“You’ve got to let yourself go, Danny,” Ketchum was saying. “Be more daring.”

“I’m a beer drinker, Ketchum-no red wine for me,” Danny told him.

“For Christ’s sake-I mean, as a writer!” Ketchum said.

“As a writer?” Danny asked.

“You keep skirting the darker subjects,” Ketchum told him. “You have a way of writing around the periphery of things.”

“I do?” Danny asked him.

“You do. You seem to be dodging the squeamish stuff,” Ketchum told him. “You’ve got to stick your nose in the worst of it, and imagine everything, Danny.”

At the time, this struck Danny as less in the spirit of literary criticism than it appeared to be a direct invitation to spend the night in the cab of Ketchum’s truck-or in the smokehouse with the skinned, smoking bear.

“What about the bear?” Danny suddenly asked the woodsman. “Won’t the fire in the smokehouse go out?”

“Oh, the bear will have smoked enough for now-I can start the fire up again tomorrow,” Ketchum told him impatiently. “There’s one more thing-well, okay, two things. First of all, you don’t seem to be a city person-not to me. I think the country is the place for you-I mean, as a writer,” Ketchum said more softly. “Secondly-though I would suggest this is more important-you have no need for the fucking nom de plume anymore. As I’m aware that the very idea of a pen name once affected you adversely, I think it’s time for you to take your own name back. Daniel always was your dad’s name for you, and I’ve heard you say, Danny, that Daniel Baciagalupo is a fine name for a writer. You’ll still be Danny to me, of course, but-once again, as a writer-you should be Daniel Baciagalupo.”

“I can guess what my publishers will say to that idea,” Danny said to the logger. “They’ll remind me that Danny Angel is a famous, best-selling author. They’re going to tell me, Ketchum, that an unknown writer named Daniel Baciagalupo won’t sell as many books.”

“I’m just telling you what’s good for you-as a writer,” Ketchum told him almost offhandedly.

“Let me see if I understand you correctly,” the writer said a little peevishly. “I should rename myself Daniel Baciagalupo; I should live in the country, in Canada; I should let myself go-that is, be more daring as a writer,” Danny dutifully recited.

“I think you’re catching on,” the logger told him.

“Is there anything else you would recommend?” Danny asked him.

“We’ve been an empire in decline since I can remember,” Ketchum said bluntly; he wasn’t kidding. “We are a lost nation, Danny. Stop farting around.”

The two men stared at each other, poised over what they were drinking-Danny forcing himself both to keep drinking and to continue looking at Ketchum. Danny loved the old logger so much, but Ketchum had hurt him; Ketchum was good at it. “Well, I look forward to seeing you for Christmas,” Danny said. “It won’t be that long now.”

“Maybe not this year,” Ketchum told him.

The writer knew he was risking a blow from Ketchum’s powerful right hand, but Danny reached for the logger’s left hand and held it against the table. “Don’t-just don’t,” Danny said to him, but Ketchum easily pulled his hand away.

“Just do your job, Danny,” the old river driver told him. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine.”

VI. POINTE AU BARIL STATION, ONTARIO, 2005

CHAPTER 16. LOST NATION

FOR THREE WINTERS NOW, THE WRITER DANIEL BACIAGALUPO-who’d reclaimed the name that the cook and Cousin Rosie had given him-spent the months of January and February, and the first two weeks of March, on Turner Island in Georgian Bay. The island still belonged to Charlotte, the onetime love of Danny’s life, but Charlotte and her family had no desire to set foot on the frozen lake or those frigid, snow-covered rocks in the heart of the winter, when they lived happily in Los Angeles.

Danny had actually improved the place-not only according to Ketchum’s standards. Andy Grant had taped heated electrical cables to the waste lines that were used during the winter. These same pipes were also wrapped with a foil insulation and covered with an ice-and-water membrane. Danny could have had running hot water by applying similar heat-line and insulation methods to the water pipe running to the bay, but Andy would have had to do a lot more work-not to mention move the hot-water heater inside the main cabin to ensure that those pipes wouldn’t freeze. It was simpler for Danny to chop a hole in the ice on the lake, and carry the water from the bay in a bucket. This amounted to a lot of chopping and carrying, but-as Ketchum would have said-so what?

There wasn’t just the ice-chopping; there was a lot of wood to cut. (Ketchum’s chainsaw was a big help.) In the ten weeks Danny was there, he cut all the wood he would need the following winter-with enough left over for Charlotte and her family to use on those summer nights when it was cool enough to have a fire.

In addition to the woodstove in the main cabin, there was a propane fireplace in the bedroom and an electric heater in the bathroom-and Andy Grant had put fiberglass insulation between the floor joists. The main cabin was now sustainable for winter weather, and there was a second woodstove in Danny’s writing shack, though there was no insulation there; the little building was small enough to not need it, and Danny banked the perimeter walls of the shack with snow, which kept the wind from blowing under the building and cooling off the floor.

Every night, Danny also banked the fire in the woodstove in the main cabin; when the writer awoke in the morning, it was only necessary for him to put more wood on the fire and fully open the flue. Then he tramped outside to his writing shack and started a fire in the woodstove there. Overnight, the only concession he made to his IBM typewriter was that he covered it with an electric blanket-otherwise, the grease would freeze. While the writing shack was warming up, Danny chopped a hole in the ice on the lake and brought a couple of buckets of water up to the main cabin. One bucket of water was usually sufficient to flush the toilet for the day; a second sufficed for what cooking Danny did, and for washing the dishes. Charlotte ’s oversize bathtub easily held four or five buckets, which included the two that had to be heated (near to boiling) on the stove, but Danny didn’t take a bath until the end of the day.

He went to work every morning in his writing shack, inspired by the view of that wind-bent pine-the little tree that had once reminded both the writer and Ketchum of the cook. Danny wrote every day until early afternoon; he wanted to have a few remaining hours of daylight in which to do his chores. There was always more wood to cut, and almost every day Danny went to town. If there wasn’t much garbage to haul off the island, and he needed only a few groceries, Danny would make the trip on cross-country skis. He kept the skis and poles, and a small haul sled, in Granddaddy’s cabin near the back dock. (That was the unheated, possibly haunted cabin Ketchum and Hero had preferred during their days and nights on the island-the cabin with the trapdoor in the floor, where Charlotte ’s grandfather, the wily poacher, had likely hidden his illegally slain deer.)

It was a short ski from the back dock of the island across Shawanaga Bay, and then Danny took the South Shore Road into Pointe au Baril Station. He wore a harness around his chest; there was a ring attached to the harness, between Danny’s shoulder blades, where a carabiner held a tow cord to the haul sled. Of course, if there was a lot of garbage to take to town, or if he needed to do more extensive shopping in Pointe au Baril, Danny would take the snowmobile or the Polar airboat.