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After
THE FIRST FEW days by the rock, I think a lot about my last conversations with my dad. There weren’t many of them. Not many times we got along. That day, the day I hid, was almost the last. Not quite, but close.
I keep replaying it, changing it. Imagining what conversations we might have had, if everything hadn’t gone wrong.
I imagine him talking to me while I work, putting together makeshift fishing rods. I imagine him giving me advice, only I don’t know a damn thing about making a fishing rod from scratch and I bet he would, so my imagined version of him mumbles a lot.
I start out with just fishing line attached to a stick. I don’t have a good way to reel a fish if I hook it, so I keep the line short and hope it won’t matter too much. I tie another bit of line to a short, fat stick; I figure I can twist the stick to wrap the line around it as a clumsy reel, see if that will work, but I’m guessing. Grasping at straws. I’ve eaten the last of the salmon and too many of the berries (they’ll go bad anyway, I tell myself), and I’m out of time to figure something out.
I finish my work in the evening. I goad the fire to a little more warmth with extra fuel and hunker down, trying to sleep. It’s not easy. The air is filled with humming, droning. Mosquitos. They’ve been around constantly, but tonight they’re thick as a cloud. I feel them against my nostrils, against my lips. I pull my shirt over my nose to keep from breathing them in, wrap extra clothes around me to protect my skin, but they wriggle through and bite and bite and hum, and soon I’m itching everywhere a centimeter of skin has peeked through.
By morning I’m half-crazy with it, skin itching, no sleep, ready to scream. I dig the fleshy part of my fingertips into my arms to keep from scratching off the bites. And then I do scream, sending a pair of crows climbing, startled, into the sky, because there’s no one to hear and no one cares and why shouldn’t I scream?
And then Bo howls, flinging his head back, like he’s joining in, and then, distantly, another howl comes, and Bo’s hackles go up and he growls, and I remember that there are still things out here I don’t care to bring into my camp.
I clamp my teeth over another shout. With all the pain I’ve dealt with, surely I can deal with itching. Right now, I have to focus on fishing.
I’m proud of my decision all morning, fishing instead of building up the shelter. I dig up some worms for bait and keep them in an empty jar. I empty out the canoe bit by bit, tipping it, scooping water out with the jars, and then finally rolling the whole thing over with the walking stick as a lever, and I hardly strain my back at all. Smart, not strong, I congratulate myself, not realizing that I’m neither.
Once Bo realizes I’m going out in the canoe, he takes off. I hope he’s going to find something to eat; he’s looking skinny. So am I.
Swarms of mosquitos buzz over the lake, but I’m too cheerful to care. I have my peaches to keep me fed for the day, and the sweetness is a welcome break from the salty salmon. As soon as I’m out on the lake with my lines in the water I drink some peach juice and then slurp down a whole slice of peach. The sun shines lazily down, and I drift.
A few hours in I realize I’m getting sunburned. It’s hot out, so I’ve taken off my fleece and my rain shell. My arms are pink, getting pinker. My cheeks and the back of my neck are hot. My skin feels tight. I splash water on my face and my neck. I can’t go back yet. I haven’t caught anything.
I wait. Nothing bites. I start leaning over the side of the canoe to see if there are any fish under the water. Nothing.
Finally, fighting back tears, I awkwardly paddle to shore. The temperature drops as the sun dips. I’ve wasted the whole day. My muscles don’t feel rested, they feel tight. I can barely put one foot in front of the other. I should have been stretching, moving to keep myself limber.
I hike back to the rock with new planks dragging behind me and despair crowding out my thoughts. If I can’t fish, how can I get food? All I have are berries and a couple of tiny cucumbers. I’m moping, wishing for a cucumber plucked off a supermarket shelf—hell, wishing for the whole supermarket—when I spot a squirrel. A big, fat squirrel holding a nut, sitting ten feet away and he hasn’t even noticed me.
I lower the planks slowly, letting them settle quietly on the ground. I sling the rifle around. I’m going to get that little bastard. I’m going to make him into squirrel stew.
I line up the sights. I try to think of it like the bow, except I don’t have to aim up the same way; bullets travel faster, which means they cover more horizontal distance before they lose altitude. But the fundamentals are the same: steady hands, line up the shot, breathe steady, breathe out.
Instead of letting go, pull the trigger.
The gun jerks in my hand. The squirrel squirts off at top speed, bounding over the ground. My shot plunked into the ground a foot away. Only a foot!
An entire foot.
The squirrel freezes a few yards away. It flicks its tail and looks around, but it hasn’t run up a tree or disappeared. It probably still wants its nut.
If I don’t move too fast, maybe I can still shoot it. I start to lift the rifle. Then I frown. What did I do wrong? I aimed the sights right at it. My hands are pretty steady; I’ve basically been resting all day. Even if I am fried to a crisp.
I aimed. I pulled the trigger.
I pulled on it pretty hard, I realize. Hard enough that I pulled at the rifle, pulled the aim off as I shot. That’s right. Isn’t that what thrillers always say? Squeeze the trigger. Don’t pull. Go slow, go gentle.
I aim at the squirrel again. Flick, flick goes his tail. Flick, flick.
Crack.
I squeeze the trigger gently. The time between when I start to squeeze and when the rifle cracks feels like an eternity, but I know as soon as the shot goes off that I’ve hit. The squirrel flies up into the air with a jerk as the bullet hits and rips out the other side, embedding itself in the ground. The squirrel drops. I whoop. “I did it!” I yell. Birds burst out of a tree nearby, and I just about double over laughing. “I did it!”
I look around. It takes me a minute to realize I’m looking for someone to tell. I want to tell my dad so he’ll be proud of me. I want to tell Griff so he’ll get that dopey grin on his face. I want to tell my mom, too, though she was a vegetarian, so maybe I’d spare her the details.
A wave of sadness sweeps through me. I trudge over to the squirrel and nudge it with my toe. It looked sleek and fat but now it looks tiny, and I wonder how much meat I can really get from it. The bullet tore it open. The ammunition’s supposed to be for bigger animals. I’ve basically pulverized the thing.
