I was thinking about breakfast as I cruised sideways up to the dock, about how I’d fry the fish plainly with butter, salt and pepper. I knew you and your mother and sister would have eaten already. You would have had fruit and oatmeal, something like that. I would be eating fish alone.

I noticed something small and yellow bobbing in the water a few metres from the dock. It was one of your toy boats. I stepped up on to the dock and tied my bow up by the painter, and used an oar from the boat to retrieve your toy. In the little yellow boat were the remaining mice I had left on the rock, inching together. I figured your mother must have brought you and your sister down to the water for a play after breakfast, and that you must have seen the pups and thought them great passengers. You would have been delighted. I felt a little guilty, now being responsible for the death of an entire mouse family. There was no way the mother would care for these pups now, so I put the boat aside thinking we could use them for our evening fishing trip.

I strung my catch through their cheeks on to a willow branch and carried them up to the house.

‘We’ll never eat all those,’ your mother said. She was peeling an apple at the table, the skin falling like ribbon in one, unbroken spiral.

‘We’ll eat the big one for lunch.’

‘And more for dinner?’

‘I can salt the others.’

She shrugged.

I put the fish in the sink and washed my hands. I wanted to show you and your sister how to gut and clean them, and looked in the drawer for my filleting knife. ‘Where are the children?’ I asked.

‘Tilda’s out back.’

‘Bear’s with her?’ I asked.

Your mother put the apple and knife on the table. The careful click of metal against wood, the knife being laid down. ‘Bear’s with you,’ she said.

Bear. It is a very long fall, from one life to the next. It’s hard to find the words. I want to communicate this to you, to make you understand how much. How hard. How. What I have learned is that the world can suddenly and with impunity open up and swallow a man whole. His stomach is the first to plummet, and there follows the rest of his body, his torso his arms his fingers.

The sound that came out of your mother when I pulled your cold body from under the dock was ancient. It was thousands of years old and it was the collective cry made by a history of mothers falling. Older than memory. If I made any noise, I wasn’t aware of it. Pink froth bubbled from your lips and when I wiped it away, more came. I stood in the lake, chest-deep, and continued to wipe the froth from your nose and mouth. I hoisted you out of the water and laid you on the dock and pulled myself up too, and there must have been a crooked nail jutting out from the wood because several hours later I discovered a gash in my shin that would have taken stitches had I cared to have it seen to. The scar, now white and shiny, is the speared and feathery shape of a willow leaf.