I dressed warmly in my wool fishing cap and multi-pocketed canvas jacket, and I packed a small bag with bread and cheese and an apple, and the pocketknife I always carried, my grandfather’s, for cutting the cheese and the apple. I collected my tackle box from where I kept it under the firewood shelter. A pale wash of light the colour of beach stones was just beginning to rise in the east as I turned from the koie and walked downhill to the lake trail. Inside the cover of trees, all was dark, and the trail was steep and rocky and crossed with roots, but I knew every rock and I knew every root. The darkness chittered and sawed with insects, and the deep echo and relay of dawn birdsong carved out the shape of the forest.

I found the key to our small boathouse in the place I’d left it the year before, the place it had been left every year, hidden in a tin box under a flat rock next to the boathouse door. Inside the boathouse, the sweet smell of petrol, of damp wood and old, hairy rope. Our small, square-nosed aluminium outboard sat snugly in its carpeted dolly, covered neatly in a thick, oil-stained canvas sheet. When I pulled the sheet away from the boat, releasing the smell of dust and winter, I upset a mouse that had built her nest in one of its folds, a mother capped with her row of pink and hairless, suckling pups. She sprung from the canvas and landed on the floor. A few of the pups still clung tenaciously to her but the others were left behind, a trail of beans. The mother ran out of the door and I stood there, thinking what to do. Thinking the pups might make good bait. A trout would go for them, no question. On one wall of the boathouse there was a long shelf where I stored tools, rope, fishing line, toy boats and buckets that belonged to you and your sister. I looked there for something I could use to collect the baby mice and settled for one of your wooden beach spades. I carefully scooped up the mice from the fold – there were seven of them – and checked the rest of the canvas for any more, and made a silent deal with mother mouse. I would lay the pups next to the boathouse door, on the flat key rock, and do the rest of the things I needed to do – launch the boat, load my rods and tackle box, see to the business of setting up the motor and servicing it if it needed to be serviced. If any of the pups had died by the time I was ready to go, I would take only those and leave the rest for her.

When I was ready, I found that two of the pups had died. I put those in my tackle box and left the others, wishing them luck.