by Gary Paulsen
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.
Big one. No. Just clean bite your head off. Wouldn’t even have time for that last thought about how stupid you were to shoot a sharp stick into a bear. One bite. No head.
Fishbone said before they sent him to Korea to get shot some they sent him to a place called Fort Sill in Oklahoma for training. Said it was about artillery, big guns which he never got to use because he got shot and took that ride between the two frozen dead men on the jeep hood before he got to shoot back even with a small gun, let alone the big ones. But they took him out in a kind of mountain-hilly country with other men where they watched the big cannons fire to learn how artillery works. Then farther out, miles out in the same kind of country, to see how they exploded when they hit. Place with old tanks and car bodies for targets and they just blew them all to pieces.
Had chiggers there. Mean little things that got under and inside his boots and underwear and ate on him, he said. Sores all over that itched worse than anything. Worst. And snakes, rattlers and water moccasins, in and around any pond or big puddle, and spiders all over as big as your fist.
Just not a good place.
Said he hated Fort Sill. Hated all of Oklahoma because of his time at Fort Sill. Said it was where Geronimo, the famous Apache warrior, was held prisoner until he died. Fell off a wagon that drove over him and broke his neck, they said, but Fishbone said he probably died just to get out of Fort Sill, take his spirit back to the deserts in Arizona where he was from. Like Jimmy Applecore. Where there were no chiggers and not as many snakes.
But near where they trained on the big guns was a kind of huge park, Fishbone said, where they kept animals in a kind of refuge, about as big a place as some small eastern states. The soldiers were put up in this animal refuge area in small tents, called pup-tents, sleeping on the ground, some of them said, so the chiggers could get at them and eat on them better, and make them into tougher and meaner soldiers.
Probably not quite true, Fishbone said, but it seemed to work that way just the same.
Soldiers got tougher, and maybe meaner, and hated Fort Sill a little more than they would have if they’d been inside clean buildings.
But where they were camped, near the artillery range, there were other animals. Elk, deer, coyotes, and some buffalo. Thing is, Fishbone said, they had a lot of free time. Lower-rank soldiers weren’t allowed to have strong liquor, lik
e ’shine or whiskey, because they were told they couldn’t handle it. Only officers were allowed what they called strong drink. Lower-rank soldiers were allowed beer.
That’s where the trouble came from, Fishbone said. ’Shine would set you to singing, maybe, foot shuffle dancing, telling good stories, but it was too fast, hit a little too hard, for much else. Man would get a little tooted on ’shine, Fishbone said, and he was happy. Or sleeping. Or just quiet dead.
Beer was different, came on slower. Gave a man time to think on being crazy, mean, lead to fights. Led to stupid.
Something the army never understood, Fishbone said. Had all these men in tents on the ground mixed in with animals in this refuge with a lot of free time.
Brought in beer for them.
Cases of beer in brown cans. Free beer. Just no way, he said, any good could come from it.
So one afternoon, they were sitting by their tents, getting wetter and wetter on beer, when one of them pointed at a big bull buffalo standing not so far away, covered with dust and flies in the hot afternoon sun. He said that way back, before they had horses, the Native Americans would sneak up on a buffalo on foot and push a sharp stick into it and kill it for food. Either a spear, or an arrow from a bow. Still. A sharp stick.
Well.
Beer being free and what it was, sitting in crates of army-issue olive-drab cans with the word BEER written on the side of each can. Like you wouldn’t know what they were if they hadn’t spelled it out. And soldiers being bored and what they were, what Fishbone called the worst part of a know-it-all or thought they were, especially when they were drinking beer, nothing good could come of it. Too slow a drink to end fast, too tough a drink to end good . . .
Somebody, nobody quite remembered who, decided it would be a good idea to sharpen a stick, stagger drunkenly over to the buffalo, and try to push the stick into his side. Like the natives did, or the soldiers thought they did, before they had horses. Big old bull. Fishbone said it probably weighed just under a ton. Close on to two thousand pounds. Bull standing there, covered with dust and dirt and flies. Fishbone said he was amazed along with everybody else that the buffalo just stood there while the soldier walked up beside him. Hardly even looked at him.
Stopped there, the soldier, turned around and looked at the rest of them, and they waved him on. Drunk, all of them, drunk as lords, Fishbone said, they waved him on and he nodded, turned slowly, and jabbed the stick into the buffalo’s side.
Or tried to.
Fishbone said he’d never seen anything move so fast. Faster than a striking snake, faster than a cat rolling onto his feet when he’s dropped to the ground. Fast as lightning. Fast. The bull wheeled in place, just a blur, and went to hook a horn in the soldier’s belly. Something made the soldier suck his stomach in, without thinking, and the hooking horn missed his gut—would have pulled it all out of him, Fishbone said, like fifteen feet of worms—and instead caught the belt. Heavy canvas ammo belt, part of his uniform, strong as iron. It wasn’t about to break, and the horn twisted into it and locked it in place.
The bull took off at a dead run, slamming the soldier back and forth and up and down into the ground until he didn’t look like a person anymore. Like a rag, Fishbone said. Shaking rag of loose meat and broken bones and blood and torn pieces of uniform. Just rags.
Hundred and fifty, two hundred yards the belt held, and the soldier slammed back and forth, up and down and finally shook loose. Laid there like old dirt, mucked with blood. Looked dead. The bull went back to just standing, in the dust and heat and flies. Wasn’t even breathing hard.
But the soldier didn’t die. They called for medics and three of them came with an ambulance and took him away, and Fishbone said he lived. Kept him in the hospital for months with pulleys and ropes and plaster casts holding everything together, and Fishbone said his brain quit working right. Went so sideways that they took him out of the army, which wasn’t so bad because most of the men in that class got killed or frozen or shot some like Fishbone when they got sent to Korea.
Didn’t know his own name.
Fishbone said he couldn’t remember his own name for a couple of months and only then because the army doctors told him what it was and made him memorize it before they let him go. Sent him home to his family with his memorized name, and they had to feed him with a spoon. They said he couldn’t hold a spoon in his own hand. And he never did remember the buffalo. All of it wiped clean out of his thinking like shaking dirt out of a rug.
Didn’t happen much, but this time it did: Fishbone was wrong.
Said nothing good could come of the drunk soldier poking that buffalo with a sharp stick, but he was wrong.
Something good came from it. He told me the story and after that there was no way in god’s green earth (which Fishbone said all the time: god’s green earth) that I would try to shove a pointed stick—like a cane arrow—into a bear. Or a wild pig. Which brings up another thing: how can it be god’s green earth when part of the earth is white, at the north and south poles, and blue in the oceans? So I could ask Fishbone about that; aren’t they part of god’s earth? Of course I wouldn’t. Ask him, I mean. That would just add to his thinking that I was being the worst part of a know-it-all. I didn’t need that.
Saved me a lot of problems later, though, so that was some good from it. Not for the soldier. Fishbone said if the man was still alive, he was probably also still being fed with a spoon. But for me there were lots of times when I raised the bow, looking at a wild pig or a bear up in a tree where one of the Old Blue dogs put them. But I never pulled it back, never shot the arrow. And I could have, but didn’t. Maybe saved me so I didn’t have to memorize my name and be fed with a spoon.
Must have been tough, those natives in the old times. Fishbone says they had to be tougher than corrugated iron. And smart. He says they’ve found mammoth bones fifteen, twenty thousand years old, fossils big as elephants, with stone arrow and spear points stuck right in the bone. ’Course we don’t know how it turned out. Maybe the same as that soldier at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. But they tried, just the same, and I don’t know if I’d even try shooting an arrow into a hairy elephant.
Maybe if a person is starving.
Nobody bringing boxes of food back then.
No stores to get food from.
You shot the mammoth or bear then or you didn’t eat. Sometimes I get pretty hungry. Seems like I’m always a little hungry. But there’s always enough bacon grease and flour to make biscuits and gravy, always a can of beans. Always something. Fishbone said he knew a family even more back in the hills, so poor . . . dirt poor. Lived in the open under old tarps. Not tents, just open tarps. Had eight children and two grown people, he said, had nothing every day but gravy, sometimes with biscuits if they had flour, but most often not. Nothing. Just burned gravy. Ate off two planks tied to elm trees, ate standing up from plates that were old metal pie tins nailed with one roofing nail for each through the middle holding it to the plank. Had three spoons they passed around. Most of the young ate with their hands because the older ones got the spoons first. Said they were so bad off they wouldn’t brush the flies off the gravy before they ate. Just scoop them up with the gravy and eat it all.
And still, with all of that, Fishbone said it was better than back in time when they might have to sit and eat bugs and be glad they had it. That back thousands of years ago, if you didn’t grow it and you didn’t shoot it, you didn’t eat, unless you caught something crawling by.
Rough way to live. That’s what Fishbone says. Rough way to live and probably nobody alive now could live that hard. But he said that with a lift in his voice, shuffle-pat of the foot, and a lift with an up-tone kind of crack in his voice so you thought . . .
You thought maybe . . .
You thought maybe if you worked at it and thought on it and did it all just right . . .
Maybe you could live that way. Live rough.
Because . . .
Because Fishbone said.
Be
cause when he said things that way, said them up instead of down, so your thinking went up instead of down, just that way, you thought you could maybe do anything.
Because Fishbone said.
Fifth Song: Dust Flower from a Soldier
Nothing around me but whirling dust,
nothing ahead of me but silver must.
Must come home to you.
Think of you each morning-night,
think of you wrong or right.
Must come home to you.
Think of you each live long day,
think of you when I stand and pray.
Got no home but you.
6
* * *
Treefriends
Fishbone says . . .
Was everything to me, what it meant. Just that. Fishbone says. Even when it didn’t seem like he might be saying very much, was still something there. Could be like the seed in the center of a wild plum. They get ripe and sweet and you eat them, same with his talk, his songs, his shuffle-pats on the wooden porch. Good to listen to, whether or not it’s sweet. Might be about a lady with a snake tattooed on her; or a fast car; or deep cold in Korea; or just a bird sitting on a limb, the way the light hits his feathers, his eye. Might be the color on the side of a fish, darting, there and gone. Stories there and gone.
Maybe just stories. But inside each of them was a seed, a pit, meant more than the story. More than just the sweet on the outside. You might not see it right away, might be thinking about the tattoo or the fast car and miss the reason, miss the part of the story-song that really counted.
Center.
It wasn’t the tattoo, it was the beauty of it, what it meant. It wasn’t the fast car, it was the story of Jimmy Applecore. How short his life turned out. How the money counted, and then didn’t count at all. How there was a Jimmy and a Charlene and then there wasn’t. Just gone. Didn’t matter about the car or the money or the white lightning. The center was Jimmy just like the center was the woman, not the tattooed snake around her neck.
