Yet it was, it had become vital in some way he didn’t quite understand. And so he kept at it, carving on the board when he had time, waiting for the current to change, sitting by a smoke fire, even drifting along in the canoe.

At the same time he had an active dream life. He had always dreamed a great deal, mostly scrambled thoughts, dreams that made no particular sense. But now and then, ever since he was a small child on the docks and on the ships, he would have the dream about his mother.

She had passed when he was born and so in some way he did not remember, nor think, that he had seen her. But he knew her, knew of her, had been part of her and so in some way could know of her, feel her, know that part of himself was from her, was in him.

Except in the dreams he could never see her face. She would be talking to other people – although he couldn’t hear her voice except for a muffled sound – but always her back would be to Leif.

The dreams felt real. So real that when he had them he would awaken thinking he was with her and would somehow be able, awake, to move to see her face and would nearly stand up looking for her.

He thought she would be smiling.

He did not understand why he felt that – felt her smiling – but would come out of each dream thinking if he had seen her, had been able to speak to her, she would be smiling.

She would smile at him. For him. It would be a gentle smile. A warm smile with kind eyes.

And this is how the story board happened, how it became not a story board but a dream board.

Because, he reasoned, if the dreams could seem so real, make him feel his mother was real, then they were indeed real. There was a dream world, had to be a dream world. And if those dreams from the dream world could come into his waking life, even for a moment when he first awakened, it stood to reason . . .

Stood to reason . . .

Stood to reason that he could take his awakened life, his open life, back into the dream world. If it could go one way, he thought, it could go another.

These are thoughts he had when he first started going north, what he came to call The Long Paddle and for a time – having been delirious and hallucinating when he was sick – for a time he thought he was sinking back into that state, thinking that way about the dream world.

But then he thought when somebody was delirious, seeing things, imagining things, like dock people who had pickled their brains on ale and mead, they wouldn’t know it.