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1 Really Reading a Hemingway Story The Example of “Indian Camp” I’m trying to do it so it will make it without you knowing it, and so the more you read it, the more there will be. —Ernest Hemingway (on his work in the mid-1920s), A Moveable Feast Prologue: The Contexts of “Indian Camp” From mid-February through April 1924, the start of an extraordinary period of creativity that would last five years, Hemingway completed eight of the stories that would comprise the bulk of In Our Time.1 The first of these stories, “Indian Camp,” marked the introduction of Nick Adams, who had briefly appeared in an earlier in our time vignette and would become Hemingway’s most memorable and autobiographical character.2 “Indian Camp” was both the first Nick Adams story and, as it would turn out, the earliest story in Nick’s chronology. It was also something else. Of his three previously published stories, “Up in Michigan” and “My Old Man” had been derivative, heavily influenced by Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, respectively, and “Out of Season” was merely competent. “Indian Camp” was therefore another “first”; it was Hemingway’s initial masterpiece in the genre. The original version of the story begins with Nick undressing inside a tent. As he watches the shadows of his father and Uncle George projected by the campfire on the wall of the tent he feels ashamed of something that happened the night before. In a flashback to that night, the two men head off in a rowboat to troll for fish. Before they leave, Nick’s father tells him that in the event of an emergency the boy should fire three rifle shots and they will return immediately. Nick walks back to the tent and tries to sleep, but the dark and silent woods frighten him, and his vague anxiety turns into a fear of death. In a flashback within this flashback, Nick recalls sitting in church a few weeks earlier singing a hymn and realizing, for the first time, that he will someday die. He remembers spending that night in the hall reading a book to keep his mind off of dying. The story then returns 4 Full Encounters of the Close Kind to the original flashback as Nick’s fear overwhelms him, he fires the three shots, feels relieved, and goes to sleep. On the lake the two men hear the shots, with Uncle George angry about having his fishing ruined and making a number of nasty comments while Nick’s father feebly defends his son. The men enter the tent, Uncle George awakens Nick by shining his flashlight on him, and the boy tells a lie about having heard something that sounded like a cross between a wolf and a fox prowling about the tent. The story then flashes forward to the morning of the night on which it opened, as Nick’s father finds two trees leaning against each other in the wind and asks Nick if that was what he heard. The boy is evasive, but his father calms him by giving advice on how to protect himself in a thunderstorm. The story returns to the present as Nick, still undressing, hears a boat pull up on the beach; the shadows of the two men disappear, and his father yells for him to get dressed and put on his coat. On the beach two Indians and a second rowboat await. The Indians row them across the lake as Nick’s father explains to Nick that there is an Indian lady at the Indian camp who is sick. After docking, the five characters walk up the beach, through a meadow, along a trail in the woods, and up a logging road into the hills. When they get to the camp, they enter a shanty in which a pregnant Indian woman lies in a bunk while her husband , who had hurt his foot with an ax, is in the bunk above her. Nick’s father explains to his son that she is having a difficult childbirth, and Nick is unnerved by her screams. Nick watches his father prepare to operate, and then assists in a brutal, makeshift Caesarean performed with fishing equipment and no anesthetic. A boy is born, but Nick, despite his father’s explanations, is too upset to watch. His father’s post-operative exhilaration is cut short when he checks on the Indian father in the upper bunk and discovers that sometime during...

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