Page 14

Before

I WATCHED GRIFF’S plane shrink and vanish. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and I jerked around, startled. He looked wounded. “He’ll be back,” he said. “He’ll bring in more supplies. But we’ve got plenty to do in the meantime. Let me show you around.”

“I’ve already seen the whole cabin,” I snapped. I’d seen the outhouse, too. I’d almost cried. I’d had to hold my breath the whole time I peed, flies buzzing all around me and bouncing against the wooden walls. Stuck here, stuck here, I thought, over and over again. “What more is there to see?”

“There’s a whole lot of things to see,” he said. He scratched his chin like he wasn’t quite sure what to say next. “And you’ll have to get to know how things run around here. I can’t take care of everything myself, not with both of us here.”

“You want me to do chores? Fine. Just point the way.”

“Chores? Some, I guess. But you’re going to have to learn to feed yourself. To look after yourself. Sometimes I’ll be gone two, three weeks hunting and that sort of thing. And you’ll have to look after yourself while I’m out there.”

I stared at him. “You’ll leave me alone here?”

He laughed. “You’ll do fine, baby bear.”

He’d called me that twice, and I had absolutely no recollection of it as a nickname. But he kept saying it like he expected me to remember.

“Fine,” I said. Whatever. It wasn’t like I was going to be here long. “Show me around.”

We started with the cabin. Not getting to know the rooms, obviously, since (as my dad said) you could stand at the door and spit on the back wall, but the things in it.

There were three hunting rifles and many boxes of ammunition. There was an ax and a smaller hatchet, an iron poker for the fire, flint for striking sparks, blankets, food, pots, knives, woodworking tools, plastic tarps, hammers, saws, fishing rods, fishing lures, fishing hooks, fishing nets, dried herbs, spices, vitamins, painkillers, antibiotics, jugs of water, jugs of cider, jugs of beer, biscuits, condensed milk, candy, an old can of soda—

I could keep going. I could fill pages. There was so much of it, and I had no idea. I barely even listened as my dad rattled everything off.

When every item was named and inventoried, we walked along the rim of the lake. Near the water a green canoe lay belly-up, speckled with sand. Dad and I carried it down and set it into the water. Or Dad did, hefting it at the middle, and I reached a hand toward the stern as if to help but barely scraped the wood with my fingernails.

My step dragged, and pebbles were harder to navigate than asphalt. I didn’t trust myself with a bulky, unfamiliar weight on top of all of that. Or at least, that’s what I said. I don’t remember anymore if I said it because it was true or because I didn’t want to help. Helping meant giving in to this, even if just a little bit.

If I was going to stay, I wasn’t going to do it cheerfully.

Bo seemed to know where we were going and set off along the shore. There were fish in the lake, trout and perch, and even on this short run Dad dropped a line over the side with a minnow speared on the hook. The rod hooked into an open loop on the side of the canoe, so it wouldn’t get pulled over the side. We were halfway across when the line jerked and danced.

“Reel it in,” Dad said. I hesitated. He swapped himself around and squeezed in next to me, crouching in the bottom of the boat. He put my hands in the proper positions.

I started ploddingly reeling it in. His hand closed over mine. I flinched.

“You can’t let it get too slack,” he told me. “Or he has room to get free of the hook. Bring him in quick.”

I cranked rapidly. The line stretched out into the water, taut and trembling, but I couldn’t see anything underneath. I only knew there was a fish because of the twitching and jerking of the rod in my hands. I could feel every movement as the fish tried to get away. He strained, got tired, strained again, but even at his most frantic the reel gave me the leverage to haul him in bit by bit.

Then suddenly he was at the surface, a speckled, gleaming back appearing for a moment before diving below again. I could feel how tired he’d gotten. The jerks of the line that shot all the way through my arms were slower now, a few strong ones instead of constant fluttering panic.

I wished we could let him go, but my dad was hooting encouragement. I hauled back and whipped the lever around again, and then the fish was out of the water completely, hanging from the hook. He was the length of my forearm, and he arched back and forth in the air, his tail curling to the side with force that would have sent him shooting through the water. Useless in the air, though.

“Bring him over the canoe,” Dad said. It was an awkward procedure with the rod still jerking this way and that as he tried to make his escape, but soon he was flopping madly in the bottom of the boat. Dad trapped the fish with a boot to its speckled side, and then he hit it three times sharply on the back of the head with a little weighted club.

I jumped at every blow. Blood oozed from the fish’s gills. They flared once, twice, slowly as the fish gasped and died. My stomach churned. I’d never killed anything. Or seen anything killed.

“It was just a fish,” I whispered.

“It was just a fish,” Dad echoed. He twisted the hook free. “But a very good fish who will feed us well. Out here, you have to get your food honestly. It doesn’t come in plastic wrap and Styrofoam. You can feel bad for the fish. Or the deer, or the rabbit, or whatever’s on your plate. But I think you should feel thankful instead. Its meat keeps you strong. Keeps you alive.”

“I think it would rather stay alive itself than keep me alive,” I said.

“The fish doesn’t get a vote,” Dad said gravely, and I stuffed down a laugh before it could escape. He waggled his eyebrows at me. “Now why don’t we go make ourselves a little fire, and I’ll show you how to make this fellow into lunch?”

My stomach growled. We’d had some dry pancakes for breakfast. They made the inside of my mouth feel gummy, like they soaked up all my spit, and I had only managed to force down one before I pushed my plate away.