The boards of the porch are cool under your bare feet, dark with the damp that comes off the lake at this hour. You stand at the rail with both hands around the enamel mug, and the steam lifts past your face in a slow column before the air takes it sideways. Below the porch the lake lies without a wrinkle, holding the shape of the far shore upside down in it, pine for pine. The sky over those pines is still the deep grey-blue of the hours before, but a thread of pink has begun behind the ridge, no wider than a wire. From inside the cabin the kettle ticks as it cools on the edge of the stove.
You move along the rail to the corner post, where the cedar has gone silver under years of weather. The grain stands up under your palm in fine ridges. A spider has worked the angle between post and rail through the night, and the web hangs heavy with dew, each thread beaded so finely that the whole thing looks drawn in pencil against the dim water. You bend a little to look. The spider itself sits at the hub, small and patient, legs gathered. Down at the bottom of the steps the path of pine needles begins, a soft red-brown track that goes down to the dock. You can hear the lake against the pilings, the smallest possible sound, a kind of breathing.
A loon calls once, far out. The note comes long and low across the water, holds, and ends. You wait for it. The answer comes from much further, from somewhere up the eastern arm of the lake, thinner with the distance, and then the silence closes again over both. The silence is not empty. The pines are full of the small adjustments birds make before they sing, a settling of feathers, a movement along a branch. A fish rises somewhere in the shallows beneath the dock, the sound a soft *plip* and a ring of water opening outward. You can just make out the ring on the dark surface, widening, fading, gone. The mug in your hands has cooled enough now to drink, and you take a first sip, and the warmth goes down slowly into your chest.
The boards lead you down the three steps to the path. The pine needles give underfoot with the dry give they have, and somewhere a cone has fallen in the night and lies at the edge of the path with its scales open. The cedar of the railing gives way to the rougher bark of the pines as you pass between them, and the smell of the place changes — resin, the cold mineral scent of the lake, the faint smoke still drifting from the chimney above and behind you. The smoke is birch. You can tell by the sweetness of it, the way it sits low in the cold air rather than rising clean. Last night's fire is still warm in the stove inside, and the kettle drew from that warmth without needing much more. A bat passes overhead on its last circuit, a quick flicker against the lightening sky, and is gone toward the eaves of the cabin.
The dock is six boards wide and goes out twenty feet over the water. The first board has a knot in it the size of a coin, polished smooth by all the bare feet that have crossed it, paler than the wood around. You walk out slowly with the mug held level. The boards are colder here than the porch was, with the breath of the lake right under them. Halfway out a board has lifted a fraction at one end, and you feel it dip slightly under your weight and settle. At the end of the dock there is a wooden bench, weathered to the same grey as the rail, the seat hollowed in two places where people have sat for a long time looking at the water. You sit in one of those hollows. The mug rests on your knee.
From here the lake opens. The far shore is perhaps half a mile across, and the line of pines along it stands black and even against the slow rise of light. The pink behind the ridge has spread now into a wider band, and above it the blue has gone paler, and a single star is still holding on overhead, very small. The water below the dock is so still that when you look down you see your own outline against the sky, and the bench behind you, and the underside of the dock boards, all assembled in the dark mirror at your feet. A water strider works the surface near the piling, leaving four small dents that travel with it and heal behind it. Further out, a thin mist has begun to lift in patches, sitting on the water in long low shapes like sleeping animals. The mist moves without seeming to move. You watch one shape drift along the shore and gather itself against a fallen log half-submerged near the reeds.
The loon calls again, closer this time, somewhere out in the middle of the lake, and now you can pick out the shape of it, low and dark on the water, no more than a smudge against the reflected pines. It calls, listens, and slides forward without visible effort. The answer comes from the eastern arm again, fainter, and then a third voice, a different one, from down the southern shore. The three of them talk across the lake in their long flutings, and the sound carries the way sound only carries over still water before sunrise, every note clean and bending slightly as it travels. A breath of air finds the surface and crosses it in a darker patch, ruffling it for the span of a few seconds, and the reflection of the far pines shivers and reassembles. The air smells of cold stone and pine and the wet of the lake, and underneath all of that the woodsmoke from the cabin, thinner now.
The pink behind the ridge has come up into orange, low and slow. The undersides of the few clouds out over the water have caught it first, going from grey to a soft rose, holding the colour as if testing it. The pines on the far shore begin to separate from one another, where a moment ago they were one black line. You can pick out a tall one leaning slightly, and the gap where a storm took one down some winter, and the paler birches grouped along the inlet. The water near the shore there is still in shadow, but a strip of light has begun to crawl down the trunks from the top, very slow, the way light comes when there is nothing to hurry it. A kingfisher leaves a branch with a dry rattle and crosses the cove low to the water and disappears into the alders on the other side. The ring of its leaving spreads on the water beneath where it had sat.
You drink again from the mug. The warmth is less now but still good. Your hands have taken the shape of the mug, curled around it, the heat moving up into the wrists. Behind you on the porch a board settles with a soft knock as the cold lifts from it. Inside the cabin the kettle has gone quiet. A small wind comes off the water, lifts the hair at your temple, passes. The mist on the lake has begun to thin in some places and thicken in others, rearranging itself without any visible hand. You can hear, very faintly, the drip of dew from the eaves of the cabin behind you onto the flat stone by the door, one drop, then another, spaced far apart.
The light comes up another degree. The orange behind the ridge has softened into a clean yellow at its lowest edge, and the highest pines on the eastern shore have taken on the first warm colour of the day, a thin gold along their crowns. The loons have gone quiet. The water strider has moved out of sight along the piling. The mist on the lake drifts toward the inlet in long slow shapes, and the reflection of the far shore goes on holding itself in the dark water below, pine for pine, unbroken, the small fish rising now and then to write their rings on it and let them fade. The mug in your hands is barely warm. The bench beneath you holds its hollows. The pink that began as a wire behind the ridge has thinned and spread and is going, quietly, into the wider colour of the morning, and the morning is still some way off, and the lake is