The sun was shining when I started out, but you know how fast these storms can blow in. The sky grayed up and darkened as I followed the shoreline. A few drops started to fall about the time I was halfway around the lake. The wind brought cold rain. By the time I was three-quarters of the way around, the rain turned to hail. My shirt was soaked. Mist rose off the water.

I was hurrying when I came to the place where the lake drains into marshland, the stretch where the mud is black and slick. I was hurrying, but watching my step, too. Snags stand there, each about as tall as a man, with black mossy logs lying down among them. The nearer snags were dark and sharp-edged, the farther ones gray in the haze of falling hail. I was almost past when I noticed that the shape of one snag was strange. No, I realized, it wasn't a snag. Two people stood there in the hail and wind, among the broken trees, kissing. They wore gray cloaks with the hoods pulled up. One face looked much darker than the other. Their hands were clasped together, but partly concealed in the cloaks, like their faces.

I had to mind where I was stepping. Mud sucked at my boots. By the time I reached solid ground, I could no longer see the lovers, except in my mind's eye. I put my head down and pressed on. I thought of the lovers' hands. The hands clasped together were big, like a man's hands. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was. As I kept marching toward my cabin and fire, I recalled the shape of their fingers, their thick wrists. They were two men kissing.

Of course, some women have such hands. One face, the lighter one, was tipped up, the darker one turned down. The hoods obscured my view. So did the atmosphere. But I recalled the smoothness and delicacy of their jaws. Men don't often have such delicate faces. Rather than two men, the lovers might be women. Two women with big, rough hands. Two women kissing.

Had one really been so much darker than the other? Or were they the same, with one only deeper in shadow?

As fast as the storm clouds had blown in, now they began to break apart. Hail kept falling, but the sky brightened. Outside my cabin door, hailstones on the ground glistened white.

Inside the cabin, I fed new wood to the fire, shed my wet clothes in a heap and hurried to dress in dry ones. The mound of wet clothes on the floor reminded me, at last, of the humps. There were humps beneath those cloaks, rising gray above the heads of the lovers. Enormous rounded humps.