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Show RUSSELL'S POND Hunt had meant to go there. Sean had gone -- Hunt's son, Sean, who was eight. Sean and a friend, Lyle, had gone there often in the early fall to fish. Russell's Pond was filled, they said, with perch, pickerel, even trout. One of the afternoons they'd gone, they were still out well after dark, and Hunt worried, had started out on the road, meeting them only ten minutes on his way. "We got lost," they said. "Be we got fish!" And they had. Four. Still Hunt continued -- because he thought he ought to -- to intend going. To check it out: he ought to do that. Against drowning. For shoreline broken glass. As a place, even possibly, that he himself could paint. Ponds bothered him though. Still. In strange quiet ways. Not lakes; lakes were different. Ponds. Hunt had shot his brother once by a pond. In the arm. It was by mistake. "Where are you going?" Leah asked. The late afternoon had warmed their landscape considerably. "To Russell's Pond." All the snow in Boston, when they'd left it, two hours before, had been gone. Here, an hour north, it was all much reduced: wet, thickly granular. "Why don't we ,all go?" Leah said. It had been surprisingly calm at Hunt's parents for Thanksgiving weekend. "Would you like?" No one had pressed them any further with the divorce. |