascinated with the useless shotgun. He studied it for hours, examining how the hammer struck the percussion cap of the shell, and handled the empty red cardboard tubes so often that I was sure he would wear them out. “There must be a way to make this thing shoot,” he would say.

Losing the food the convict had stolen was more of an annoyance than a tragedy. We had plenty left. We made a start on the deer by cutting off a hind quarter with the saw and bringing it inside to thaw. Once it had thawed, getting the thick hide off was a tedious and messy job which took almost a whole day. Neither of us had ever skinned so large a creature before, and we did not know where to begin. But eventually the task was completed.

The snares began to produce other meat. Rabbits were plentiful, but I was wary of serving them too often, mindful of the need for red meat with fat. We ate wild greens. Once we could find no more of them, I took to cooking slim strips of the inner bark of birch trees, which were very bland and so took on the flavor of whatever they were boiled with. We ate sparingly of the vegetables buried in the storehouse which the thief had not discovered.

Several weeks went by, and my birch bark calendar added the dates until it was December. We had settled into an almost effortless routine. Get up, eat, work, eat, go to bed, and start over again in the morning.

We were merely marking time, and both of us knew it. Tim, particularly, was growing impatient.

“Let’s walk around the lake,” he said. “If the trail’s there we’ll hit it.”