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he is talking to will still be there, tied to the other rail, their flanks white with snow, eyelashes and nose whiskers rimed with frost.
    If a horse has not been picked up by evening, his father will ask him to lead it home, for which he will receive some token of reward.
    He thinks of all the horses as his father’s horses. Everywhere in Ferryland he sees the prints of his father’s horseshoes, in the snow, in the gravel, in the mud, in the sand on the beach below the rocks when the tide is out. Prints that bear the shapes of hearts and the initials of his father’s name.
    He discovered just last week that there was another blacksmith in the world, a man from a place farther south along the shore called Cappahayden whose forge they passed above on the abandoned railway line while they searched for pieces of iron for his father’s rough stockpile. It looked so much like Johnston’s forge he thought theirs must somehow have been moved.
    As if to make up for not telling him about this second forge, his father was scornful of this other blacksmith’s work.
    Now he has to settle for believing that his father, though not the only blacksmith in the world, is by far the best. But what it was like to believe that his father was not
a
blacksmith but
the
blacksmith, he is unable to remember.
    In the past week he noticed for the first time, though they must have been there all along, hoof prints in the snow not shaped like his father’s horseshoes. He knew that horses from elsewhere had passed through, and with his boots he scuffed out the prints, erased them with the branches of spruce trees, swept the snow free of the evidence of this other blacksmith, this other, rival forge and horses whose names he did not know.
    After school, he looks out the window at his father in the forge, as he hammers away behind great plumes of steam on his iron anvil. The heat pours out through the open door, condenses on contact with the air.
    He goes out to the forge to watch his father work. His father’s right arm is much thicker than his left and out of all proportion to the rest of his body, as if it has been grafted on to him from some other man.
    His father’s hands move so fast his eyes can’t keep up with them. The heated metal is only usable for seconds, so it has to be bent and hammered with conviction. A misshapened piece cannot be salvaged. If you are lucky, you can make something else from it, minimize your loss and make a nail from what should have been a spike.
    Once the metal is removed from the furnace, his father works with the calm urgency of a surgeon bent on saving someone’s life. In the interval between the removal of the bit from the furnace and its immersion in the vat, he is oblivious to all else and something takes over that cannot be taught, something that if not for looking so simple would not work.
    He hefts the bits of molten metal with a long-handledclamp that is itself one of his creations, as are all the clamps and pliers that he uses.
    His father lets him douse a bit of molten metal in the water; a sudden hiss briefly brings the water to a boil, a cloud of steam rises from the vat, obscuring the instant when the light within goes out and the transformation from ember to object occurs.
    He raises a horseshoe nail still steaming from the vat, dripping water. His father takes the clamp from him and holds out the nail for him to touch. “Go on,” he says, “It won’t hurt.”
    Even though he trusts his father, he is surprised that it doesn’t hurt, surprised to find that what he dipped in the vat is no longer fire but something solid, fixed and purposeful. “What happens to it in the water?” he asks.
    â€œIt gets cold.”
    â€œIt doesn’t just get cold,” he says, convinced that his father is keeping something from him.
    â€œIt gets cold and it hardens,” his father says, but he smiles as if he is harbouring some secret.
    The