Bright water bugs skimmed the quietly heaving surface of the lake. A muskrat with reeds in his mouth, his nose barely above the water, his tail trailing for a rudder, swam past the blind. Stud's live decoys anchored in the shallow water, preened, tipped for food, gossiped of the days when they themselves were free to skim southward ahead of the storms, bound for southern bayous.
Stud lay back looking up at the immensity of sky, never more deeply blue, he thought, than above Wisconsin in the autumn. He watched a flight of coots but let them pass; followed a wood duck with his gun but did not shoot. A hell-diver was playing among his decoys, and a couple of green-winged teal went by just out of gunshot, their wings whirring like toy windmills in a cyclone.
"Nothing but a ruddy can outfly them," Stud observed, "and the ruddies fly so darned fast it's a wonder they don't catch fire."
Toward sunset the flight began in earnest, and for about ten minutes Stud banged away like the Federal gunboats before Vicksburg. He shot his bag limit without crippling a bird, waded out in hip boots to bring them ashore, and went singing home, loaded down with rice-fattened mallards.
One morning he crossed the field of wheat stubble stretching yellow and frosty on either hand and went into the brown woods to choose his trees for winter cutting. It would be good to swing an axe again, to take big white chips out of a tree, to hear it crash to the ground and settle with a sigh. It would be good to get on one end of a cross-cut saw again, to make Gus cry out for mercy as they sliced through three feet of oak. His big muscles yearned for the sixteen pound mall he used for driving wedges, a sledge which made the average man pant like a one-cylinder gas engine, but which was a plaything for Stud.
At night he came in tired, soaked with sweat, but almost happy. Sarah noticed and was glad.
Fall, with the red of sumac and of hard maple, the leathery brown of hickory leaves, and the pale yellow of elm was upon the land. The leaves drifted in the brisk winds, and the wind sighed through the pines of the front yard. The marshes turned to brown and almost overnight the muskrat houses sprang up in rough brown piles along the deeper channels through the grass. The orchard was a wilderness of ripening, fragrant fruit, yellow, scarlet and deep red. The house was banked about with shocks of corn. Five cords of wood were already sawed and split, and more would come out of the woods as the days grew colder.
Gus came running in from the mail box one morning with a postcard from Early Ann. It had a picture of a huge hotel where Early Ann was staying and in a large, girlish hand:
"Having a good time. Wish you were here!"