To ten-year-old Bruce, the summer of 1954 seemed, at first, like any other on the lake: floating in the rowboat, watching the seagulls, frogs and herons, catching crayfish. But just when he thinks that life is perfect, everything starts to change, and over the summer both the harshness of the adult world and the patterns of the natural reveal themselves. By the time the weather turns he will be a different child and will have chosen his own path to understanding the wilderness that waits behind the family cottage.