On December 27, 1956, a hunting party of five set out from Ash Point in South Harpswell to go gunning for ducks between Eagle Island and West Brown Cow Island. Only two made it home alive.

Fisherman Lawrence C. Estes, Jr., known to one and all as Buster, skippered his boat the Amy E. with son Steven, 13, son Maurice, 12, nephew Harry Jewell, 16, and fellow fisherman Everett Gatchell on board. The thirty-seven-foot lobsterboat, named for Estes’ wife, towed a pair of skiffs.

Near Eagle Island, Estes dropped Gatchell and son Maurice off in one rowboat. They intended to row ashore and hunt from Eagle Island, but the rough winter seas made a landing too dangerous, so Gatchell and the boy spent a chilly day shooting from the skiff.

Buster Estes and the other two boys motored on out across Broad Sound, anchored the Amy E. near West Brown Cow, and rowed to the half-tide ledge known as Mink Rock. The seaweed-covered ledge is under four to five feet of water at high tide, but it makes an excellent perch for cormorants, seals, and duck hunters when exposed. After the fact, it became apparent that the Estes’ little skiff must somehow have drifted away, leaving him and the two boys marooned on the ledge as the freezing tide was coming in. All three perished.

No one knows what actually happened on Mink Rock that day, but the late author and Bowdoin professor Lawrence Sargent Hall built his literary career on his imaginings in his short story, “The Ledge,” one of the most famous stories in the annals of Maine writing. First published in the Hudson Review in 1959, “The Ledge” was selected as the best American short story of the year in Prize Stories 1960: The O.Henry Awards and has subsequently appeared in close to forty anthologies.

People thought him a hard man, and gave him the reputation of being all out for himself because he was inclined to brag and be disdainful. If it was true, and his own brother was one of those who strongly felt it was, they lived better than others, and his brother had small right to criticize. There had been times when in her loneliness she had yearned to leave him for another man. But it would have been dangerous. So over the years she had learned to shut her mind to his hard-driving, and take what comfort she might from his unsympathetic competence. Only once or twice, perhaps, had she gone so far as to dwell guiltily on what it would be like to be a widow.

Groping in his pocket for his pipe the fisherman suddenly had his high spirits rocked by the discovery that he had left his tobacco at home. He swore. Anticipation of a day out with nothing to smoke made him incredulous. He searched his clothes, and then he searched them again, unable to believe the tobacco was not somewhere. When the boys inquired what was wrong he spoke angrily to them, blaming them for being in some devious way at fault. They were instantly crestfallen and willing to put back after the tobacco, though they could appreciate what it meant only through his irritation. But he bitterly refused. That would throw everything out of phase. He was a man who did things the way he set out to do.

She, somehow, standing on the dock as in her frequent dream, gazing at the fisherman pure as crystal on the icy boards, a small rubber boot still frozen under one clenched arm, saw him exaggerated beyond remorse or grief, absolved of his mortality.