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These tidal adventures filled my early teens. In the spring, I pursued spawning herring, shooting like silver darts into streams above the swamps and into the vast tracts of the pinelands. The cedar-stained creek water swarmed with these chromium fish. Once, camped on a swamp road in the back of a friend’s woodpaneled station wagon and waiting for the sun to rise on the opening of the hunting season, I listened all through the night to the sound of lapping waves and the crank and squawk of migrating geese in the moonlit sky. In the morning, under lowering clouds, we watched rafts of ducks—thousands of ducks—skim the blue-gray chop. Some of them dropped into our wood decoys with outspread wings and lowered yellow legs. The pursuit that brought me deepest into the marshes, and closest to their secrets, was fur trapping.

I was a trapper as a boy. I caught muskrats and raccoons, skinned them in the backyard, stretched and dried their pelts on wood forms and sent the pelts off to fur buyers in New York. Today, this seems wildly anachronistic, but there was a market for wild fur in those days, and it wasn’t so unusual for country boys forty or fifty years ago to earn money with a trapline. It was like having a paper route, except you got up earlier and carried a smallcaliber rifle or shotgun (to shoot the occasional duck on the way home). A muskrat fetched two dollars, a raccoon three and a half. A wild mink went for upward of twenty dollars. But it wasn’t the money that took me into the swamps. It was the swamps themselves that fascinated me. In late December, January and February, I got up early in the morning to make my rounds, at five a.m., well before the school bus made its grinding way down our road to pick up the children in our far-flung part of town. When I stepped from my bed, the house was quiet except for the lungs of the forced-air furnace, which blew a pleasant warmth through the grates in the floor. The windows were dark against the night. Paul was asleep in his room, my mother in hers, though I sometimes heard her stir. My mother talked in her sleep, though I could never make out what she said. If Johnny was with us, he would be with my mother or asleep on the couch, fully dressed and without a blanket. My mother was a light sleeper and aware, in a distant way, of my movement through the house. I felt it even though she didn’t call out my name. The few minutes I spent getting dressed and preparing to go out into the cold and dark were a peaceful time, and I savored the anticipation of walking the route of my trapline.

I pulled on my hip waders, which I kept near the side door of the house along with my single-shot 12-gauge shotgun and a trapper’s basket; I dressed in dungarees, flannel shirt, wool coat and an insulated hunter’s cap with flaps that could pull down over my ears on bitter mornings; and I set off on my trapline route. I especially liked that first gulp of icy air when I stepped outside the door and felt the cold night almost immediately creep down around my neck and catch the edges of my ears. I trapped in two big marshes, one to the north on the way to Green Island, which was about a half mile from our house over two dirt roads and a patch of pine and scrub oak, and another to the south, in the direction of Snug Harbor, which took me through a more settled part of our borough.

Both marshes were a few hundred acres of muck, marsh grass, tall reeds and tidal ponds, which were fed by cedar-stained freshwater streams that came out of the piney woods. In those days, our little borough, which was called Silverton, renamed by developers from Mosquito Cove, still had unbroken wedges of scrub pine, oak and holly forest, made impenetrable in some places by swelling waves of briar patches, sometimes much taller than a man. Usually, the marsh would be black as ink when I reached it, but I knew its contours, paths and streams, which unfolded in the funnel of the flashlight I carried, and often