Ernie Thomas's Gloves

 This pair of wool gloves was knitted eighty or so years ago by Ernie Thomas, famous in my family, but dead before i was born:   a lumber jack, camp carpenter, and trapper, who (with his son Harlan, a Harisville area school teacher whom I actually did meet at my father’s funeral)  had, along with  my Grandfather) built a camp in the late nineteen twenties on the island people used to call Failing’s Island but we call Loon Island, close to  the North Shore of Lake Bonaparte. The camp has a big central fireplace to which they connected a big box stove for heating during the hunting and trapping seasons.
     One winter in the thirties or forties, Ernie Thomas fell through the ice as he was returning from running a trap line in the Bonaparte outlet to Mud Lake.  His body was never recovered.
 But we have the mittens and, for some reason, the moths have spared them completely.  Georgia says it is because we have not put them away.  I never use them.  Don’t want to wear them out. If we ever find Ernie Thomas, he will need them.