When everything was unloaded, the food and blankets, oil lamps, fishing rods and clothes, I woke you and carried you, cocooned in a blanket, from the car over to a lichen-covered slab of rock behind the koie. We sat together and looked over the descending wood to the lake below. You weren’t fully awake, and you curled your body into my chest and whimpered, displeased with having been disturbed. I rocked you back and forth and spoke about the fish we would catch in the morning, the fish we would catch before your mother and sister had even left their beds. I described how we would motor out on the glassy water to where a creek emptied into the lake, where the water was cool and shallow and where the trout, golden-green and spotted like leopards, were sure to be. You asked me if a fish knows it’s been caught when it’s been caught and I told you I didn’t think so, and you asked if you would be allowed to hold the rod all by yourself and I promised you that you would. We sat together on the rock until your mother called us in to eat.

Dinner was chicken and potatoes cooked in the fire pit. Your mother put you and your sister, both silly with exhaustion, to bed at ten. She lay down with you and told you a new story about the girl all three of you had invented together. A girl named Anne who lived on an island that was shaped like a boat. This girl could climb trees without making a sound. She was the master of wasps. When it suited her, she could transform herself into a fish.

I wasn’t yet tired. I lit candles and arranged them on the dining table, poured two glasses of wine and sat quietly, shuffling a deck of cards, waiting for your mother. Her storytelling voice was one of my favourite sounds: somnolent, but punctuated when there was tension, melodic when the dilemma was resolved. My attention was half on the story but also taken up by the night sounds of the koie and of the forest. Wind speaking through the pines, an owl. The pulse of countless crickets and night creatures.

Sometimes, out there, with the air so pure, it seemed possible that if we knew how to listen, we might hear the sound of the stars cutting across the sky.

Your mother’s story was over yet still she didn’t come. I waited, my hands lost in the rhythm of shuffling cards, then softly called to her. My voice hung alone in the middle of the room. She had fallen asleep, so I took a pack of cigarettes and my glass of wine and went outside to the rock I had shared with you, a few hours before. I was hoping for a show, for the soft glowing dome of northern lights, but they never came.

Cold, when I woke up in the morning. Condensation dripped down the window next to where my head lay. I slept with the alarm clock tucked in bed next to me so I could silence the squawk as soon as it rang. Didn’t want to wake your mother and sister at five in the morning. Your mother turned in her sleep and pulled the blanket up over her shoulder. You. You were tucked closely into her body like a snail in its shell. Your white eyelashes lay on your cheek and you were safe. I didn’t wake you up, Bear, as I had promised, not because I didn’t want you to come with me, but because I didn’t want to peel you away from where you slept. The moment was precious and I didn’t want to break it, and I thought that I could take you out again in the evening. True, the fish that bite in the evenings are usually the bottom-feeders, the long-whiskered, flat-headed catfish, and though inedible, though they taste of mud, I thought you would have had just as much fun catching and releasing them. So I decided to go without you.