“This cake, by the way, is real chocolate,” she assured us. “I’m sick of trying to force carob on you, and all of you spitting it out behind my back.” Yet we saw that our health-conscious hostess was still serving the dreaded organic fig bars from the health food store in town. “Colon blasters,” we called them. The baby’s father had said that Colin Blaster sounded like the name of an English soccer coach.

“Tony’s not back yet?” one of his friends asked.

“And he made Bruce go with him,” Bruce’s wife said. “Tony probably told him there was something in town he had to show him, and he took Bruce to town and the thing he had to show him was a stop sign.”

We ate deviled eggs while we waited for Tony and Bruce to return with the steaks. On the drive up, I told a friend, we’d seen blueberries wild by the side of the road and birch bark peeling from the trunks of trees with towering crowns, but so far we’d seen no moose.

“If you come out with us in the canoe tomorrow, you’ll see plenty of moose,” she said. She described the stretch of river we would travel and the numbers of moose we would see. “But no males with antlers. They’re shy. You have to wait. You see them come out to look for females in the fall.”

The children called for us to watch them play with eggs. It was the game wherein you toss a raw egg gently to your partner a few feet away. Your partner tosses it back, and you widen the gap between you. The toss and retreat is repeated until all but one of the pairs has broken their eggs.

We watched, sipping drinks, until the baby’s father called, “Eyes right!” and appeared in the yard to the right of the house carrying a baseball bat. The children screamed with laughter as they took turns pitching raw eggs.

“Jackpot!” they screamed, as the baby’s father connected, splattering them all, including the neighbor’s dog who had stopped by to cruise the grill.

Mr. Howell, emboldened by the display, retrieved from his car a sack of sheathed hunting knives. But other of the parents blew the whistle on this—high-stakes pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey not the same as batting eggs—and we strained to hear his gnarly utterances as he returned the knives to his car.

“Deadlines,” one of the birthday girls announced, excusing herself from the games. “I have deadlines,” she said soberly, inexplicably adjusting a gorilla mask over her face.

On the porch, in a high chair, the baby sent a bowl of Cheerios sailing off the tray.

“Dinner is shoved,” said his mother, kneeling to wipe up the mess. She returned from the kitchen with a jar of baby food and a clean spoon. “What’s he eating now?” asked the baby’s father. He picked up the jar and mimed alarm as he “read” the label: “Deadly poison?!” This made the children spit potato salad till their parents said get a grip.