large family is a treat for me-for such a short time. I take a kid or two with me-for the pleasure of driving the boat would be wasted on me. And I always share my room with one of the Keeling children-or, rather, the child is required to share his room with me. I fall asleep listening to the astonishing complexity of a child breathing in his sleep-of a loon crying out on the dark water, of the waves lapping the rocks onshore. And in the morning, long before the child stirs, I hear the gulls and I think about the tomato-red pickup cruising the coastal road between Hampton Beach and Rye Harbor; I hear the raucous, embattled crows, whose shrill disputations and harangues remind me that I have awakened in the real world-in the world I know-after all. For a moment, until the crows commence their harsh bickering, I can imagine that here, on Georgian Bay, I have found what was once called The New World-all over again, I have stumbled ashore on the undamaged land that Watahan-towet sold to my ancestor. For in Georgian Bay it is possible to imagine North America as it was-before the United States began the murderous deceptions and the unthinking carelessness that have all but spoiled it! Then I hear the crows. They bring me back to the world with their sounds of mayhem. I try not to think about Owen. I try to talk with Charlie Keeling about otters.
'They have a long, flattened tail-the tail lies horizontally on the water,' Charlie told me.
'I see,' I said. We were sitting on the rocks, on that part of the shoreline where one of the children said he'd seen a muskrat.
'It was an otter,' Charlie told the child.
'You didn't see it, Dad,' another of the children said. So Charlie and I decided to wait the creature out. A lot of freshwater clamshells marked the entrance to the animal's cave in the rocks onshore.
'An otter is a lot faster in the water than a muskrat,' Charlie told me.
'I see,' I said. We sat for an hour or two, and Charlie told me how the water level of Georgian Bay-and of all of Lake Huron-was changing; every year, it changes. He said he was worried that the acid rain-from the United States-was starting to kill the lake, beginning, as it always does (he said), with the bottom of the food chain.
'I see,' I said.
'The weeds have changed, the algae have changed, you can't catch the pike you used to-and one otter hasn't killed all these clams!' he said, indicating the shells.
'I see,' I said. Then, when Charlie was peeing-in 'the bush,' as Canadians say-an animal about the size of a small beagle, with a flattened sort of head and dark-brown fur, swam out from the shore.
'Charlie!' I called. The animal dove; it did not come up again. One of the children was instantly beside me.
'What was it?' the child asked.
'I don't know,' said.
'Did it have a flattened tail?' Charlie called from the bush.
'It had a flattened sort of head,' I said.
'That's a muskrat,' one of the children said.
'You didn't see it,' said his sister.
'What kind of tail did it have?' Charlie called.
'I didn't see its tail,' I admitted.
'It was that fast, huh?' Charlie asked me-emerging from the bush, zipping up his fly.
'It was pretty fast, I guess,' I said.
'It was an otter,' he said. (I am tempted to say it was a 'nonpracticing homosexual,' but I don't).
'See the duck?' a little girl asked me.
'That was no duck, you fool,' her brother said.
'You didn't see it-it dove!' the girl said.
'It was a female something,' someone else said.
'Oh, what do you know?' another child said.
'I didn't see anything,' I said.
'Look over there-just keep looking,' Charlie Keeling said to me. 'It has to come up for air,' he explained. 'It's probably a pintail or a mallard or a blue-winged teal-if it's a female,' he said. The pines smell wonderful, and the lichen on the rocks smell wonderful, and even the smell of fresh water is wonderful-or is it, really, the smell of some organic rot that is carrying on, just under the surface of all that water? I don't know what makes a lake smell that way, but it's wonderful. I could ask the Keeling family to tell me why the lake smells that way, but I prefer the silence-just the breeze that's almost constant in the pines, the lap of the waves, and the gulls' cries, and the shrieks of the terns.
