“It’s a crazy idea, Art. . . . No, seriously. I can’t object more strenuously.”

Burl is on the phone. Early last November. Nate seldom hears his father raise his voice, although if anybody could wear his patience thin, Art Hoebeek was the one to do it.

Nate waits, watches his father rub his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. He and Art back-and-forth a bit and finally the call ends. “What was that about?” says Nate.

Burl takes a deep breath. “Art’s got another harebrained scheme,” he says. “He’s found this secondhand propane refrigerator in ‘mint condition’ and he wants to bring it up to the camp. Now. Says he’s going to spring Dodge and Trick from school to help out.”

For a fraction of a moment Nate is elated. The Hoebeeks live in Indiana; he gets to see Dodge all summer but seldom after Canadian Thanksgiving. But the consternation on his father’s face brings him up short.

“So what’s harebrained about it, exactly?” he asks. His father gives him the look that means work it out. “Okay,” says Nate. “So if they bring it up on the Budd car, they’d have to truck it in from the track on the Mule.” His father raises an eyebrow. Nate thinks. “Is the Mule’s cargo bay big enough to handle a fridge?” His father nods. “But it’s a propane fridge, right? So basically, you try to cart it in on the trail, it’s going to be scrap metal.”

His father holds up a hand. “The fridge is sturdy enough. The big problem is the risk of shaking loose scale in the cooling tubes —”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Nate, seeing a TED Talk coming on. “Bottom line, the trail is murder if you could even use it now. I mean, if there’s snow up there . . .” Another nod. Keep going. Nate clenches his teeth and resists growling. His friends’ fathers tend to have all the answers right on the tips of their tongues. Nate knows that his own father has the answers, all right, but he keeps his tongue inside his head. Work it out, Nate. “Okay, so . . . Oh!” He slaps himself on the forehead. “He’s not going to come in from Mile Thirty-Nine; he’s planning to get off at Southend and bring it up the lake?”

“Got it,” said Burl.

“Won’t it be frozen by now?”

His father shrugs. “It’s been a warm fall. I doubt it. But the water will be pretty darn close to freezing, in any case.”

Nate thinks about it. He’d been up to the lake at least once in every month of the year. You didn’t go in the water after September if you could avoid it, and you got out quick if you did. “So why doesn’t he just wait for it to freeze solid and then we could drag it in with the snowmobile?”

“Bingo,” says Burl. “That’s what I tried to tell him. But he’s dying to get up there again before winter sets in, because of having to miss close-up.”

That was the usual way of things. The two families met at Ghost Lake the second weekend of October and had one last big meal together, then closed the two camps up good and tight: boarded up the windows, shut down the pumps, put away the boats, et cetera. But this year had been different. Mr. H. was a big-deal pharmaceutical salesman, and a medical conference had come up, something he couldn’t miss. The Crows had offered to close up the Hoebeek camp for them, but Art had declined the offer because he was going to get there “by hook or by crook.” That’s what he’d said. Which, at the time, had not seemed such a big deal. If they were just going to come up on the Budd car to Mile 39, where the trail led into the north end of the lake, it would be fine. It might be wet, it might be cold; there might even be snow but not too much, not this November. In fact, the idea had sounded great to Nate back then. He’d planned to go along.

But the fridge changed all that.

So the plan, it turned out, was to get off the train at Southend, which was more than twenty kilometers down the lake.

“What’s that in real people’s language?” Art Hoebeek would have said.

“About twelve and a half miles, Art,” Burl would have answered him, knowing full well that Art knew the distance to the end of the lake. “You’re going to have to take it real slow and stay as close to the shore as you can, just in case. With a weight like that and the three of you on board . . . it could be dark before you make it in. I don’t like it one bit.”

But Mr. H. was determined. And Burl had backed down.

“He’s a grown man,” Burl had said to Nate. “What are you going to do?”

A grown man but an idiot as far as Nate was concerned.

Later, when the whole story came out, or as much as anybody would ever be able to piece together, they learned Art had asked Likely La Cloche if he and the boys could borrow his sixteen-foot aluminum utility boat. Likely was an old-timer, a Ghost Lake icon. Nate didn’t know his real name. Burl told him that he was called Likely because if you thought you’d discovered something new about the lake, it was likely that old Monsieur La Cloche already knew about it. He lived at Sanctuary Cove down near Southend most of the fall. There was a whole busy little community of folks at Sanctuary, thirty or forty camps’ worth, that Nate hardly ever saw, except the odd boatload of anglers who came up the lake to troll for trout between the islands. Likely had said, sure, Art could borrow the boat. What Art had failed to tell him was that he was bringing a fridge.

“Why would Likely let them do that?” Burl had said when he first heard about the accident. Turned out Likely reneged on his offer when he saw the fridge. Said they could store it with him in his shed and take it in next summer. “So what happened?”

Burl’s forehead had crinkled up and he’d looked away.

“Dad?”

“I guess Art must have turned on his salesman’s charm.” Nate had nodded. “You know what he’s like. The weather’s calm, the lake placid, the sun bright in a cloudless sky. A beautiful late fall day. What could happen?”

They had found the boat overturned in Dead Horse Bay.

They had found Art Hoebeek and Trick, Dodge’s twelve-year-old brother, floating in their PFDs just the way they ought to be, face up, arms out. No chance of drowning in a personal flotation device. They hadn’t drowned; they were dead from hypothermia.

The search party never did find Dodge.

Burl Crow had gone up that awful November day they got the news, but he wouldn’t let Nate come along. They had fought about it. Or, at least, Nate fought, and Burl just waited him out. There had hardly ever been a time he’d said no to his son about going with him to the lake. Just once before, really, a week earlier when Dodge had asked him to come along on the fridge expedition. Nate had stomped to his room and slammed the door. That was a first, too.

The search party had been cut short by the first big snowstorm of the season. It had raged for three days. By the end of it, the snow was thick on the ground and the ice was forming on Ghost Lake. There was no other way into Dead Horse Bay. There was deep forest right down to the waterfront. Another search party had gone up anyway, tried to hack their way in from the trail at the dam, but with no luck.

Dodge was still out there.

A year ago, eight months before the fatal trip, the three boys — Nate, Dodge, and Paul — had gone up to Ghost Lake with Burl over March break. It was a test. If the boys passed, they could go up alone next March. It was next March now. But it was going to be just Nate and his friend from school, Paul Jokinen, heading up on Thursday.

“You sure about this?”

“Yeah.”

His father nodded. Waited.

“What?”

“Have you got some idea about looking for him?”

Nate’s eyes skittered away from his father’s. But you didn’t lie to Burl. There was no point in it. So he nodded.

“The lake’s frozen solid, Nate. Probably ten inches thick. There’ll be a ton of snow.”

“I know.”

“Are you planning anything foolish?” Burl asked.

Nate shook his head, hurt by the implications. “I’m not stupid,” he said. His father nodded. Waited. “Maybe we’ll poke around along the shoreline of Dead Horse. Check out the east side of Picnic Island. You know, in case the current shifted . . .” It wasn’t really a plan; it was more like a deep-seated need to do something — anything.

Then his father laid his strong hands on Nate’s shoulders. “There’s nothing you could have done, Nathaniel.”

Nate looked into his father’s eyes. “He pleaded with me to go.”

“I know.”

“If I’d been there, Dad, I wouldn’t have let it happen. I’d have stopped them.”

“I believe that. Or I believe you’d have tried. But Art Hoebeek . . . he was —”

“An idiot?”

His father frowned. “I was going to say a difficult man to convince when he had an idea in his head.”

“I’ll never forgive him,” said Nate. Then he bowed his head. He’d never forgive himself either, and his father knew it. They’d been all over that.

His father didn’t pass judgment. His mind was focused on Nate and Paul’s upcoming trip. “Nate?” He looked up. “You die out there, son, I’m going to get real angry.” Nate smiled, but his father didn’t smile back. “You have no idea,” he said, shaking his head. “Hell, I’ll be angry with you for the rest of your death.”

Gallows humor. Nate laughed, but it caught in his throat. His father wasn’t being funny. And the line stayed with Nate. I’ll be angry with you for the rest of your death. That was not a fate he wanted to face.

Burl Crow was a teacher by avocation and training, a guidance counselor by profession. But in the bush, he didn’t teach so much as showed and waited. He had expected his three students to ask before they screwed up, rather than warning them beforehand. Think first, that was the crucial thing in the wild.

They had gone over the Ski-Doo, troubleshooting. It was an old model Burl kept in excellent condition. It wasn’t enough to be able to operate it, as far as he was concerned; you had to treat it tenderly and know what to do when it stopped dead in the middle of nowhere. The Hoebeeks had a new-model Polaris, less likely to cause any trouble. Dodge knew the Polaris just fine, so Burl made him conduct a workshop on its finer points. Dodge hadn’t much liked being schooled, but he loved being the center of attention. He had hammed it up, big time. But he knew his stuff and that was all Burl wanted to know.

Thorough. Nate’s father was all about thorough.

The three boys had learned how to safely climb on the roof and shovel off the solar panels so they could have enough electricity for lights, the radio, charging their cell phones. Not that there was any reception, not so much as a single bar — not at water level, anyway. But up behind the camp, high on a cliff overlooking the lake, there was an abandoned shack that a miner had built ages ago. His name was Japheth Starlight, and the Crow camp stood on the old Starlight claim. Nate had never met Starlight. He was long since dead and gone. But his tiny, perfect shack was still there and Burl had kept it shipshape, repairing major bear damage on one occasion, propping it up when it started to list with age. From up there, you could get reception.

“First sign of any trouble . . .”

Dodge had pulled out his cell phone. “Up the hill,” he had said. They all knew the drill. There had been blazes carved on the trees to show the path up to the shack. Burl had the trio find their way up by themselves while he waited below. They tied plastic orange ribbons on branches where the old tree blazes had grown dull with age. Nate had texted his mother from the cliff top. “The eagle has landed,” he wrote. He’d watched for almost a minute until the “delivered” notification popped up. He’d wanted to wait for her to reply but Dodge was impatient, so they’d made their way down the hill back to the camp with Dodge out front leading the way. Nate could still see — would always see — Dodge tramping down that hill through the bush, pulling ahead of him and Paul. Because that’s what Dodge did. He was always on to the next thing, one step ahead of you. Now, in Nate’s imagining, Dodge pulled farther and farther ahead until he disappeared into the bush. Just walked right into the next world, wherever that was.

He would never be dead to Nate until there was a body. Dodge was up there somewhere. And if anyone could find him, it would be Nate.