shoots emerging from them and on those shoots were magical new willow leaves. Each year the muddle of fallen branches and trunks seemed to get more complicated. They sank deeper into the bog, nestling in each other’s arms. This is where I came to catch tadpoles and frogs, painted turtles and water snakes.
Uncle Reub sometimes told me stories when we were alone together but today we walked in a mutual solitude, across the dew-damp lawn, up to the gravelled road that ran behind the cottages. My bare feet were already tough. I never wore shoes when we lived at the cottage, except when my family took me to a restaurant or to a movie in town. Shoes were for city boys. Even on the hottest days, when tar melted on the road to Bridgenorth, I only ever experienced a satisfying warmth in my bare feet that made me feel I was connected to the land, that I understood it, that it was part of me.
We walked up the point, past silent cottages where not a single curtain was yet drawn. In the fluorescent yellow light of early morning, all the cottages looked and smelled as if they were freshly painted. They probably were. I was only a boy but I understood how proud the cottagers were of their summer homes. Each garden was perfection, lush green lawns, pink granite stone and concrete pathways from the gravel road to the cottage door, petunias and begonias in a constellation of marshalled perfection. It was as if the cottagers challenged the wild around them, that they vied with each other to be the best at taming the surrounding forest.
Passing Dr Sweeting’s clapboard grey cottage, a dog barked and a wiry brown mink darted from the stand of white pines the cottage nestled in and across our path. I was glad Angus wasn’t with us. He would have killed that mink. We walked on in a complicated silence until the road and the cottages ended and the woods began.
‘Is this your secret place?’ Uncle Reub asked.
I thought that was a childish question but I didn’t say so. It wasn’t a secret. Everyone knew where the living woods and the dead forest were.
‘It’s the woods,’ I answered.
We followed a track that all the children on Long Point and Cedar Bay had made, through the maple and birch trees, down to the lake. ‘That’s frog bog,’ I told my uncle, pointing to the shambles of tree trunks, branches, weeds and reeds that lined that deep and hidden bay on Lake Chemong.
Uncle walked to the edge of a bank of sweetgrass and looked out over the stillness. I sometimes did that too. In its quiet and calm that scene, that view of the rushes and reeds and the forested far shore of the lake and the turquoise sky, that picture, even to me as a young boy, was perfection. I looked at my uncle standing there, as still as a totem pole, and for a moment I thought he might suddenly march forward right through that sweetgrass into the sparkling still water – without taking off his shoes or rolling up his trousers – that he might forge a path through the pickerel weed and water lilies then let them close together behind him. But he didn’t.
‘I didn’t know there was sweetgrass here. I bet muskrats think this is paradise.’
‘I’m going over there,’ I replied.
I walked along the straight trunk of one fallen cedar tree and then another out into the marsh, to an open pool of clear water. Along the southerly shoreline of the bog, bulrushes were all standing to attention, their tops like thin little bearskin hats on skinny green soldiers. The water lilies were all shut tight. They wouldn’t expose their hearts until the sun was much higher. Later in the summer, if all of July was hot and humid, the water in the pond would get covered in bright green algae but now, in early July, it was crystal clear and you could see absolutely everything in it. Streamlined silvery minnows were easy to see but if you looked harder there were tiny, long slender dragonfly larvae that looked like they’d got baby leaves stuck to their tails. At the edges of the pond that’s where the tadpoles were.
Uncle walked slowly along the same fallen tree trunks. I thought he looked quite ridiculous, with his arms straight out to keep his balance, like Christ on the cross, I thought. He reached where I was and joined me where I was kneeling on a stump looking into the water.
‘Is it interesting, what you’re looking at?’
I knew my uncle couldn’t see what I saw. Grace and Perry, Steve’s younger brother, could but grown-ups couldn’t. Giant water bugs were stabbing the tadpoles to death. It was scary to watch and I didn’t like it but also I did like it and always watched.
All that my uncle saw were iridescent green dragonflies, like phosphorescent toothpicks, hovering over the pond, and on the water, long-legged water striders skating gracefully over the surface, never sinking.
‘Are you wondering how those insects can walk on water?’ my uncle asked.
Other grown-ups never knew what was in my mind but my uncle sometimes did. I really wanted to know why the water bugs were so mean to the tadpoles but I’d also wondered why water striders didn’t sink when they stopped skating.
‘They’re lighter than water so they don’t sink.’
I thought for a moment.
‘But ducks are heavy and they don’t sink either,’ I said, not so much as a question but as a fact.
‘You’re right. Good thinking. What ducks do is they trap air in their feathers. The trapped air makes a duck lighter than water and that’s why a duck doesn’t sink. I really should have explained it better. Water striders do the same as ducks. They trap air on their legs just like ducks trap air in their feathers. Shall we catch one and see?’
On his knees on the log, balancing himself with one hand, Uncle Reub reached down to the water, trying to grab a water strider and show me its legs. As he leaned out over the pond his glasses case, in the breast pocket of his pyjama top, slid out and plopped into the water. It sank almost immediately, just like the Titanic I thought, raising its stern to the sky before dying. Uncle pulled himself upright and rested on his knees. It was easy to see his glasses case, shiny and silvery, nestling in the black leaves and guck a few feet away at the bottom of frog bog, but I could see the concerned look in my uncle’s eyes.
‘I’ve got my shoes on. Can you go in and get it?’ Uncle asked.
‘No,’ I replied, not because I couldn’t but because I didn’t want to get into frog bog.
Uncle Reub paused for a while then said, ‘OK then. Let’s see if we can fish it out.’
He walked back along the logs, this time faster, with his arms more like you’d expect from a grown-up, over to a willow tree and took a knife from his pocket. Grown-up men all carried penknives in their pockets. My father’s penknife, in his pants’ pocket whether he was in trousers in the city or shorts at the cottage, was made from brown tortoiseshell and had two blades that my dad kept razor sharp with a small pumice stone. Black electrical tape kept the tortoiseshell from falling off. My uncle’s knife was completely different. It was a small single blade, thicker than a penknife, three inches long with a horn handle. The blade was in a soft tan leather sheath covered in white and red and black beads. I thought it was the most wonderful knife I had seen.
With that knife, Uncle Reub cut two green branches from near the trunk of a willow so that both were the same thickness and each had two fingers at their ends.
‘When I practised general medicine in Mandan, North Dakota, a good friend of mine showed me how to do this. What we’ll do is get the ends of these branches under each side of the case. They’ll act like two forks and we’ll slowly lift it up and out of the water.’
Uncle and I walked back along
