Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (21 page)

THERE was an island, long and slim, built up of the variegated Brazos chert gravel, which, when wet and shining, looks like the jewels in a storybook treasure chest. Its top was padded with white sand and bordered by big willows and small cottonwoods. Toward the blunt upper end, where spring’s drouth-breaking floods had worked to most effect, lay a bare-swept sandy plain, and the few trees along the shoreline there were bent downstream at steep angles. Against stubs and stumps down the length of the island the same force had laid up tangled jams of driftwood—ash and cedar elm and oak, good fuel. Here and there where silt had accumulated, Bermuda grass or weeds bristled in patches.

Because I liked the look of it, I stopped there in the middle of a quiet bright afternoon and made a solid camp on flat gravel under willows, eight feet above the water but only a few nearly vertical steps from the canoe. I was tired and my gear needed tending, and it looked like the kind of place I’d been waiting for to spend a couple of nights and to loaf through a little of what the abstractly alliterative military schedules used to call “matériel maintenance.” Islands are special, anyhow, as children know with a leaping instinct,
and when they lie in public domain you can have a fine sense of temporary ownership about them that’s hard to get on shores, inside or outside of fences.

By the time I’d finished setting up and hauling my chattels from the canoe—all of them, since they all needed cleaning or fixing—it was nearly evening. The stronger of the channels flanking the island ran on the side where I was camped; I walked up the narrow beach and put out a catfish line just below where the water dropped out of a rapids, tying a rock to the line’s end and throwing it straight out so that when the line came taut the rock dropped gurgling and anchored the line in a long bow across the head of the deep run, back to a willow stub beside me. Trotlines from shore to shore get you more fish and bigger ones, but they’re also more labor. After I’d finished with the line I worked along the beach, spin-casting bootlessly for bass. Four Canada geese came diagonally over the river, low, calling, and in a moment I heard a clamor at the head of the island, shielded from me by the island’s duned fringe and by willows. I climbed up through them to look. At least 200 more honkers took off screaming from the sand bar at the upper end of the bare plain. The passenger ran barking after them. Calling him back, I squatted beside a drift pile, and in the rose half-light of dusk watched through the field glass as they came wheeling in again, timid but liking the place as I had liked it, and settled by tens and twenties at the bar and in the shallows above it where the two channels split.

Nine skeptics, maybe the ones that had seen me at first and raised the alarm, circled complaining for a time before they flew on elsewhere. Black against water that held the west’s reflected red, the others stalked about till their alertness had softened, then began to drink and cavort,
lunging at one another, leaping into the air with their wings spread and circling two by two in a kind of dance. Old John Magnificence was with me:

He was. I used to be suspicious of the kind of writing where characters are smitten by correct quotations at appropriate moments. I still am, but not as much. Things do pop out clearly in your head, alone, when the upper layers of your mind are unmisted by much talk with other men. Odd bits and scraps and thoughts and phrases from all your life and all your reading keep boiling up to view like grains of rice in a pot on the fire. Sometimes they even make sense.…

I thought of the shotgun at my camp a hundred yards below, but it would have been useless if I’d had it; they were a long way from any cover. And for that matter there was about them something of the feel that the bald eagle had had for me in the mountain country. I’d been a hunter most of my life, except for two or three years after the war. Young, I’d made two-hour crawls on my belly through standing swamp water for the mere hope of a shot at a goose, nearly always frustrated. Just now, though, it seemed to matter little that these were safe out of range. Watching the red-and-black shadow show of their awkward powerful play was enough, and listening to their occasional arrogant horn shouts. I squatted there watching until nearly dark, then backed down quietly to the beach and went to camp.

Supper was a young squirrel who had nevertheless
achieved an elder’s stringiness, roasted in foil on the embers, and a potato baked in the same way. I’d been going lazy on the cooking lately, mostly because I had little appetite, and that little most generally for things I’d have disliked in town—bouillon, or coffee thickly sweet with honey, or the stewed mixed fruit that made my breakfasts. From such sparse eating and from exercise I’d lost weight—maybe twelve or fifteen pounds since Possum Kingdom, to judge from the slack in my waistband. I ate the potato and chewed a little on the squirrel and gave the rest of it to the pup.

Hearing the geese honk still from time to time, I knew it would have been easy enough, on that moonless night, to ease up the defiladed beach near them and sneak across the sand on my stomach for a sniping shot. All it would take was patience. But I was years past being tempted by that kind of dirtiness; the contradictory set of rules that one works out for killing, if he keeps on killing past a certain age, usually makes an unreasonable distinction between ways that are honorable and ways that aren’t, and for me night pot shots weren’t.… And I didn’t think I needed anything as big as a goose.

Someone else’s rules were less strict, or maybe his need was greater; when I’d put a couple of heavy chunks of elm on the fire and sat watching them, sniffing the faintly urinal sharpness of their burning, two rapid shots sounded far off down the river and a minute later geese were calling confusedly in the sky. Stacked alongside my own abstention it angered me a little, but on the other hand it was none of my right business.

From brief yards away, in a Cottonwood, a barred owl cut loose with flourishes:
Who, who, whoo, whoo, whah, whah, hah
, HAH, HAH, WHO
ALL!

Then, an afterthought, he said: YOU ALL!

Certain it meant specifically him, the passenger barked back once almost under his breath, growled a little with an angry ridge of short hair dark along his spine, and sought my lap.

E
LM STINKS
, wherefore literal farmers give it a grosser name, but it makes fine lasting coals. That morning I was up before dawn to blow away the ashes from the orange-velvet embers underneath, and to build more fire on them with twigs and leaves and brittle sticks of dead cottonwood. I huddled over it in the cold, still, graying darkness and watched coffee water seethe at the edges of a little charred pot licked by flame, and heard the horned owl stop that deceptively gentle five-noted comment he casts on the night. The geese at the island’s head began to talk among themselves, then to call as they rose to go to pastures and peanut fields, and night-flushed bobwhites started whistling
where-you? where-you?
to one another somewhere above the steep dirt river bank. Drinking coffee with honey in it and canned milk, smoking a pipe that had the sweetness pipes only have in cold quiet air, I felt good if a little scratchy-eyed, having gone to sleep the night before struck with the romance of stars and firelight, with the flaps open and only the blanket over me, to wake at two thirty chilled through.

On top of the food box alligator-skin corrugations of frost had formed, and with the first touch of the sun the willows began to whisper as frozen leaves loosed their hold and fell side-slipping down through the others that were still green. Titmice called, and flickers and a redbird, and for a moment, on a twig four feet from my face, a chittering kinglet jumped around alternately hiding and flashing the scarlet of its
crown.… I sat and listened and watched while the world woke up. and drank three cups of the syrupy coffee, better I thought than any I’d ever tasted, and smoked two pipes.

You run a risk of thinking yourself an ascetic when you enjoy, with that intensity, the austere facts of fire and coffee and tobacco and the sound and feel of country places. You aren’t, though. In a way you’re more of a sensualist than a fat man washing down Sauerbraten and dumplings with heavy beer while a German band plays and a plump blonde kneads his thigh.… You’ve shucked off the gross delights, and those you have left are few, sharp, and strong. But they’re sensory. Even Thoreau, if I remember right a passage or so on his cornbread, was guilty, though mainly he was a real ascetic.

Real ones shouldn’t care. They ought to be able to live on pâté and sweet peaches and roast suckling pig or alternatively on cheese and garlic in a windmill or the scraps that housewives have thrown in begging bowls. Groceries and shelter should matter only as fuel and frame for life, and life as energy for thought or beyond-communion or (Old Man Goodnight has to fit somewhere, and a fraught executive or two I’ve known, and maybe Davis Birdsong hurling his bulldozer against the tough cedar brush in a torn shirt and denim pants, coughing yellow flu sputum while the December rain pelts him, not caring) for action.

But I hadn’t set up as an ascetic, anyhow. I sat for a long time savoring the privilege of being there, and didn’t overlay the taste of the coffee with any other food. A big red-brown butterfly sat spread on the cottonwood log my ax was stuck in, warming itself in the sun. I watched until it flew stiffly away, then got up and followed, for no good reason except
that the time seemed to have come to stir and I wanted a closer look at the island than I’d gotten the evening before.

It was shaped like an attenuated teardrop or the cross section of an airplane’s wing, maybe three quarters of a mile long and 100 yards or so wide at its upper, thicker end. Its foundation everywhere appeared to be a heavy deposit of the multicolored gravel, and its flat top except for a few high dunes of the padding sand was eight or ten feet above the present level of the river. All around, it dropped off steeply, in spots directly to the water, in others to beaches, and toward the pointed tail the willows and weeds stood rank. I rooted about there and found nothing but coon tracks and a few birds still sleepy and cold on their roosts, but, emerging among cockleburs above a beach by the other channel, scared four ducks off a quiet eddy. I’d left the gun in the tent; shots from here and there under the wide sky’s bowl reminded me that busier hunters than I were finding game.

Let them. I considered that maybe in the evening I’d crouch under a bush at the island’s upper end and put out sheets of notepaper on the off chance that more geese would come, and the off-off chance that if they did they’d feel brotherly toward notepaper. You can interest them sometimes in newspapers.