We’re at the Pete Blodgett camp again this year, a rescued and renovated log cabin named in memory of a mighty hunter and fisherman from the Dartmouth class of 1925. His nephew and grandnephew, Put and Boo Blodgett, think of this place as a bit of a shrine. There’s a photo of old Pete in a red shirt smiling from the wall between a couple of bunks.

Outside, an open field surrounded by dense spruces commemorates a long-ago logging camp, and before that, well over a century ago, a sporting camp run by an old-timer named Amasa Ward, who wintered here – fortified by ample supplies of flour, beans, venison, firewood, and alcohol – 120 years ago. One of the other guys at camp here, Jack Noon, spent a winter at Hellgate recently and has just published a book about it: Wintering with Amasa Ward, 1889-1890. It’s a great read, for both the history of this place and Jack’s many adventures here. “A large part of my heart never opens,” he writes, “until I am up by the Swift Diamond and the Dead Diamond.” The place is a bit of a shrine for him, too.

The sound of falling water is constantly in the air, even inside the camp; on the far edge of the field, the rapids of Hellgate Gorge drop noisily into a big pool that once – again, long ago, in Amasa Ward’s day – held brook trout of up to five pounds.

I’m no longer a resident of New Hampshire, and the $105 fee for a license for just a day or two of hunting is just a bit daunting. So while the young guys were out beating the bushes in the valley of the Dead Diamond, I was quietly reading and writing on a bunk by a west window, in the company of what appeared to be a limitless supply of cluster flies. I killed thirty with my New Yorker, and within minutes there were thirty more, buzzing around my magazine and chin. I should have switched to Field and Stream, I guess. The flies’ mysterious reappearance is a good argument for spontaneous generation, a theory I’ve thought was discredited centuries ago.

The evening came early, a perception enhanced by our recent switch to standard time. A little after three the sun dipped into the spruce tops across the field. The flies quieted down a bit; the glare on my magazine was less; and I became gradually aware that the side of me toward the wall was cooler than the side of me toward the stove.

The brook-fed water line to the cabin had, amazingly, still been working. We left the faucet running to prevent its freezing, but about 3:30 it began passing icicles about the size of my little finger, and shortly afterward dribbled to a stop. Maybe tomorrow, if the day is clear, it’ll warm enough to resume. But the inexorable hand of the approaching cold won’t be denied much longer.

One of the beauties of life in the North is lingering twilight at the end of the day. It was more than an hour after the sun disappeared before it was too dark to read by the window. I briefly tried my headlight, but found it revived the cluster flies, who headed right for my forehead. It was time to put away the books and join the conversation. The boys were still out somewhere, but the older half of the group – Put, Jack, and Eric – was sitting around the table chatting and shelling peanuts. The collective knowledge and experience of those three guys is awesome to me, and I love to just listen to them talk. I poured myself a whiskey and started in on a few peanuts.

Put was heating up a large baking pan of something he called a Reuben casserole. When the boys, who rarely return before dark, finally got back from their hunt, we’d have dinner and listen to the day’s adventures.

An hour later they still hadn’t turned up. This is usually good news: They’d gotten a deer and had to drag it out. But there’s also always a lingering fear that perhaps something has gone wrong. So they were on our minds as we chatted. I even got up a couple of times and went outside, because I’d fancied I’d heard an engine on the far side of the river.

On my third trip out into the icy Stygian darkness, I spotted a flashlight coming, crossing the suspension bridge over the river. Then two more, and the sound of voices. From the arrangement of the lights, they were in a group, not in a line, which suggested they were hauling something in a wheeled barrow. And they were: a big, beautiful six-point buck. They left it in the barrow to come into the warm cabin and inhale the casserole. A successful hunt and a sauerkraut supper! Yes!

Still later, just before bedtime, I wandered out into the yard to look at the sky. It’s easy, living as we do in an environment almost never totally dark, to forget what a night sky really looks like. Dark as it was, the tops of the trees and hills were silhouetted against a background bright with numberless stars. The Big Dipper was right-side-up, half-hidden by a high ridge line, and Polaris so close to the zenith it would have been tough to navigate by it. Turning around, I saw Orion’s shoulders and belt rising from the trees, Sirius close behind, and the great lamp of Jupiter sinking toward the trees. I know that all is not well with the world, but all is well here this beautiful evening.