Fishbone's Song (7 page)

I moved along the creek down past three big bends it made around small hills, barely rises in ground. And on the moss sides of the hills, the north side, I found some mushrooms, some morels, and I picked them and put them in the pouch with the flour for later. Little Christmas trees is how
they looked and was the only kind of mushroom Fishbone said was always safe. Easy to see. Easy to know.

Where the creek hit the swamp where I had found the shypoke feathers that I used for the arrows, it made a sharp turn to the left, and it was this bend that marked the farthest I had ever gone from the cabin. I'm not sure of distance, but if a person walking slow while watching, hunting, made maybe a mile an hour, then it was close on a mile from the cabin.

The longest away. Here—if I came this far—I usually headed in a big circle to the right, skirting the edge of the swamp and working back around to the cabin in a great loop through the woods. That's when I was hunting, strictly hunting for food for the cabin, either squirrel or rabbit or grouse. And usually I took something in that circle. Or got a good shot at something. And just what distance I had gone so far I had seen plenty of game—several
rabbits, a couple of grouse, one opossum, and big leopard frogs in the creek. All close. One grouse was on a freeze and stood so still I had to walk around him. Or her. Couldn't tell from looking at it. I could have almost grabbed it and if we're telling the truth, I was tempted. Grouse boiled in fresh creek water with morels thrown in made a great soup. And my backbone was steady moving toward my stomach, as Fishbone said when he was hungry. And more truth, I was always hungry. It seemed. I could just eat. And eat.

But.

I was moving. Hunting. Not killing yet. So I passed over the easy kills I saw and kept moving, moving. I went off to the left of the swamp throughout the morning, off to the left and then the land started to rise. First in a gentle slope and then steeper and steeper until I was moving onto a ridge made of a large gray rock outcropping that stood out like the backbone of some giant animal
skeleton. I worked along this ridge, not on top because I had learned that all things look to the top of a ridge or a hill and I didn't want to scare away animals that might be in the same area.

Below the ridge line and slow, two, three steps, pause, stop, study what's ahead, start again, stop right away, and study, study, breathe in slow and out more slowly, wait, wait.

Two more steps, stop. Think of fitting, fitting in to the ridge line, into the grass under my feet. Think of being the weather, air, all of everything. Fit in to the edge, edge of the dream. Slow. Sloooow. Looking for a line, a curve that doesn't belong, doesn't fit.

Down the face of the ridge moving that way, watching, seeing, but more, more, feeling,
feeling
everything, feeling all things, knowing all things. Closer to the creek where it wound around the side of the ridge, water against the rock, cutting away until it left a small clearing back against the rock face and out to the creek, with thick brush and
grass coming down to the water on the other side of the creek.

And there.

Right . . . exactly . . .
there
.

A grouse. Sitting low in the grass. Body down, head up a bit. Frozen. No motion.

Slowly draw the arrow back, feel where it's going, how it's going to go and then without thinking about it, release. Soft “thrumm” of the string and the cane arrow is gone, clean and gone, hitting the grouse just below the head, through the neck.

One flop.

And done. Dead.

Food.

I had an old two-bladed pocketknife that Fishbone had given me, only one blade, the other broken off, and I used it to cut the bird's head off and the lower part of the legs and feet. Then tore the skin away—easier to skin than to eat feathers because they never all come off when you try to
pluck them—and then a small fire, creek water in the pot with the whole grouse. Small bird. And the mushrooms to let them boil until the meat falls off the bone. Gather more wood while it's cooking, all night wood, then before dark set a trap for crayfish.

The creek is alive with them and the tails taste almost sweet. Fishbone says they taste like lobster, or shrimp. I don't know. Wouldn't know. Never tasted them. But crayfish make your mouth water just thinking of them. Well. So does grouse. Or rabbit. Or biscuits and flour gravy. Or anything.

Fishbone says most people eat the tail and the guts, but I could never get into scooping the guts out and eating them, so I stick to the tails. Don't eat rabbit guts. Don't eat squirrel guts. Don't eat frog guts. Don't eat guts.

Just the heart. Sometimes. Throw it in the stew as I did with the grouse heart. Just meat. Good meat.

Where the creek curved away from the little
clearing, the bottom was almost free of weeds and grass from the current picking up speed around the corner. On the side of the bank there was a U-shaped gouge that came back into the dirt about two feet. The water in the U was about five inches deep with a clear, sandy bottom. I took flat rocks from the ridge stone and made a small underwater wall across the face of the U and left a two-inch opening in the center. In the back of the U I put the grouse guts, head, feet, and feathers, except for the outer wing feathers that I saved to use on cane arrows later, and I weighted the guts down with stone. Kept the good parts on the bottom. Meat, skin, guts bring all the scavengers in—fish, crayfish, even leeches, which will come if the water is still. Leeches don't do very well in fast current. Which is just as well because I don't want to eat a leech.

I figure through the night some shiners might come in, and crayfish, and I could sneak down in the morning and cover the front of the trap and
have a hot breakfast with what I catch in the night. I also took some of the wire and made a snare over a rabbit trail that tunneled back into the grass. About a four-inch loop, a half inch off the ground and straight across the little packed trail, tied off to a small ash tree on the side. All the way Fishbone said to do it.

Then more wood for the fire, and still more. The grouse stew bubbled away until the meat fell away from the bone and the mushrooms were soft, and I drank the stew water and ate the grouse and mushrooms, and put the leftover skeleton and bone bits with the bait in the water trap.

Pulled a bunch of leaves back against the rock wall for a bed, the fire kicking heat in under the ledge, warm around me, nestled back in and closed my eyes.

But no sleep.

Not yet. Questions kept popping up. How, I thought.

How.

How did I know what I knew, how to hunt, how to move, how to work a ridge, how to be, how to . . . everything?

How to hunt.

How to be a hunter. A knower. A learner. A person who sees things. Not just to kill. That was part of it. But not only that. Not just to kill but to hunt. How could I know that?

And I knew. Fire flickering, heat coming back into me, dark in the woods around and I knew, knew what it was, how it happened. It wasn't me. I was just a place that it came to, came through.

It was Fishbone.

It was his stories, his shuffle-pat story-songs that came into me as whole ways of being, knowing. Came into me like heat from the fire, came in to say one thing, maybe about fast cars or running 'shine, but it would work for all things. Work for thinking, make thinking better, so it would make
me more whole, make me think smarter and better about everything I was, everything I did.

Don't know if he meant it.

I think he did. I think he knew what he was doing with all of it, his thinking, the rhythm of his thoughts and voice. Maybe the way he smiled. Sipped 'shine. Way he looked away just when he should look away, answer just when he should answer.

Make me think just when I need to think. Do. Feel. Be. Give me an answer when I need one. Straight out. Hold back when he didn't think I needed one.

What with the grouse and mushroom stew, I was full as a tick and feeling dozy, so I pulled back in the leaves and went to fast sleep. No dream. Or at least not one I could remember. But it was summer just when it was warmest, before it turned into early fall, and later at night when the fire went down and out and the night air came in and found
me it cooled some, a little, and I started to wake up. But I pulled in more leaves, brought them up and over me and went back to sleep until splashing nearby woke me again when it was full light.

It was two shiner chub fish fighting each other over the grouse guts inside the box trap. I jumped up, kept low, found a small flat rock I had put down the night before, and used it to close the gate on the trap, penning in the two chubs. I also saw that there were three medium-size crayfish in the trap as well, and when I looked down the stream bank, I found I had snared a cottontail rabbit to add to the food supply. The rabbit had stuck his head through the noose of wire, wrapped twice around the small trunk of the ash willow, and was dead, choked out.

I made a fire, and when it was going, I went off from the creek to take care of what Fishbone called “my necessaries.” Then I went back and cleaned the chubs, putting the guts back in the creek for the crayfish to eat. I put the chubs and the crayfish—the
crayfish without cleaning, but whole—in the breakfast soup. While they were boiling up, I took the rabbit from the snare, removed the wire, and cleaned him as well, also putting his guts in the creek except for the heart, which I dropped in the soup. Both chubs and crayfish—all outside the trap—came for the guts and had them clean and gone before they hit the bottom or drifted downstream.

No waste nor want, Fishbone said when he was talking about the bible, or anything else, for that matter. Woods, life, weather, food, souls—it should all close in back of you as you move through life. Come in, go out, not a ripple left. Like a knife through water. Like stovesmoke. No tracks, not a wrinkle to show you were there. No waste. No want. No bother to nobody or no thing. You be there, he said, then you're not there. He'd smile. We're all here because why, why? Because we're not all there. Now you see us, then you don't.

Once I washed it out in the creek, I wrapped
the rabbit in dry grass to take back for Fishbone. He dearly loved rabbit dusted in flour and fried in bacon grease. Thick coating, crispy fried. Not his favorite thing, but one of them. Second favorite was 'coon meat, cut in chunks and fried the same way. In bacon grease. So deep it bubbled when you fried it.

Good as bear, he said. And bear was the best meat of all. Way back, when they went into the hills to start making 'shine, even before that, when there was just a frontier and a man had to clear his own land with his hands, when he could barely even
own
his own land, when he used a rifle that sparked flint and fired a round ball, even then they knew what was best. Deer were everywhere, and in a pinch they would eat deer meat. But the fat was bad, covered your lips and inside your mouth like candle wax. So they'd take deer for the hides, for buckskin, which made good clothes when it was soft and supple if it was worked up right. It
was so good buckskin was shortened to just buck, and that became a rate of money. A single note was called not a dollar but a buck. Five bucks was five deer hides, stretched and salt cured.

But for meat they took bear.

Rich with good fat, clean fat, to use for cooking. Nothing, Fishbone said, absolutely nothing, tasted like biscuits fried in bear grease. It could preserve leather, help a small cut when it was rubbed on, grease a squeaking wagon wheel, and, when stored in a glass jar, would predict weather a day before it came. Sharpen a knife with liquid bear grease on the stone and you could shave hair with it after four swipes.

Best thing ever.

So I guess rabbit was third. Bear first, raccoon second, and rabbit third.

But I hadn't shot a 'coon. I'd seen them now and again. Usually on a tree limb when one of the Old Blue visiting dogs stuck them up an oak or an
elm. They'd sit up there and snarl and spit at the dog. One of them, an old boar, must have weighed twenty or twenty-five pounds, maybe more, put up with it for a while, then dropped down and cleaned up on the dog, just beat the bejesus out of him, so he came running back to me and sat on my foot, bleeding a bit here and there, making a kind of small sound. Fishbone said they were water animals, 'coons, and if one of them got a dog in the water, he'd sit on his head and drown him all the way down. Drown him dead. Just hold his head underwater until it was done.

But I'd never shot one even though I had few chances for a shot. A hollow cane arrow was fine for a rabbit or grouse or squirrel but anything bigger . . . no. Not if I wanted a clean kill, a quick kill. A meat kill. Food. Raccoons were just too tough for a simple sharp stick and as for the other, bear.

Well.

Saw a stump near the creek, big old stump
maybe three feet across and six or seven feet tall. Or had been at one time. Completely torn to pieces, torn down and ripped to shreds by a bear looking for grub worms. Which I tried once because Fishbone said bears ate them and some natives ate them, but I couldn't hold one down. Too squishy and gutsy and smeary in my mouth and just made me lose it and puke everything up. I think I'd starve to death before I could actually eat a raw grub worm and hold it down. Of course I've never really starved, where I thought I was going to die of it the way some people have starved right to death. So it's hard to say for sure. But they're pretty bad. Gooey. Grub worms.

So I was looking at this stump thinking it must have been a giant bear, some kind of wild crazy demon bear, and then I saw it. Little thing, couldn't have been more than forty or fifty pounds soaking wet, tearing another stump to junk with just its front paws, digging in with claws as sharp and
handy as knives, just pulling with strong front legs, ripping and pulling the old wood away like some kind of machine.

And I thought. No.

Don't shoot a sharp stick into something like that. It would come at you and the last thing you'd think was that you'd made some kind of perfect know-it-all mistake shooting a sharp stick into a bear. Last thing, while it used those claws and strong front legs to pull you to pieces like a rotten stump. Last thing. And that was a small bear.