Ernest Hemingway · 1925 · survival

The story that closes In Our Time, and the one Hemingway said was about a boy coming home from the war with no mention of the war in it. Nick Adams gets off a train at a burnt-out Michigan lumber town, walks out to a river and camps, and fishes for two days. Almost nothing happens, on purpose.

1. 1
   Seney

   Nick Adams gets off the train at a town burned to the ground - thirteen saloons gone, not even the foundations left, and the country around it burnt over black. He shoulders his pack and walks out without looking back.

2. 2
   The Fox River bridge

   He stands on the bridge and watches trout holding steady in the current, keeping themselves in place with wavering fins - and feels, for the first time in the story, something he recognises as happiness.

3. 3
   The pine plain

   He walks until his shoulders ache and pitches camp on level ground above the river, pegs the canvas taut, cooks and eats and makes coffee - and the story spends pages on it, because the doing of it is the whole point.

4. 4
   The river

   Two days of fishing with grasshoppers taken from under a log at dawn - one big trout lost, which shakes him more than it should, and one kept, and a long careful stretch of not thinking about anything.

5. 5
   The swamp

   Downstream the banks close in and the water goes deep in the shade, and Nick decides he does not want to fish the swamp today - and that is the last line, and everyone has been arguing about what is in the swamp ever since.