There came a spring when no women walked out from that place, seeking husbands among the other peoples. And those women of the other peoples, who thought to travel to the homes of the people who fished the lake, they arrived to find empty camps and cold hearths, with huts fallen in under the weight of the past winter snows. They found nets, rotting on the scaffolds where they’d been hung to dry. They found unused fish spears amidst the high heaps of fishbone and broken mussel shells. They found all this, but nowhere could they find the people who fished the lake.

One young woman looked out to the lake’s lone island, a hump of moss and rock on which the last tree had been cut down long ago. Taking a canoe, she set out for that island.

There, she found the people who fished the lake. Crow-picked and withered by the winter. Their skin was sun-blackened in the manner of fish strips hung over a smoking fire. The children that she found had been eaten, every bone picked clean, and the bones then boiled so they were now light as twigs.

And in the lake, no fish remained. No mussels and no freshwater crabs or lobsters. The waters were clear and empty. When she paddled back across it, she could look down to a lifeless bottom of grey silts.

Tradition was not a thing to be worshipped. Tradition was the last bastion of fools. Did the fisherfolk see their final fate? Did they comprehend their doom? Glyph believed the answer to both questions, among those who still worked the waters, was yes. But the elders on the shore droned on about vast harvests in times past, when the gutted fish hung in their tens of thousands and the smoke of the fires drifted low and thick on the water, hiding the lake’s distant shores. Hiding this island, even. And oh, how they all grew fat and lazy in the weeks that followed, their bellies soft and bulging. There are fish in the lake, the elders said. There have always been fish in the lake. There always will be fish in the lake.

And the witch flung fish spines on to level beds of ash, reading in their patterns the secret hiding places of those fish. But she had done the same the last season, and the one before that, and now no hiding places remained.

The elders stopped telling their stories. They sat silent, their bellies hollowing out, the bones of their wizened faces growing sharp and jutting. They spat out useless teeth. They bled at their fingertips, and made foul stench over the shit-pits. They grew ever weaker, and then slept, rushing into the distant dreams of the old days, from which they never returned.

One cannot eat tradition. One cannot grow fat on it.