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him.
    The other friend was the son of a poacher who lived a bachelor existence in an old boathouse that sometimes went adrift during spring high water. I have forgotten the boy’s name but Helen used to refer to him tellingly as the Marsh Boy. He was a child of few words who generally avoided human company. But we were wharf-rats together when I was five, playing on and under the decaying old steamer docks, in the hulks of abandoned barges, or poling a punt around in the swamps. He led me even farther into the world of the other animals by showing me a bittern’s nest; muskrat houses; the nesting haunts of snapping turtles; giant carp that lay half awash like crocodiles amongst the reeds; bullfrogs; and the thick, black water snakes who lived under his floating home.
    I was enthralled by him and the world he lived in and took him home to lunch one day so I could show him off to my parents.
    He was ill at ease as we climbed the stairs leading to our apartment over the clothing store, and he baulked entirely when he got to our open door. I think he would have fled had not my mother come forward, beaming in welcome, to take his arm and urge him in. She offered him a steaming plate of macaroni and cheese, which he turned down with something very like a snarl. Staring suspiciously at my father through the ragged tangle of black hair which hung over his brow, he backed away from the table, pulled a knotted handkerchief out of his pocket, untied it, and spread a clutch of hard-boiled eggs on the kitchen floor.
    These were not the products of your ordinary domestic hen. One was a heron’s egg; a couple had probably belonged to a hell-diver; and one very large, olive-brown one might have been laid by a gull. While we watched, fascinated, the Marsh Boy systematically cracked each egg against his forehead, peeled off the shell, and gulped down the contents. Having had his lunch, he departed with no further social parley.
    Although I pressed him, he would not again risk his liberty to the confines of our apartment. That may have been just as well since one of his favourite snacks was frogs’ legs. Eaten raw. I doubt if my mother could have handled that.
    Once the sailing season began the Marsh Boy faded from my life. I didn’t see him again until the autumn when we both began attending Grade 1 at Lord Dufferin School. By then I had almost forgotten our close kinship of the spring, but he had not. One day at recess he gave me a painted turtle.
    This was a phlegmatic but indomitable creature the size of a small dinner plate. He was allowed to range around the apartment at will, demonstrating his bulldozer power by crawling under heavy objects such as a coal bucket and sliding them along. To the consternation of a friend of my mother’s, he once slid a basket of washing right across the kitchen floor without ever revealing his presence under it.
    Hercules, as I named him, delighted in joining me when I had a bath. He liked to be on top of things and would stand peering myopically over the edge of our kitchen/dining table for hours, seemingly contemplating the depths of an imaginary pool into which he never quite dared plunge.
    One day just before Christmas he was ambling around the table top where I was busy drawing pictures. Suddenly he gave a cry—a sort of sonorous honk which startled both Helen and me. As we stared at him, “he” laid an egg, shuffled to the table’s edge, and plunged to the kitchen floor. The fall caused no apparent injury but thereafter Herc became strangely withdrawn, even for a turtle. She took to spending most of her time under my bed. She would have nothing to do with the egg, a leathery, lozenge-shaped object, so Angus buried it in a box of moist sand and placed it in the warming closet of our big coal stove. It never hatched, and in the spring we gave the unfulfilled Hercules her liberty in the swamps of her birth.
    As for the Marsh Boy, after the first week or so he failed