Gone to the Woods

by Gary Paulsen

  The next fish was still difficult to scale, but seemed to go a little better and he choked a bit on the guts but didn’t actually heave anything up. And the one after that was still less problematical and by the fourth one Sig looked and smiled and said, “It looks like you’ve been cleaning fish your whole life.”

  Which wasn’t true at all but made him feel good just the same and the boy followed him in a proud strut, carrying his four fish to the fire pit like he’d been doing that his whole life as well.

  He still had no idea what exactly they were supposed to do with the fish next. Naturally he knew they were going to cook them and eat them, but he was so hungry he probably could have eaten them raw.

  This was another chance to watch Sig work at living outdoors—to watch and learn. He made a grassy bed next to the pit and laid the eight fish in a neat row on the clean grass. Then he broke dry twigs from the limbs they had taken from the poplars, made a small twig teepee in the center of the pit, and, with one match, started the twigs on fire.

  As soon as the tiny fire was going well, he broke bigger sticks and still bigger limbs and stacked them over the little fire. In no time, there was a nice fire going and he picked up the sheet-metal frying pan, wiped it clean with another handful of grass, and set it aside. From the jar of white lard, he scooped out a good chunk with his fingers and shook it into the pan.

  He then took two corn muffins out of the bag in his pack. Using the same finger he smeared each of the muffins with a thin layer of lard, took the little jar of salt he had brought and sprinkled salt on the larded muffins, and handed one of them to the boy.

  “An appetizer,” he said. “Take small bites and chew it slowly.”

  The boy grew to be an old man. And Lord knew he would eat thousands of meals in thousands of places from other great wilderness campfires and military foxholes to fancy, expensive restaurants in New York City where he could live a month on what the meal cost, but he would never eat anything to rival that muffin. Not ever.

  He tried to do as Sig said. Take small bites and chew slowly. Edy must have used sugar, he thought, because the bites were so sweet and seemed to melt in his mouth in a salty-sweet joy-taste that made him smile except that he was also close to crying.

  “Good,” he said, “so good.”

  And he knew that Sig saw the tears but he looked away and nodded. “She makes a great corn muffin.”

  “Good.” It’s all he could think to say. “Way good.”

  And it was wonderful, but it also had a downside in that it awakened in him an absolutely ravenous wolf of hunger. Along with the smile and tears, he nearly growled with it.

  Sig nodded again, as if seeing the wolf in him, and he slid the frying pan into the fire and coals. Out of the magic pack he pulled a large potato, which he washed by rubbing it with fresh green grass. Then he used his belt knife to cut slices so thin you could almost see through them, which he dropped and spread carefully in the frying pan where the lard had melted and was sizzling. On top of the potatoes he sprinkled a bit of salt.

  The boy’s mouth was still watering from the taste of corn muffin and his hunger grew more pronounced, if that were possible, with the smell of frying potatoes. Sig used his spoon to flip the slices neatly over, like tiny pancakes, and in a short time he nodded and said, “Done.”

  More magic from the pack as he pulled out two beat-up ancient metal pie pans and put them on the ground by the fire pit. He arranged the potatoes in two neat equal stacks, one in each tin plate, added a bit more lard and salt to the frying pan, and put in four of the fish, which covered the bottom of the pan.

  The fish cooked rapidly and he flipped them over once to get both sides and then put two in each plate, using his spoon to spread the stacked potatoes across the top of the fish.

  “To get the taste of the fish in the spuds,” he said.

  “How?”

  He had never eaten a fish, especially a whole one that had just been caught, and wasn’t sure whether he should ask or not, but Sig nodded before he’d finished the question.

  “Push the potatoes aside to eat after the fish in case you get a bone stuck in your throat. The potatoes will push it down.” He ate with his fingers while he talked. “Eat the skin first, then you can see the meat alongside the backbone and over the ribs. Lift it out with your fingers and eat slow and leave the bones in the fish. When you get done, you can suck the eyes out before you do the next fish.”

  He remembered thinking that somewhere, someplace, there were people who wouldn’t believe you could sit next to a campfire and eat the skin off a dead fish and then suck the eyes out.

  And at first he was totally certain he could not do that either. But he watched Sig do as he had said, eating the cooked skin and sucking the eyes out with great relish, and he was hungry.

  So he did it.

  The skin was crisp and salty and made him think of a flexible potato chip and the eyes tasted like salty jelly. Before they finished the first two fish each, Sig had put the next four in the pan and they ate them and topped them with the salty, greasy potatoes, even though the boy did not need to push any bones down his throat. For dessert, they split another corn muffin in half and used it to scrape the bottom of the frying pan clean of grease and juice.

  He was not full. He thought that he might never be truly full again after a day of only eating one meal, and so late in the day at that. But he was satisfied and more than ready to call it a day, to close his eyes and let sleep claim him.

  But they were not done yet. He had leaned back in the grass and let the evening sun start to work at him when Sig stood up and took his plate and frying pan to the stream. He washed them, scrubbing them clean with handfuls of fresh grass dipped in stream water.

  Sig didn’t look at him, but the boy knew, he knew. He rolled over and took his plate down to the water and washed it, along with his spoon, and thought, All right, now it’s time to take it easy.

  “More wood,” Sig said.

  This time he merely nodded and moved into the trees and started breaking dry limbs to put next to the fire pit. Only now he wasn’t alone. The evening light had come, the soft time, with shade back in the trees, and with it came the blood drinkers, the mosquitoes. At first only a couple, then a few, and then, out of nowhere, clouds of them, so thick they plugged his nostrils and made him breathe through his mouth so that he wound up swallowing them.

  It wasn’t possible; there couldn’t be that many of them. Thousands, millions, so many you couldn’t see through them, so bad they coated his hands and face like fur. He brushed and slapped and slapped and brushed them away and still they came until he couldn’t stand it and used some of the corker words from the Chicago bars while he ran out of the trees.

  Sig was by the fire pit and he actually smiled at the boy as he ran up. The boy could see nothing to make him smile. But Sig shrugged and added wood to the fire and as the boy came close he threw a handful of grass and green leaves on the fire. A cloud of smoke billowed up, wafted around, and the mosquitoes disappeared.

  Just like that.

  “And that,” he said, “is why we need more wood. A lot more wood.”

  “But how…?” He coughed smoke. “How can I go back in there? They’ll kill me, take all my blood.” He was already starting to scratch. “Or I’ll itch to death.”

  “Stand in the smoke,” Sig said. “Stand in it and wipe it into your clothes, your hair. Wash in it like you were washing your hands.”

  “Wash in smoke?”

  He nodded. “It doesn’t last forever but it will give you a few minutes until the smell leaves you. Then you bring back a load of wood and smoke-wash again. You’ll be fine.”

  The boy didn’t really believe him, but he stood and did as he was told, washed in smoke. “I’ll help you gather wood after I get the water on.” Sig dug in the bottom of the pack and brought out the beaten and dented three-quart saucepan. While the boy stood in the smoke—he wanted to make sure he got a good dose of the smell—
Sig went to the stream, brushed away a clear place on the surface, and filled the saucepan with water. He tucked it back into the fire and stood, washing his clothes with smoke.

  “What’s the water for?”

  “Aren’t you thirsty?”

  He could have drunk the entire stream, he thought, but didn’t say. They had gone all day without drinking, and if Sig didn’t seem to need it, the boy wasn’t about to whine. Once they ate, the thirst grew worse. The salt with the fish and potatoes had driven it into his brain.

  “Can’t drink the stream without boiling,” he said. “Too much duck crap in the water. Makes you sick.” He gestured farther downstream, then over to the left. “On the ridge where we’re going to hunt mushrooms tomorrow, there’s a spring. We can drink there all we want. Pure water. No duck crap.”

  The boy couldn’t understand why they had to “hunt” mushrooms. Seems like they would just pick them. But he felt he had used up his questions so he held that one for later, with all the rest. Besides, they had moved into the trees and started gathering more wood. He found Sig was right. Washing in smoke kept the mosquitoes away, or most of them, and by the time the smoke wore off and they came back in strength, he and Sig had double armfuls of wood.

  So back to the fire pit, more wood on the flames, more leaves and grass on the fire, more smoke-washing, then back into the trees and repeat. They kept going like that until it was dark and the boy thought they had enough wood to burn for a week. Huge pile.

  By this time, he was so tired he was staggering, and when it was time to sleep, he didn’t lie down so much as collapse to his knees, then roll over and sprawl on one of the blankets Sig had laid out on the tarp.

  He did not remember closing his eyes, but he must have because he slept, or more correctly passed out, and dreamt one dream after another. In one he was being chased by geese, in another an old car was after him, and then the geese were driving the car after him … and on and on.

  Sometime in the night, Sig must have covered him with part of his blanket, and he vaguely remembered coming slightly awake several times while a big bear—part of a dream—put more wood on the fire and added leaves to make more smoke. The bear had blue eyes and smiled while he put the leaves on the flames and then giant mosquitoes came with the geese driving the old car and chased the smiling bear away while he ran into the house through the kitchen and up the stairs to his attic room.

  And then it was morning.

  He woke up and the first thing in his brain was the thought that his dreams had been nuts. Who ever heard of a bear with blue eyes?

  The sun was in his eyes and he turned away to see Sig sitting by the fire. When he saw the boy awake, he handed him a cup of water from the saucepan. The water was cool—he must have taken the pot off the fire in the night—and the boy sipped it at first and then, when he tasted how wonderful it was, gulped it down.

  “Give me the cup,” Sig said when it was empty.

  The boy handed him the empty cup and Sig filled it again. “Drink more. All you can hold. I’ve already had mine.”

  Two more tin cups and he was past thirst, into hunger. Stomach growling.

  “No hot breakfast,” he said—it was as if he were reading the boy’s mind, or heard his stomach. “No fire. We’re leaving. Got to hit the ridge early.”

  He was talking less now and the boy was beginning to learn how it worked, his talking. You could ask a question or help him do something and he would help you do it right, give you a good answer.

  Just the once. And if you did it or it was obvious you understood what to do, that was it. He didn’t have to talk about it again. And he didn’t. Edy had said he might go the whole day without saying much and that’s what happened this morning.

  They rolled up the blankets and tarp, Sig packed everything that was supposed to be in the pack, they slid the canoe in the water, and off they went. Without a single word. The boy climbed in the front of the canoe, settled on the bottom on his knees, and grabbed the paddle. Sig pushed them out into the water, jumped in, used his paddle over the side to turn them and get them headed downstream, and stroked a couple of times with all his shoulder strength to get them moving.

  The boy paddled as best he could and they went around two bends in the stream into another new world; more shade and, in this place, mossy banks so that it seemed like an imaginary place. He found himself expecting to see fairies around the next bend. But they didn’t travel far. Once they cleared the second bend, the land went up and away on the left side, a hill that led to a ridge forested with poplar. Sig pulled the canoe over to the bank.

  “We walk from here,” he said as the boy hopped out and watched him push the canoe over so the side was against the bank. “Back and forth up the hill to the ridge.”

  They pulled the canoe well up on the bank, Sig took the pack, and the boy came with the tarp and blanket roll—which was about the maximum he could carry—and they moved toward the bottom of the ridge hill.

  Once there, Sig made his way into a small stand of hazel bushes and, on the other side, they came out on a little clearing with a trickling spring at one side. Here he set the pack down, fished out two cups, and handed the boy one. “Drink all you can hold.”

  The water was cold and tasted sweet, like drinking a sugared beverage, and he did as Sig said, sitting on the bedroll. Sig rummaged around in the pack—the boy thought, My God, is it really bottomless?—and came up with two empty cloth flour sacks. They had prints of flowers on them and had clearly been washed until there was very little picture left, but on the boy’s sack along with the flowers there was a picture of a farmhouse that looked a lot like Sig and Edy’s house. He had a quick thought-image of the house and Edy coming to meet him on the driveway and wondered what Edy was doing right then. It seemed they had been gone forever and he remembered with a start that they had been there yesterday and he had only arrived the day before that and he hadn’t thought of Chicago or the train or his mother since yesterday. Or was it the day before?

  Mother. He tried to picture her in his mind, but she came out blurry and edgy and he thought it was like a different world back there in Chicago, gray and grimy and stinky, and what if he never went back? How would that be? Maybe not so bad.

  Sig interrupted his thinking by handing him one sack and starting toward the bottom of the ridge, taking large uphill strides so the boy was nearly running to stay with him. After they’d gone a fair distance—the boy was panting—they came into the poplars where it was cool and shady and the short grass was slightly damp.

  “They spread their spores in places like this, on the north side of hills in poplars,” Sig said. “I worked this ridge the other day and found a couple of mushrooms. There should be a lot more now.”

  The boy was still basing everything he knew on pictures he had seen in little books that were read to him where tiny people lived under big mushrooms in a fairy land where the mushrooms were called toadstools. Which made him wonder why—did toads sit on them? And what happened to the little people if toads were always sitting above them on mushrooms and made poop? Wouldn’t toad poop be worse than goose poop?

  Or maybe toads didn’t have to poop.

  “What we’re after are called morel mushrooms,” Sig said, again stopping the boy’s runaway thinking before he started asking questions about toad poop. “They’re about as big as my thumb”—he held up a thumb—“and look a lot like a little Christmas tree. They are also very hard to see at first, until you see one and then you can find them everywhere. Edy says it’s because they know how to play hide-and-seek.”

  “I see a mushroom now,” the boy said, pointing. It was exactly like the ones in the picture books—short stem and a little round cap on top. “Right there.”

  Sig shook his head. “Wrong kind. Eat that and you’ll die. Some mushrooms are poison. The morels are safe and that’s the only kind we’re picking.”

  Well, the boy thought. They were hunting mushrooms and he found one, wrong kind or not. S
o.

  “You go right, I’ll take left, and we’ll work up to the top of the ridge.” He started moving, only not big strides but careful, like he was actually hunting something alive. The boy did the same, careful of the way he moved, watching the ground, and for fifteen or twenty steps he saw nothing but green grass.

  “Like this,” Sig said in a moment. “Come see.”

  As the boy came up to him, he held out a small dark mushroom and he was right. It was about three inches high, brown and tapered with little ridges running up and down the side looking for all the world like a tiny brown Christmas tree.

  “Look for this,” he said. “See the shape of the line? If you look for that shape, the little cone shape, it makes them easier to see.”

  The boy moved off to the side and started up the hill. At first he saw many of the other kind of mushroom—the toadstools—but none of the morels. And then, at the base of a tree, near a coating of moss, he saw one. It seemed to appear, as if by magic—as so many things seemed magical lately—just there. No mushroom, and then a mushroom.

  “I found one,” he yelled to Sig. “How do I pick it?”

  “Take it all. The top and the stem. Just take it up and put it in your sack and look for more…”

  He picked it—it came away easily—and put it in his flour bag and stood and again, as if by some change in light or shade, he saw them all over the place. It didn’t seem possible. He had looked before and didn’t see any and now they were everywhere and he went to picking.

  He could not have measured time or even distance. He kept picking what he could see and moving to the next stand, sticking them in his flour sack as he went. He was completely caught up hunting, his head down, looking for the next mushroom, perhaps halfway to the top of the ridge, when Sig called to him.

  “Wait for a second.”

  He had been working well away from the boy’s position, and now he set his sack down and took long strides over to him. From inside his shirt pocket, he dug out a corn muffin and handed it to the boy.