He buried the body in the floor of the storage cellar he’d dug into the hillside behind the trailer, where he kept his other meat—bear mostly, some venison. In the deep cool of the cellar, the dead man’s carcass would be secure, forgotten, protected from scavengers inclined to dig up the remains. There was nothing more to be considered. It was done. A thing of the past.
The payoff for the bear bladders and paws was good, as usual, so the business with the man’s body was a minor disruption with no damaging effects. Inevitably, there would be occasional problems to solve in this life outside restraint. He would continue to learn. Nothing he couldn’t manage.
He stepped to the seam at the farthest edge of firelight. From behind him, he could hear the dog gnawing at the bone under the trailer. He lifted his nose and breathed in the immensity of his solitude within the dark surround of the woods. Scenting the night, he drew in through his nose a series of staccato breaths. One. Two. Three, four, five. Yes, there would be the occasional adjustment to be made, irregularity to be dealt with, problem to solve. This grand solitude would not be among those problems.
5
RARELY, IF EVER, DID KEEFE FISH ANYWHERE AWAY FROM the headwaters of the upper Ripshin. For him, the quest for the fish was never a venture whose success could be calculated in pounds and inches, in the count of fish taken, in numbers of any kind. Keefe sought intimate contact with some sort of elemental condition he’d located in the headwaters, in the cascading streams and deep, glassy pools cradled in the stones boiled up out of and tumbling down the hillside. A fly rod, to him, was the language by which he could carry on a dialogue with that condition, and the native brook trout that had haunted these waters for centuries were his interlocutors. Over the past few years, Sandy had absorbed the nature of Keefe’s relationship to the headwaters and made it her own as well. Not only had she embraced this bond, but she now saw in it the answer to something for which she hadn’t, in fact, known she’d been searching. The answer had materialized before the question could be formed.
However, unlike Keefe, from time to time Sandy still felt the need for the heft and weight, the palpable thrill, of a big fish on the end of her line. She now knew something of what the headwaters could provide and how critical that provision had become to her. She could no longer survive without it. But one thing the headwaters could never provide was the thrashing leap of a large rainbow trout or the crafty, deepwater struggle of a big brown trout, both of which might shred her line and escape if she didn’t play them exactly right. To feed this occasional craving, she went to the tailwaters, downstream from the hydroelectric dam that marked the beginning of the lower Ripshin, just across Willard Road from her house.
A respectable caddis fly hatch had been on in the late afternoon when she returned from work, and she’d taken good advantage of the trout feeding on it in the two hours she had before the dam would begin to release water for power generation. She’d taken one decent brown trout and two rainbows by working her way upstream along the seam of the current. One of the rainbows, a wild, stream-bred descendant of the rainbow trout stocked in the river over the years, had brought to the contest the sort of weight and ferocity she sought. It had bent her rod and whipped her line frantically, tail-dancing across nearly the entire width of the river and back before she could put the fish in tow and bring it to hand. She held the caught trout by the tail with one hand and cupped its belly in her other. Before letting it loose, she assessed her prey—close to a pound and a half, at least sixteen inches long. The calculation felt good, as did the weight in her hand, and she allowed herself to enjoy the size of her prize for a moment before releasing it back into the stream.
Wading further upstream, nearing the path that lead from the river up to the road and across to her house, Sandy heard the warning siren from the dam. The siren announced that the release of water from the bottom of Willard Lake through the turbines of the dam was about to commence. In another nine or ten minutes a three-foot wall of water would arrive suddenly at her location downstream, making it dangerous, in fact impossible, to wade through the waters where she now walked. If she cast well, she would have just enough time.
During the winter, a dead hemlock tree up the riverbank had fallen, and the top thirty feet of the dead tree now rested submerged in one of the deeper, richer spots in the river. A snag like this would give both angler and fish the cover they sought. Sandy had yet to fish around this new feature the winter had deposited in the river. She’d saved it for last today. She knew there’d be a lunker holding somewhere down around the sunken branches.
Working herself slowly into position, Sandy set her feet and began to feed out line, sending her false casts away from her target until she had the right amount of line in play. When her line fit the distance to the snag, she shifted direction and delivered her cast, dropping her fly onto the edge of the flow folding around the fallen hemlock. She held her breath and only barely managed to resist the instinct to react when she saw the faint shimmer of gold move and shift within the pool. That gold would be the belly of a brown trout, and, from what she could see from her casting position, a big one. Maintaining her patience, she let the fly drift well past the snag before lifting her line and casting again. Her second cast brought the fly down onto the same fold of current, and the fish hammered it. Sandy set the hook and immediately leaned deeper into her crouch, arching her rod as far out to her right as she could to draw the fish into the middle of the river and away from the submerged snag, where it would surely tangle her line and break off. With the trout now moving into open water, she began a slow retrieve of her line while wading into more shallow water where her footing would be more stable. When the fish ran, she let it. When it dove and held, she retrieved it further toward her. Back and forth they went until the fish fatigued and Sandy drew it to her hand in the shallows.
As she had seen, the heavy belly of the brown trout glowed bright yellow. The gills were ribbed with deep grooves, and a slight hooked curve had formed in the fish’s lower jaw. A big one. An old one. A wise one. Easily three pounds. Twenty inches if it was a day. As the course of the fish had shifted during their contest, Sandy’s yearning shifted. Holding the big trout at the tail and belly, having bested an experienced, well-tested veteran of the river, she longed to kill it. Slip her thumb into the jaw and snap its neck. A tooth-lined jaw like this would likely cut the flesh at the base of her thumb, but not much before she could dispatch it. She might have the fish stuffed and mounted. It was certainly a prize most fishermen would consider worthy of that minor vanity. Or she might take her trophy to Keefe’s bungalow, gut it, and cook a trout dinner for two. A fish this size would provide a decidedly sumptuous meal. Her arms still quivered from the fight as she held the fish at the surface of the water, cradling it gently in the current to replenish the oxygen it had lost in the struggle. Her fingers unfurled from the trout’s body. The fish held still for a second in the shallow water at her feet, then righted itself and rocketed away. Sandy’s eyes followed as the shining yellow streak of its belly disappeared in the depths.
Sandy reeled in her expended line as she waded across the river and climbed the bank up to the path. She walked four or five paces up the path, stopped, and turned to watch as the increased water level sent from the dam arrived. The gentle, riffled current of the river turned in an instant to a churning, deadly torrent. The same torrent that had consumed Vernon five years ago, but the scene did not replay itself for her now. That was finished. She thought only of the magnificent trout, stunned but free, holding in the depths under the surging flood.
MUD and brush kicked up along the path still clung to her damp boots and waders as she passed through the band of pines separating her place from the road and followed her narrow gravel driveway up to her little house. At the far end of the driveway, beside Sandy’s truck, lay the old tractor tire into which Stink often curled to sleep. He pulled himself out of the tire and sauntered a few steps toward Sandy to greet her.
“Such a fish I caught, sweetheart. Such a fish.” Sandy gave Stink a quick scratch behind the ears, then turned to the sound of Tommy Akers’s old red pickup emerging from the pines and rumbling up the driveway. She leaned her fly rod against the side