I pull the knife free and begin tossing cellophane and wasp paper onto the ruptured battery. The treated plastic bursts into flame. I add strips of bark. The curling embers tumble onto the duck feathers which, in turn, begin to smoke. Now it’s a mad rush to arrange twigs around the fragile flame. I make a teepee of sticks over the crackling, snapping tinder. I watch the edges blacken, then glow, then spit fire. Soon the chemical smell of the battery is overwhelmed by the burning resins of the wood.

Heat warms my face. Light expands outward—yellow and orange—to fill the entire shack. On the wall, blurred graffiti sharpens into focus.

DONT DRINK THE WATER

FISH HAVE SEX IN IT

And I start to laugh. At the lame joke. At this miserable shelter. At myself.

I am the caveman who first struck flint against a chunk of iron pyrite.

I have made fire.

10

Stratford wasn’t much of a town; it was more like the memory of a town. Once it might’ve been a vibrant farming community, a commercial center near the juncture of the Androscoggin and the Nezinscot rivers, but the old homesteads had been abandoned over decades and left to collapse under the weight of winter, and the new places were just big exurban houses set on three-acre lots. Most of the cornfields planted in the rich loam of the floodplain had transitioned to second-growth forest. Even the mill at the mouth of the Nezinscot was gone; the only vestige of the dam was a broken wall along the far bank of the stream: a moss-covered ruin of a time people didn’t seem to feel merited honoring.

That was my initial impression of the hamlet, at least.

Then I turned a corner, emerged from a stand of pines towering over the road, and there on the banks of the river rose a majestic farmhouse and barn so perfectly preserved I involuntarily lifted my foot from the gas. In an instant I had seemingly traveled a century back in time. The clapboards gleamed white in the sun, and the red trim shined as if freshly painted. The roof shingles, wet with snowmelt, icicles dripping from the gutters, might have been nailed on mere months earlier. Even the vase-shaped elms out front had somehow escaped the blight that had decimated their kind from Maine to the Mississippi.