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“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Make plenty baby what the hell.”

They heard Billy shoot.

“I wonder if he got one.”

“Don’t care,” said Trudy.

Billy came through the trees. He had the gun over his shoulder and he held a black squirrel by the front paws.

“Look,” he said. “Bigger than a cat. You all through?”

“Where’d you get him?”

“Over there. Saw him jump first.”

“Got to go home,” Nick said.

“No,” said Trudy.

“I got to get there for supper.”

“All right.”

“Want to hunt tomorrow?”

“All right.”

“You can have the squirrel.”

“All right.”

“Come out after supper?”

“No.”

“How you feel?”

“Good.”

“All right.”

“Give me kiss on the face,” said Trudy.

Now, as he rode along the highway in the car and it was getting dark, Nick was all through thinking about his father. The end of the day never made him think of him. The end of the day had always belonged to Nick alone and he never felt right unless he was alone at it. His father came back to him in the fall of the year, or in the early spring when there had been jacksnipe on the prairie, or when he saw shocks of corn, or when he saw a lake, or if he ever saw a horse and buggy, or when he saw, or heard, wild geese, or in a duck blind; remembering the time an eagle dropped through the whirling snow to strike a canvas-covered decoy, rising, his wings beating, the talons caught in the canvas. His father was with him, suddenly, in deserted orchards and in new-plowed fields, in thickets, on small hills, or when going through dead grass, whenever splitting wood or hauling water, by grist mills, cider mills and dams and always with open fires. The towns he lived in were not towns his father knew. After he was fifteen he had shared nothing with him.

His father had frost in his beard in cold weather and in hot weather he sweated very much. He liked to work in the sun on the farm because he did not have to and he loved manual work, which Nick did not. Nick loved his father but hated the smell of him and once when he had to wear a suit of his father’s underwear that had gotten too small for his father it made him feel sick and he took it off and put it under two stones in the creek and said that he had lost it. He had told his father how it was when his father had made him put it on but his father had said it was freshly washed. It had been, too. When Nick had asked him to smell of it his father sniffed at it indignantly and said that it was clean and fresh. When Nick came home from fishing without it and said he lost it he was whipped for lying.

Afterwards he had sat inside the woodshed with the door open, his shotgun loaded and cocked, looking across at his father sitting on the screen porch reading the paper, and thought, “I can blow him to hell. I can kill him.” Finally he felt his anger go out of him and he felt a little sick about it being the gun that his father had given him. Then he had gone to the Indian camp, walking there in the dark, to get rid of the smell. There was only one person in his family that he liked the smell of; one sister. All the others he avoided all contact with. That sense blunted when he started to smoke. It was a good thing. It was good for a bird dog but it did not help a man.

“What was it like, Papa, when you were a little boy and used to hunt with the Indians?”

“I don’t know,” Nick was startled. He had not even noticed the boy was awake. He looked at him sitting beside him on the seat. He had felt quite alone but this boy had been with him. He wondered for how long. “We used to go all day to hunt black squirrels,” he said. “My father only gave me three shells a day because he said that would teach me to hunt and it wasn’t good for a boy to go banging around. I went with a boy named Billy Gilby and his sister Trudy. We used to go out nearly every day all one summer.”

“Those are funny names for Indians.”

“Yes, aren’t they,” Nick said.

“But tell me what they were like.”

“They were Ojibways,” Nick said. “And they were very nice.”

“But what were they like to be with?”

“It’s hard to say,” Nick Adams said. Could you