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the blade is water. He stalks coons with a single-shot twenty-two, a gun he has shaped by use. By the time Wes is fifteen, the gun is tame as a cherry stick in his hands.
    Jake’s life is a map of the seasons. A map of his brother, working eels off the stern of the skiff.
    In summer, they will go at night. Flat calm, no breeze. They leave from the bridge an hour before slack tide and head north, the lamp hitched to the stern, to light the shadows of the eels as they snake through the bottom mud.
    Wes sets the boat on a dead drift and climbs onto the edge of the hull. Jake watches as his brother stands motionless, the balance of cunning, with the eel spear poised and so still, it might be an extension of his arm. Wes stalks the eels as they spook along the bottom. He waits until he sights a pack; then he hurls the spear down, pulls it up, and flicks them, writhing, onto the floor of the boat. “Pail them,” he says to his brother and, without turning, he thrusts the spear back down into the mud.
    Jake gathers the eels into the tin bucket as Wes works them off the bottom until they are gone, until that ground on the flat is empty. Then Wes rows the skiff farther north upriver. The oars slip through his big hands.
    Year-round, they jab eels. Even in dead winter, they work them, walking up the frozen channel toward Ship Rock. They rarely speak and there is no sound but the ice cracking under their feet.
    Jake knows the shapes that ice can take. He knows that ice grows the way a man does, compressed under its own mass. When it is young, it is supple and translucent, barely skin on the river’s surface. It shapes itself between the wind and underwater. By January, the ice has thickened along the zone of salt marsh cordgrass. White at the river edge, it holds whorls of currents frozen the way a red oak holds memory in the layers of its bark. By midwinter, the deepest channel is eighteen inches thick, the surface ridged like wind-cut sand through flat planes in the dunes.
    Midwinter ice can hold the blood of fish, a molted feather; it can hold their weight. Its underside has acquired a hardness that is not affected by the pulse of water moving three feet underneath. It will gather a density with shadows and once in a while trap a small animal in its freezing. He has dreamed himself into the migration corridors of shorebirds. Terns. Plovers. The snow geese that mate on ice meadows in the flooded basins of the Arctic, where they molt their whiteness all at once,breed in a mass of shed feathers, feed and teach their young to fly. He has eaten the pages of the books he reads; passages about northern twilight where the moon does not set for days; where light deflects off sea ice and a breeze can tip layers of air to serrate the landscape into mountains, islands, where there is nothing but barren sky. He has dreamed himself into the belly of a whiteout because he wants to taste what it is to live with no shadow, no spatial depth, no horizon. He knows that ice can grow in years the way a man grows, a creature with blue rivers wrapped through its surface and a still heart. It can travel in packs or alone, shore-fast or wandering, with leads that split black like veins through a leaf.
    And so he thinks as he walks, five yards behind his brother, Wes, up the frozen channel of the east branch of the Noquochoke River, the ice as alive to him as the barrier dunes that transgress each year, their sea edges torn into abrupt cliffs by the winter moon storms, their backsides sloped. Wind-smooth. Female.
    Wes stops suddenly, thirty yards before Ship Rock.
    “Here,” he says, marking the ice with the spear. “They’re here.” Even through a four-foot freeze, he can smell the eels. In the winter, they drift, dull and familial, braided into one another through the soft bottom mud. Wes marks a circle of a dozen spots on the ice around the eel ground, and they chop the holes, working clockwise and counterclockwise until they meet. Then Jake waits,