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a decent price for my muskrat pelts, I should be able to get a new Harmony guitar from the catalogue,” I said.
    â€œLet me know when you order,” Wally said. “I’ll get a new set of strings and a bow and maybe a junk of rosin.” Suddenly he jig-skipped and sang out: “Here we go, Fiddling Wally Mason and Picking Jake Jackson with ‘The Barley Corn Reel.’ And he diddled into the tune and I joined in with a wing-wang, wing-wang and broke into a jig-skip, too.
    We were still jig-skipping, diddling and wing-wanging when we got to Wally’s gate and I could hear his jig-skips and hey-diddle, harrough-a-diddle down his lane right up until his door slammed shut.
    The Boss was sitting with his ear to the radio when I came in. The words, coming through the usual buzz, were rising and lowering sporadically, sometimes cutting out: “Vital…at Holl…into the boards…sin bin…Gre…up centre to…Bou…y…Pitsod…out…Whitlo…scores! They don’t call him…is…lighter…for nothing.” Everything blanked out into a buzz then.
    â€œWhat’s the score?” I asked.
    â€œFive–two, Halifax. Charlottetown forgot to get out of bed.” The Boss fished into his pocket for a fifty-cent piece and held it out to me. “Get a dry-cell tomorrow,” he said.
    â€œDid you try heating the old one?”
    â€œYou can. I’m going to bed.”
    After he left, I unhooked the cylinder-like battery behind the radio and sat it on the stove’s oven door for the night. By the shallow light from the kitchen, I poured a glass of milk from the porch bucket and used a butcher knife to cut a chunk off the boiled tongue curled on a plate on a side shelf. Then I went to the pantry and made a sandwich with the tongue and Nanny’s freshly baked bread and sat and ate with my feet on the stove’s oven door, savouring the crunchy bread crust mingling with the tongue and the milk, hearing the low whine of the kettle and the odd snap from the firebox. When I finished, I groped up the stairs through the cold darkness and got my slingshot.
    Back at the stove, I cut one of the bicycle tube pulls off the slingshot and geared up a capo on the guitar and slid it up and down the neck, working chords for a while. Before the fire died and the kitchen got cold, I went and got the catalogue and turned to the page where the Harmony guitar stood in stateliness and mystery beside its case.
    I really didn’t have to go to the catalogue to see the guitar; it had been fixed in my mind for well over a month. When I trudged through my potato-picking stint for John Cobly; when I approached the brook in the early morning darkness listening for splashes around the trap area; when I skinned a muskrat by lantern light in the shop with the sour burnt kerosene smell mingling with that of the musky, raw carcass; when I rolled a pelt inside out onto a pointed board, nailed it on and scraped off the lumps of fat; when I mailed the silky-haired, stiff hides wrapped in heavy, brown paper tied with binder twine, that guitar hung in the back of my mind like a vision.
    It all came together a few weeks later, when The Old Man picked Wally and me up after school with the wood sleigh and pointed to a hump in the buffalo at the bottom of the sleigh. “There’s a dangerous machine in there I got at the post office. Better wait ’til you get home to find out what it is. The frost won’t do it any good.”
    Then there was that awe and excitement of opening the triangular box in the kitchen, smelling the fresh newness of the guitar and holding it. Wally’s bow, strings and rosin were strategically placed inside the box. He grabbed them like a starving cat and disappeared.
    But he was back that evening. I was too wrapped up in my new guitar to go over. He had his fiddle, with the new strings on, new bow, rosin and all, in a potato sack.
    â€œGoing