Several yards into the shadowed forest I threw the rabbit guts across the snow where they spread a shameful stain. I walked slowly back to the house with my rabbit in my hand and wondered how many days I had left. I knew we couldn’t stay. Soon I would have to put away my snares and say good-bye to the cabin in the woods that I was just beginning to come to know.
As if reading my mind, Mom confirmed my fears when I returned to the house. She took the rabbit and laid it in a pan of cold water. As she washed her hands she leaned against the sink and smiled the first real smile I’d seen in several weeks. “Are you proud of yourself, bringing home dinner like a man?”
“I hope I gutted it okay,” I said.
“It’s just fine.” She moved across the room shortening the distance between us. “Sam, you’ll have to pull your snares in a few days.”
I nodded my answer, feeling the comfort of her presence and the warmth of the fire in the woodstove. I knew she was heading to Anchorage to start a job, and we kids were to be farmed out with friends until we finished the school year.
Perhaps it was the purity of a sleeping forest in winter, or maybe it was just the safe, warm feeling of the cabin itself with its memory of Dad’s laugh and the taste of his cream and sugar coffee. For whatever reason, the homestead was a good place to be, especially for a guy like me. Then I knew that in this, my first time in the woods alone, long before the end of winter’s shadow, I had started a new part of my life.
Chapter 3
At the end of March, Joe left home for Anchorage. It was a quiet, casual departure as if he was just going to the beach site for a couple of days instead of moving out on his own to the city two hundred miles away. Mom, Mary, and I were still on the porch and the sound of his car had just faded when Art Mitkof pulled up in his green Chevy pickup. He came in and sat at the table as he often did on winter mornings, sipping his sweetened coffee while Mom worked.
Mom started washing dishes, then worked restlessly across the kitchen to tend pans of rising bread. She had taken to baking bread again, the one thing she truly loved to do. There was even a touch of color back in her cheeks.
Art rubbed his pant leg with a nervous hand. “Spring’s out there somewhere,” he said. “Soon be time to hang some new web.”
“John always said winter was for hanging web,” said Mom. “Spring seems kinda late.”
Art had grown up in Ninilchik. He was part Russian and part Dena’ina Indian, with his slick black hair and thin mustache. He had fished the beach beside us all my life. “Yeah, John, he was always a little ahead o’ me on that one.”
“That was his way.” Mom leaned on her bread dough and took a deep breath.
Art ran a handful of fingers through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck. “I gotta tell ya,” he said, “I don’t like to see you sell off like this.”
Mom slammed a fist into the bread dough and turned to face him. “Art, I gotta sell the fish sites and go to Anchorage. There’s no two ways about it. What am I going to live on here? I can’t fish. I’m not about to put myself in a dory and pretend I know what I’m doing. It’s not what I want, Art. I just don’t see another way. We are keeping the land and the house, but the fish sites gotta go.”
Her chubby body seemed to sag in the dress she wore. “Joe’s already gone to Anchorage to get a construction job. Without him, fishing’s out of the question. You know I can’t run that skiff, much less set a net. Sam here is eager, but he doesn’t have the beef for it, and I sure can’t afford to hire a hand. Those sites barely fed us as it was, and John still had to hire on to that oil exploration crew and go doodle-buggin’ most every winter.”
“You know I’d help you,” said Art. I could see his face as he imagined himself trying to keep his nets mended and in the water while he babysat the Barger clan.
“Art, you’re a doll, but face it, you can’t hardly get around to your own work much less help me.”
I could see Mom had hurt his feelings, but she was right. Dad always said the only thing Art would work at was fishing and sometimes even that got to be too much like work. I saw him look away out the window and down the road like he hoped Dad would pull into the driveway.
“I can take Joe’s place in the skiff,” I said. I took a seat at the table as if invited. “I could. I know how to run the motor; I can set the nets, me and Mary.” Just saying it put a knot in my stomach, and I knew I was wasting my breath.
There would be new faces in the rain gear at the beach this summer. Someone else would haul our gillnets off the racks and into the boats. Someone else would run the boats that pulled the nets out from shore. Someone else would have my bunk in the shack on the beach, where they’d sleep every chance they got, so they could wake at every change of the tide to pick fish from the nets, pull the nets out of the water, set the nets back in the water. Someone else would learn that days didn’t matter, and by July they’d only know tides and the opening and closing of the fishing period.
Someone else would have that odor of salmon fishing; the sweet ocean cologne of sand, salt, and fish. The smell filled your pores until even a good hot bath wouldn’t drive it out, and people could tell that you were a fisherman. Someone else would have that odor this summer. I wouldn’t be there when the tide was running, and the nets were bent into a bow. I wouldn’t be mending the web, patching holes that let fish escape, costing money. Dad would say, “No time to sleep when the net’s in rags. Can’t make money with a ragged net.”
I would just be a regular kid at a time I was ready to be more than a regular kid, to be a fisherman. I wanted to be in the bow of the dory when the surf was running and the waves were higher than Dad’s head. That’s the sea my mother feared. She believed she’d die in that water, and she was scared for me too.
“You kids stay out of the boats,” she insisted every spring when she took us to the beach cabin for the first time. “You fall in that water and you’ll freeze to death in a minute.”
She passed her fears on to me with her lectures, and I avoided the water until the urge to be older and bolder grew too strong. It was as if her phobia finally pushed me toward the sea. The first calm day of 1964, I talked my way over the gunwale and into the open dory as it bobbed in the surf. I lay in the belly of a great sea creature with ribs of spruce and a skin of plywood. The aroma of fish was like a drug that reeked of adventure.
Mom came stomping down the beach from the cabin, yelling at Dad. “John Barger,” she growled, “you know how I feel about those kids being out on the water.”
Dad was leaning on the gunwale, rocking with it up and down on the edge of the water. “I know,” he said. “I also know that you’re wrong. How are we supposed to be fishermen and sit on the beach?” I hung over the bow and looked into the sand as they fought. When the water was shallow the land beneath it was bright and visible, then surges of murky water came in, and I saw nothing.
“What if that boat tips? What if the motor stops, or you spring a leak? What are you going to tell me then? ‘I’m sorry, Arlene, but your kids drowned because we have to go fishing’.”
Dad stomped off, muttering, “Don’t know why in the hell she even let ’em out of diapers. Wants ’em to be babies forever.”
I went out anyway, splashing through the meager waves of a sunny day, tasting salt water when it fell on our faces like rain, pretending I was helping when actually I just got in the way, pretending I was strong and able when I was weak and scared. Mom went home and tended her garden rather than pace the beach and watch her youngest baby porpoising around with the men who belonged out where