Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (23 page)

   The fire devoureth both the ends of it, and the midst of it is burnt. Is it meet for any work?

But the river is prodigal of its trees, and better stuff is usually near.

If food is to sit in the fire’s smoke as it cooks, any of the elms will give it a bad taste, though they last and give good heat. Cedar’s oil eats up its wood in no time, and stinks food, too, but the tinge of it on the air after supper is worth smelling if you want to cut a stick or so of it just for that. Rock-hard bodark—Osage orange if you want; bois d’arc if you’re etymological—sears a savory crust on meat and burns a
long time, if you don’t mind losing a flake out of your ax’s edge when you hit it wrong. For that matter, not much of it grows close enough to the river to become drift. Nor does much mesquite—a pasture tree and the only thing a conscientious Mexican cook will barbecue kid over. Ash is all right but, as dry drift anyhow, burns fast. The white oaks are prime, the red oaks less so, and one of the finest of aromatic fuels is a twisted, wave-grained branch of live oak, common in the limestone country farther down the river.

Maybe, though, the nutwoods are best and sweetest, kind to food and long in their burning. In the third tangle I nicked a huge branch of walnut, purple-brown an inch inside its sapwood’s whitened skin. It rots slowly; this piece was sound enough for furniture making—straight-grained enough, too, for that matter. I chopped it into long pieces. The swing and the chocking bite of the ax were pleasant; the pup chased chips as they flew, and I kept cutting until I had twice as many billets as I would need. Then I stacked them for later hauling and went to camp to use up the afternoon puttering with broken tent loops and ripped tarps and sprung hinges on boxes, throwing sticks for the passenger, looking in a book for the differences among small streaked finches, airing my bed, sweeping with a willow branch the sandy gravel all through a camp I’d leave the next day.…

I lack much zeal for camping, these years. I can still read old Kephart with pleasure: nearly half a century later hardly anyone else has come anywhere near him for information and good sense. But there’s detachment in my pleasure now. I no longer see myself choosing a shingle tree and felling it and splitting out the shakes for my own roof, though if I did want to he would tell me how.… Nor have I passion for canoeing, as such; both it and the camping are just ways
to get somewhere I want to be, and to stay there foi a time. I can’t describe the cross-bow rudder stroke or stay serene in crashing rapids. I carry unconcentrated food in uncompact boxes. I forget to grease my boots and suffer from clammy feet. I slight hygiene, and will finger a boiled minnow from the coffee with equanimity, and sleep with my dog. My tent in comparison to the aluminum-framed, tight-snapping ones available is a ragged parallelogrammatic disaster.

Nevertheless, when camping for a time is the way of one’s life, one tries to improve his style. One resolves on changes for future trips—a tiny and exactly fitted cook box; a contour-cut tarp over the canoe hooking to catches beneath the gunwales; no peaches in the mixed dried fruit.… One experiments and invents, and ends up, for instance, with a perfect aluminum-foil reflector for baking that agreeable, lumpy, biscuit-mixed bread that the Mexicans call
“pan ranchero”
and the northwoods writers “bannock” and other people undoubtedly other names.

One way or the other, it all generally turns out to be work. Late that afternoon, carrying abrasive armloads of the walnut from where I’d chopped it to camp, I got as though from the air the answer to a question that used to come into my mind in libraries, reading about the old ones and the Indians. I used to wonder why, knowing Indians were around, the old ones would let themselves be surprised so often and so easily. Nearly all the ancient massacres resulted from such surprise.

The answer, simple on the island, was that the old ones were laboring their tails off at the manifold tasks of the primitive life, hewing and hauling and planting and plowing and breaking and fixing. They didn’t have time to be wary. Piped water and steam heat and tractors might have
let them be alert, just as I’d been among the stacked tomes of the Southwest Collection.

It was a good day, work and all. At evening I sat astraddle the bow of the canoe on the beach, putting new line on the spinning reel, when three big honkers came flying up the river slowly, low searchers like the first ones of the evening before. The gun was at hand. Even though they veered, separating, as I reached for it, they still passed close, and it needed only a three-foot lead on the front one’s head to bring him splashing solidly, relaxed, dead, into the channel. I trotted downstream abreast of him as he drifted and finally teased him ashore with a long crooked piece of cottonwood.

Till then I’d had the visceral bite of the old excitement in me, the gladness of clean shooting, the fulfillment of quarry sought and taken. But when I got him ashore and hefted the warm, handsome eight or nine pounds of him, and ran my fingers against the grain up through the hot thick down of his neck, the just-as-old balancing regret came into it. A goose is a lot of bird to kill. Maybe size shouldn’t matter, but it seems to. With something that big and that trimly perfect and, somehow, that meaningful, you wonder about the right of the thing.…

For a while after the war I did no shooting at all, and thought I probably wouldn’t do any more. I even chiseled out a little niche for that idea, half Hindu and tangled with the kind of reverence for life that Schweitzer preaches. But then one day in fall beside a stock tank in a mesquite pasture a friend wanted me to try the heft of a little engraved L. C. Smith, and when I’d finished trying it I’d dropped ten doves with sixteen shots and the niche didn’t exist any longer.

Reverence for life in that sense seems to me to be like asceticism or celibacy: you need to be built for it. I no longer kill anything inedible that doesn’t threaten me or mine, and I never cared anything about big-game hunting. Possibly I’ll give up shooting again and for good one of these years, but I believe the killing itself can be reverent. To see and kill and pluck and gut and cook and eat a wild creature, all with some knowledge and the pleasure that knowledge gives, implies a closeness to the creature that is to me more honorable than the candle-lit consumption of rare prime steaks from a steer bludgeoned to death in a packing-house chute while tranquilizers course his veins. And if there’s a difference in nobility between a Canada goose and a fat white-faced ox (there is), how does one work out the quantities?

Though I threw the skin and head and guts into the river to keep them away from the pup, an eddy drifted them into shore and he found them and ate a good bit before I caught him at it. The two big slabs of breast hissed beautifully in foil on the fire after dark. When they were done I hung them up for a time uncovered in the sweet walnut smoke and then ate nearly all of one of them. The other would make sandwiches at noon for two or three days, tucked inside chunks of biscuit bread. Despite his harsh appetizers, the passenger gobbled the drumsticks and organs I’d half roasted for him, and when I unrolled the sleeping bag inside the tent he fought to be first into it.

Later, in half-sleep, I heard a rattle of dirty metal dishes beside the fire. I shot the flashlight’s beam out there and a sage, masked face stared at me, indignant. Foreseeing sport, I hauled the pup up for a look. He blinked, warm and full, and dug in his toes against ejection into the cold air, and
when I let him go he burrowed all the way down beside my feet, not a practical dog and not ashamed of it, either. The coon went away.

Later still, the goosefeathers began their emetic work and I woke to the rhythmic
wump, wump, wump
that in dogs precedes a heave. Though the account of it may lack wide interest, later it seemed to me that there had been heroic co-ordination in the way I came out of sleep and grabbed him, holding his jaws shut with one hand while I fought to find the bag’s zipper with the other, then fought to find and loose the zipper of the tent, too, and hurled him out into the night by his nose. He stayed there for a while, and when I was sure he’d finished I let him back in, low-eared and shivering, but I preferred his unhappiness to what might have been.

It came to me then who it was that had slept with a dog for his health. Leopold Bloom’s father. The dog’s name had been … Athos! Old Man Bloom had slept with Athos to cure his aches and pains.

One can get pretty literary on islands.

THERE was an old man, too. He lived beside the river in Parker County, and my Weatherford friend had told me to look out for him, that he knew things. I scudded down there one afternoon before a bleak, damp, cutting norther, past shores with a farming-country sameness in their look. Willows and sand and cottonwoods, and at a fence line before a field, dead limb tangles shrouded in grapevines … Lost fishlines were looped around branches above the water; old refrigerators and washtubs and barbed-wire reels cluttered the bars.

At about the place where I guessed from my friend’s description that the old man ought to live, I parked the canoe and tied it, and with the pup climbed up through bright-leaved hardwoods to a pasture. Across its fence and a dirt road stood a neat, white, new cottage with no grass or shrubs, square-surrounded by a tight hog-wire fence. Fifty yards behind it was a double hewn-log cabin, boarded on the ends, in what looked to be good condition, with a galvanized roof
and winter-bare rosebushes against its walls. White Leghorns scratched to leeward of a part-log barn, and a pair of milk cows stood waiting.

At the gate I stopped, and under the wind’s cut yelled: “Hello, the house!”—formula in that country, where you don’t barge into yards or bang on doors until you’ve used up remoter salutations and seen if there are any big dogs.