I take it from his hand. It’s no longer just a rough-cut piece of pine. It’s a terrapin. It looks so real that it seems ready to crawl down the bank into the water and swim away.

“How did you make this?” I ask.

“I didn’t,” my father says. “I just let it become what its spirit wanted it to be.”

He holds up the knife. “See how I hold this?” he says. “Don’t just wrap your fist around it as if it is an ax.”

“You were watching me?”

“For a little while. Now look. Hold it this way. It will feel right.”

I take the knife from him, adjust it in my hand. And I immediately do feel the correctness of it. It’s better balanced. It no longer feels awkward to me. I watched how he moved his hand as he used the knife. I think I can copy what he did.

I feel as if a bird is fluttering in my chest. My father has finally taught me something.

I pick up another of the pieces of wood I’d hacked at before. I place the blade of the knife against it.

“Turn it the other way for the first cut.”

I do so and a curl of wood slides off as I press the blade forward.

“Feel the grain of the pine,” my father says. “Let it guide you.”

“Ah.” It’s just as he says. I can feel the wood cooperating with me as I cut into it. I can already almost see the shape inside it. Another terrapin? No, a rabbit. I start to dig the blade in, eager to draw that animal out, but the blade drives in too deeply and sticks.

My father touches my wrist.

“Slowly,” he says. “Speed doesn’t always win. You know the story of Terrapin and Fox?”

I do, but I want to hear it from his lips.

“Can you tell it to me?”

My father leans back and removes his pipe from the pouch at his waist. He slowly fills it with tobacco, packing it into the bowl with his thumb. I keep carving as he does so, slowly, just as he said.

He pulls out flint and steel, strikes a spark into the pipe and inhales. The tobacco catches fire and glows as red as sunrise. Smoke comes out of the edges of his mouth.

“Ahhh,” he says. “It happened this way, so the old people say.”

“Fox was boasting. He was the fastest. No one could beat him in a race.

“‘I bet that I can beat you,’ Terrapin said.

“Fox laughed at that.

“Terrapin said it again. ‘I bet I can beat you. Let us race through the tall grass to the top of each of the seven hills. Whenever one of us reaches the top he will stand up and shout “HUT HUT.”’”