“In summer the rich pond water was a vat of ripe simmering fruit, of varnish color: golden in the sun, holding like a rich syrup all the stock and plankton of the woods: loam-wealth, growth richness, leaf and sap goodness, the potlikker of the secret woods – all untouched and rare and gamy. There lolled fat, torpid, safe fish, bobbling languorously over in the thick piny syrup, bubbling their rubbery globules, like plump ripe fruit in their juices.”
