So they go to Diamond Lake, Piquette being a company for Doctor McLeod's daughter, Vanessa. Vanessa is intereseted in Piquette and her culture, but Piquette takes it as an insult that she asks about her culture and the Indian way of living. They don't get to know each other, Piquette brings most of the time inside the cottage, helping Vanessa's mother with the work. One night, Vanessa is sitting down by the lake, listening to the loons and looking at the black, beautiful lake with the moon making a streak of amber with it's path. Her father comes down, and they are, without knowing it then, sitting there together on the shore, listening to the loons, for the last time ever. Vanessa still tries to be kind to Piquette, but she is impossible to reach, and she looses her interest in trying.
That winter, Vanessa's father dies of pneumonia. Vanessa is drowned in her own and her mother's sorrow. She realises that Piquette is no longer going to school, but four years later, when Vanessa is 15 and Piquette is 17, they meet in the Regal Café. Piquette has been around for two years, and they have a little chat, without actually having anything to talk about. Piquette is getting married with an Englishman, she had been forced to seek the very things she so bitterly rejected. When Vanessa is 18, she leaves Manawaka to go to college. When she comes back for the summer, her mother have news about Piquette. She is dead. She was left by her husband, or she left him. She had two small children, and had put on a lot of weight. She had a drinking problem, and had been in the court a couple of times, and one day, the shack caught fire, and neither Piquette or the children got out.
That summer, Vanessa went to Diamond Lake a few days together with Mavis, a friend. She went down to the lake, but it was not the same. The small pier her father built was replaced with a bigger pier built by the government, and the loons and wild animals were gone.