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wilderness) but most Trentonians preferred to keep Charlie at a discreet distance. He and Angus also took me snowshoeing in the woods, and Charlie declared that, given time, he would make a real woodsman out of me. Unhappily, when I was six he lost interest in fox ranching and went off prospecting for gold in the far north.
    Another of my father’s cronies was Vic Bongard, who was so dead keen about sailing that he sailed summer and winter. Vic owned an iceboat—a cross-shaped hickory frame about twenty feet long by twelve wide, fitted with large skate blades at each extremity. Driven by a disproportionately large sail, this contraption could skim over the surface of the frozen bay at forty miles an hour.
    One brisk Sunday afternoon in February, Vic and Angus somehow persuaded Helen to join them on a little run across the bay. I went too, and we had a splendid sail to Rednersville where we went ashore to visit a farm family. The farm children and I drank sweet cider while our elders drank the real stuff, to such effect that they were persuaded to stay for a goose dinner which lasted until nearly midnight.
    By then the weather had changed and snow was beginning to fall. When we set out for home we could no longer see the lights of Trenton some seven miles away, but a glimmer of moonlight was still filtering through the clouds so off we sailed, my mother and I well bundled up in an ancient buffalo robe. The snow began to fall more and more thickly and the darkness deepened, but the breeze held steady and on we skimmed, the blades swishing with the sound of giant scythes.
    Then we stopped. To be more accurate, the iceboat stopped. We four continued on like hockey pucks vigorously propelled over new ice. Clinging to each other and half smothered by the robe, Helen and I must have slid a hundred yards before we managed to gain our feet. I was wildly exhilarated. Helen was as mad as I had ever seen her.
    â€œOh, you fools !” she shrieked at Vic and Angus as they emerged through the thickening murk. “You absolute idiots could have drowned us all!” She strained for the right epithet. “You… you MEN ! ”
    It was no use pointing out to her, as Angus tried to do, that there was a yard of solid ice beneath us. That only made her madder. She stamped her foot. “Oh, what’s the difference ! If Farley and I had hit a tree we’d have been as good as drowned !”
    The iceboat had, in fact, hit a ridge of snow scraped up by somebody cutting ice blocks. Angus and Vic said nothing about it at the time but it occurs to me now that if we had sailed into the channel the ice cutters had made, my mother’s awful prophecy might well have been fulfilled.
    The Bonter farm, not far from the village of Consecon, was a favourite place to visit in summertime. Elmer Bonter kept dairy cattle and his wife made Devonshire cream. Served with fresh strawberries or raspberries, and topped with dollops of buckwheat honey, this was a dish the memory of which can still make me salivate like a Pavlovian dog.
    I have another memory of the Bonter farm. One day I allowed myself to be dared by the Bonter kids into trying to walk across the farm manure pile.
    Inevitably I broke through the crust and sank into it up to my armpits. When I was pulled out by an irate Elmer, I had lost not only my shoes but my trousers too. Even prolonged immersion in the nearby waters of Lake Ontario, laving myself with home-made brown soap, could not wash away my feelings of humiliation.
    My other companions of those early days are now mostly lost in the mists but I recall a couple with some clarity. One was the son of a local doctor. Now spending his days on a Florida beach like so many Canadian jellyfish, Doug Reid, who witnessed my humiliation at the Bonters’ farm, today complains it was my predilection for running around naked which led him to choose a nudist colony as his retirement residence. He says I had a bad influence on