On my last full day, the sixth day, the old man took me out fishing on the Rainy River. The afternoon was
sunny and cold. A stiff breeze came in from the north, and I remember how the little fourteen-foot boat
made sharp rocking motions as we pushed off from the dock. The current was fast. All around us, I
remember, there was a vastness to the world, an unpeopled rawnes, just the trees and the sky and the
water reaching out toward nowhere. The air had the brittle scent of October,