Fishbone's Song

by Gary Paulsen

  After that first learning that I can remember, things kind of came so fast it was all I could do to catch up.

  First the woods. The old cabin we lived in was just barely not the woods, made out of old slab boards left from a sawmill some place far off and long ago. Weathered and gray, and according to Fishbone, older than him, and so full of gaps, he said you could throw a cat through the wall without hurting it. So I asked him kind of snotty, did he ever throw a cat through a wall, because when I was young and didn’t understand how his story-songs worked, I was kind of snotty, or as he said, I was part of a know-it-all. And he had a look he gave me that had no smile in it when he thought I was being part of a know-it-all. And since it was the only time he looked even a little cross or sideways at me, I stopped being that way every chance I got.

  So I was already in the woods, more or less, sleeping in the cabin with the night sounds and the bugs all part of me, and it was just natural to fold into it like it was home, my bed, my warm green woods bed.

  Second Song: Devil Love

  She found my heart,

  and took it.

  Found my soul,

  and shook it.

  Found my song,

  and spoke it.

  Found my life,

  and broke it.

  Dance on, devil woman.

  Dance on, devil love.

  3

  * * *

  Woodstime

  I was never afraid of the woods.

  Never felt out of place the way you can be with people, schools, crowds, ratchety noise—the way it was when the state came to take me and put me in those places with those things and people. Had to fight sometimes. Had a big fight with a boy twice my size, beat me all to hell and gone, just for being different. He thought because I was down I was done, but I got up and clipped him with my thick mail-order boots, and he went to puking and left me alone after that.

  Still didn’t like it. Even when they opened my brain and put in good things. Taught me to read. The little school was in a hill town and had one old computer which I never got to use, or even learned how to use. Boy in the school said that he knew of a place where they had more, many computers, and they could play games on them and talk all over the world on them, but I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth; he also said he had an uncle who could dead-lift six hundred and ninety pounds with one hand, so believing him was a stretch.

  But this little school with bad ceilings and a leaky roof had books. A whole room full of books on shelves, and an old woman who had soft blue hair and wore glasses on a cord around her neck who was in charge of the books, and she thought you should read them. No, that’s not quite right. She loved the books, and when she touched them, it was like she was petting them, and she taught me how to read, made me read, made me want to read, made me love to read. Did it all in two months and twenty-six days, which was all I was in that place until they sent me on back to Fishbone.

  In the shack.

  In the woods.

  But the old woman with the glasses on a cord around her neck and hair that smelled blue didn’t forget me. Every month when the man from the state came with bullet money from Fishbone getting shot some in Korea, and kid money so I could be “raised in a goodly manner,” and grocery fixins, the old woman sent one or two books on up with him. I’d send back any books I’d read and we’d trade back and forth.

  History books, poetry books, western books, nature books, even some by an English writer named Shakespeare. Poems that didn’t rhyme and were hard to read until I found they were supposed to be a play, and if you said the words out loud, they made more sense. Sometimes made you feel new about some things.

  Old Blue numbers three and four both thought I was crazy when I came to spouting Shakespeare poems that didn’t rhyme off the porch, but Fishbone seemed to like them. Didn’t say so, but closed his eyes and smiled and nodded and shuffled his feet the way he did when he was doing his own songs his own self. Word-songs. Same smile, and even bigger when Shakespeare came to working on love talk.

  He must have known about the woods. Shakespeare. To have all those words rumbling around and to be able to bring them out in the way he did, the dance of them, he must have known how it was in the woods.

  How green and still it could be, and how it could smell and sound so that it was inside you, part of you.

  Could be the best part of you.

  Like home. Like my home.

  I folded into the woods not long after I learned about using the outhouse and peeing on the downwind side of the porch. I remember walking off the porch and down to the creek and sitting on the sand at the side of the clear, rippling water, and putting my hand in and seeing the way it wiggled my fingers, made them look all wavy.

  Everything else disappeared. Just gone, clean and gone like there was never anything else. Just the woods. From that day on every chance I got—and that was all the time—I went into the trees. I’d take just one step in, move to the left and then right around a tree, and I was there: Home. Moving quiet, like a knife through water. Warm, green, leafy light all around me, sounds of birds all before and after me, in the woods. In the woods . . .

  First just to look. But by the time I was six, I started in to hunting with Fishbone rules. Fishbone had a way to do everything, all things—way to think, way to cook, way to see, way to live, way to be.

  And his hunting rules were simple.

  If you killed it, you had to eat it. You could eat it raw or you could eat it cold or you could eat it cooked, but if you killed something, you had to use it for food.

  I learned that when I started. I made a small spear out of cane, sharpened it to a needle point with the kitchen knife, and worked down the creek bank looking for anything that moved. I was thinking of crayfish but couldn’t find any, so I tried spearing some chubs flashing in the shallows, but they were too fast for me. Downstream a little more I found and speared a frog. Not a big bullfrog like we later got out of the swamp one hill over. You could fry the legs, big as chicken drumsticks almost, wrapped in flour or cracker crumbs, legs jumping and twitching in the pan as they fried, and tasting good, completely good, when they were done and crisp, sprinkled with salt.

  This first frog was small. Come shooting off the bank like he was shot from a spring, went underwater and stopped. Just stopped in clear water wasn’t four inches deep. I poked the cane spear down and got him, pinned him to the bottom, killed him. Then I reached down and grabbed him with my free hand, and took him back up to the cabin to show Fishbone.

  Good, he nodded. Now eat him.

  The frog, I asked.

  Yes, boy, he said. You killed it, you eat it.

  The whole frog, I asked, thinking I don’t believe I can get the whole frog down and hold it, guts and skin and all. Thought of the tongue, sticky and kind of long, and it almost made me puke but he shook his head.

  On frogs just the back legs, he said, cut them off and wash them in the creek and bring them in and fry them in a little bacon grease until they crackle, then eat them.

  But I said there aren’t two bites. No meat at all.

  Then you shouldn’t have killed it.

  Lessons learned. Don’t pee into the wind, don’t get worms in your butt, and if you kill something, you had to eat it. I had to cut the legs off the body of the frog. Bright green and shiny skin with black spots, cut them off just where they joined the little body, then wash them clean and dust them with flour, same as with a big frog.

  Looked so small. Little spindly legs hardly big enough to see sitting in the pan. Then scoop bacon grease out of the can by the sink where we pour it after we cook bacon. Solid and gray-brown, two spoons tastes all salty and bacony.

  Then outside to pick up the axe and split wood for the cook stove. Big axe, double-bladed Collins almost impossible for a six-year-old to pick up, and then worse to have to swing it, again and again, to split enough wood for a hot fire; then carry it in, light the fire, get the stove hot, put the pan with grease and ti
ny frog legs over the hottest part, and fry them until they stop jumping and jerking and twitching, until they crackle.

  Then eat them. One bite. And all the time thinking you’d done something wrong. Bad wrong.

  By killing one small frog.

  And then back to the woods.

  Only knowing more now, this time, knowing that hunting is not just to kill. Hunting is watching. Watching to know. Watching to learn to see and know and learn. A way to get food, but more, more than that a way to learn, to know. A way to be.

  A hunter.

  A watcher.

  The spear was not enough, not fast enough for chubs. Once in a great while we would stretch an old seining net across a part of the creek down where it pools and net twenty or so to salt and smoke. They tasted good smoked, smoky and oily and salty. Each fish was about the length of Fishbone’s hand spread out, with fat and slick and oily meat. But he didn’t like to net them too often because he said we would take them all out with the net and not have any fish. But any I could catch alone we could cook in the pan and have with sliced potatoes, picking the meat carefully off the bones.

  But they didn’t bite. I tried with some line and a small hook I found in an old box in the shanty shed at the rear of the cabin. Dug a few worms and hung the line off an old piece of willow and they came to it. You could see them gather around bait. But they just nibbled and nibbled at the worm until it was all taken off, broken away from the hook.

  So I couldn’t spear them and we only netted them almost never, and they didn’t take a hook, and you can, I figured, get hungry something awful just watching and learning about things but never taking any food. Well, true fact is there is always food here from what the man brings once a month when he comes to check on things. Can always make biscuits and gravy with flour and bacon grease and lord only knows how many cans of beans there are stored in shelves in back of the stove. And cans of some meat called Spam. Fishbone said he lived through some hard times when he was small, where the onliest thing he had to eat were lard sandwiches on week-old bread. With a little salt. Said sometimes his mother would find a way to buy flour and yeast and make bread or biscuits to have with gravy. Burned brown gravy made from flour and lard usually on the week-old bread from the bakery. Penny a loaf, he said, and they couldn’t afford that. Lard and old bread. Three times a day. So now he kept cans of beans and some Spam. Just in case, he said, just in case it came on hard times again, but he wouldn’t use any of it unless it happened. Hard times. I couldn’t just open a can of beans or Spam whenever I felt a little lean in the belly, he said. Go out, he said. Earn it.

  So I needed a faster way to hunt and I thought on it and decided that I could make a bow and use cane arrows—straight and light—if I could find the right wood for the bow. I tried elm, using an old leather bootlace for a string first, but it either bent too much and was too weak, or if thicker wouldn’t bend at all. Messed around with other wood I didn’t know the name of and finally settled on dried willow. There was a stand of old dead and dried water willows that grew when there was a heavy runoff from the long mountains one year, then no runoff again, so they died and stayed there, straight and clean from knots or splits. I picked a piece a little thinner than my wrist and whittled on it with the kitchen knife until it was rough tapered. Then Fishbone showed me how to scrape and shave wood with a piece of broken jar glass from the junk pile where it seemed like we threw stuff away until we needed to use it again.

  Bow was about as long as me. I read in one of the books all about a crook a long time ago named Robin Hood. Was really good with a bow. Said he could shoot one arrow into a target and then another so it split the first arrow down the middle, but I found later that there probably wasn’t a man like him, that it was all based on an old tombstone behind a church in England that said:

  Here lies Robyn Hode

  ’Nere was an archer so giud

  Period. There never was any more about him anywhere, but people started making up stories about him based on the tombstone. There was nothing else you could hang on to as true about the whole business. Good. Fun to read. Only made up.

  But in the book they said a wooden bow cut and trimmed to the right shape was called a stave and that’s what I had. A stave. Until I cut notches in the ends for string and hooked them up with the leather lace. I shortened the string until when I held the bow in the middle, the string was back away from the center of the bow about the distance of my spread hand. Cutting, tapering, and shaving was slow, but I’d sit of an evening with the oil lamp flickering in the soft night air moving through the slats in the walls and listen to Fishbone tell his song-stories, sipping his ’shine from the jar and making word pictures in my head.

  Something made them slide in there, the song-tales. Slide into my brain so they seemed alive, real inside me in some way so I could almost hear the colors, smell the sound.

  Sing-song stories of old times, sad songs of the hard times and lard sandwiches and wearing one pair of Oshkosh bibs until they were more patches than bibs, all-over wear-holes and fixed with pieces of cotton flour sacks. And baby sister wearing pullover shift dresses made from the same flour sacks. And patches on them as well, so many she had a nickname of that: Patches. Same baby sister dying of the croup, of the coughing croup hacking so long and deep you could hear-feel it in your whole body every time she coughed, night after night, day after day, until finally the end of it, the end of it. The end of her coughing and the end of her, of Patches. Buried wrapped in an old piece of binder canvas with the wooden slats still riveted to it. Shiny brass rivet heads against the straw-polished old wood strips. Buried in the same flour-sack shift dress, buried with a handful of wildflowers held in her hands, wildflowers she loved to pick and smell. Buried in a hand-dug grave by the back of the house. Buried forever. Buried.

  Sad songs. So sad he had tears, not ’shine tears but real ones when he told it. Sang it with the foot-shuffle beat on the porch boards and old voice cracking, thinking of burying her. Patches. Had blue eyes, and red-blond hair, and a smile all the time, and they were all buried with her. Part of the song. Blue eyes and hair and smile. All buried.

  Arrows were easier. The bow had a nice snap to it, not heavy to pull but zippy. The string made a thrumming sound, lower than the bottom string on the old guitar when I plucked it good and taut. And cane from along the creek bank down where it edged the swamp was dry and light. I cut five of them a little longer than my arm and on the front end carved a point as sharp as a needle. On the rear end I gouged out a shallow notch for the bowstring, and by pinching the end of the arrow shaft with my fingers, I could pull it back over a foot. Not all the way back to the cheek or the chin but a good way toward them. From eight or ten feet away on the mud side bank of the creek, the cane stuck in nice. Solid. In about a hand width. I tried a farther shot or two, but without feathers on the shaft, the arrow tended to head off sideways and I couldn’t hit anything even close to what I aimed at.

  But for then, for a seven- or six- or eight-year-old boy who was just starting to hunt, it was good enough, and I started working the creek for chubs. They would sit on the bottom, or near the bottom, with their nose up into the current, and the water only a foot or two deep, clear as glass. Just sit there, holding themselves in place, and I picked one, leaned out so I was almost over him, not three or four feet away, pulled the bow—I could almost taste him dusted in flour and cooking in the bacon grease—aimed carefully . . .

  And missed.

  Shot over his back a good foot and the cane arrow stuck in the bottom. Or almost stuck. The bottom was gravel and mud, mixed, and the arrow hit a stone and broke.

  But I had another arrow. Had four of them. And there were chubs all over the creek bottom and I stepped barefoot out into the water, closer and closer to another one, just holding his place, leaned over, drew the bow . . .

  And missed again.

  And broke another arrow.

  This time I heard a snort and turned to see Fishbone sitting i
n his rocker on the porch, watching me, his shoulders shaking, and I saw he was laughing. Almost to himself except that now and then he would make that snort and he took a sip of ’shine and said water bends things.

  What do you mean, I asked.

  Bends things you look at. Bends where things are, bends what you see, bends how you see.

  But I can see the chubs right there. They’re right there in front of me.

  No they’re not, not like you see them. They’re lower than they look. Try aiming just below one, like you were going to shoot under him.

  Sounded silly but Fishbone almost never said anything silly. Or wrong. Or wasted. Never seemed to waste a word or a thought. Didn’t talk much but when he did, when he did, it was better to listen. So I waded in the shallows near the bank in the soft mud squirting up between my toes, found another chub, leaned over, guess-aimed the width of my hand below him, and let go.

  Missed again. But closer this time, much closer, so that the cane shaft almost rubbed against him on the way by, and he jerked away to the center of the creek into deeper water. Fishbone said, did you hit him, and I said no, but so close I might have got a scale.

  I was down to one cane arrow, which was not a problem because the bank was filled with cane and it was easy to cut with the kitchen knife.

  Another fish was sitting there in the shallows, and I moved and stood near and almost over him. I’d seen the big herons and other hunting birds go after fish and frogs the same way. Just stand and stand without moving, without even twitching. Watching, waiting, waiting until the fish or frog had almost forgotten they were there. Had gone back to just being a fish or frog, just being what they were . . .