By the time they had the auger through, the light was already going the color of a bruise. Del set the tip-ups while Marcus arranged the little heater and pretended not to watch him do it.

“You still hold it wrong,” Del said.

“I hold it fine.”

They had been holding things wrong at each other since they were boys, and the lake did not care, and the fish came up out of the dark when they came up at all, silver and astonished, and were let go or were not.

Their father had taught them both the same way and they had each learned something different, which is the whole trouble with fathers, and with lakes, and with the particular silence two men keep when they have driven a long way to sit in a small room over a hole in the ice and say almost nothing that matters.