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logs had been notched to create a corner. I felt the uneven planes of the cut where an axe had chopped out chunks of hard white wood. Now, many years later, the logs were grey and spongy and crumbled in my fingers.
    Who cut these logs? A trapper? A prospector? If I carefully dug my way around the cabin site over the next few weeks, it would be like an archaeological dig. Maybe I’d find some old bottles or tools.
    Just then the sun disappeared. Everything was suddenly thrown into murky shadows. A cold mist seemed to push up from the ground around me.
    I stood up and brushed off the back of my jeans. They were damp and soggy against my skin. When I leaned forward to put back the bits of moss, I heard a soft sigh beside my shoulder. My scalp prickled and goose bumps ran up and down my arms. Slowly and fearfully, I turned my head. There was nobody there. I started to breathe again.
    All at once, a strong wind whistled a high-pitched warning above the trees, then swung lower to push around their branches. The trees slowly began to rock back and forth, their trunks swaying. I looked up uneasily, then fell forward when a rumble of thunder tailgating the wind brought something crashing through the bushes.
    It was Bram. He ran as far as the edge of the cabin’s buried skeleton. Then, hackles up, stiff-legged, he edged around the outside, looking at the sunken spot with rolling eyes. I had to laugh.
    Bram hates thunder and usually turns into a bag of chicken bones at the first faint sounds of a storm. Overreaction is his middle name. He whimpered from a distance, his large brown eyes begging me to listen to reason and to get out of there.
    â€œBram,” I said, “don’t worry, boy. It’s just a storm building up. Come here, boy, this way.”
    He was staring wild-eyed at something beside me, backing away and growling deep in his throat. When I took a step towards him, he bared his teeth and snarled.
    â€œBram? Cut it out!” Suddenly he was making me awfully nervous. “Stop it.”
    He growled again, showing the whites of his eyes, and began to mince around himself in a stiff-legged circle. I inched towards him, not daring to look over my shoulder where his eyes were glued.
    A clap of thunder hammering above our heads did it. I scurried past Bram towards the rocky slope. He lunged after me, snapping and snarling like a rabid wolf.
    We were both out of breath when we reached the canoe. Bram sat down beside it, a dumb bewildered look on his face. I pushed the Beetle into the water and held it steady for the killer dog. He walked around me first, sniffing and whining, put one paw on my leg and gazed adoringly into my eyes before climbing slowly into the canoe, shivering and shaking like an old, old man with a chill.
    Across the bay the trees were shaking their branches over dark choppy waves, and the sky was full of black, swirling clouds. How could all of this have happened in the short time I’d been in the clearing? Was I going to sit out the storm or try for home? Sensible had never been
my
middle name, so naturally I pushed out from shore.
    Crawling into the middle of the Beetle, I stayed on my knees and dug the paddle deep. By now, the wind was gusting in every direction, and because it hadn’t made up its mind which way it wanted to blow, the waves in the sheltered strip between the two islands were still fairly small.
    As I edged my way around Little Island’s tip about twenty minutes later, a crack of lightning followed by a roller coaster of thunder threw Bram into another fit of the shakes. He crouched low on the bottom of the canoe, waiting for the Big Dog Catcher in the sky to come and get him. That was fine with me, because he’d been pacing back and forth, and the waves were getting bigger. I’d had to rap him a couple of times with the paddle and shout death threats to keep him from tipping us over.
    The west wind had got a toe-hold between Gran’s shore and us,