As we skirted the alder brake I could hear the throaty rumble of Heartbreak Rapids just downstream. Jake was raring to go. Ben told him to sit and clipped a sheep bell to his collar, then calmed him down with dog talk. “Get around behind ’em boy and flush ’em out to the guns,” he said. “And go easy—walk soft. There may be broken glass in there.” The dog rolled his eyes back up to Ben’s as if to say, “You think I’d forget?”
The big Lab sinuated his way into the alders, treading lightly, head high to catch the first whiff of woodcock musk on the light dawn breeze. I looked down. The ground was blotched white with woodcock “chalk.”
“Get ready,” Ben said. “He’s birdy as hell.”
I looked into the thicket and saw Jake’s tail upright as the plume on a knight’s helmet. The ruff was up all along his spine. He circled to his left, then came back in toward us and froze.
“Put ’em up, boy.”
Two woodcock tweetled out from under his nose, straight toward us.
“Take ’em going away,” Ben said.
We spun around as the birds passed over our heads and dodged out into the open, their wings impossibly long for the size of their stubby russet bodies.
We fired.
They fell.
“Okay, Jake, fetch dead.”
When he’d brought them to hand, Ben held one by a wing and spread its feathers in the dawn light. One of the primaries was half an inch longer than the others. “A male,” he said. “And yours is a hen by the size of her.”
Jake sat waiting for orders.
“With all this chalk underfoot there’s bound to be more birds in there,” I said.
Ben looked at me. “But they’re so easy, Harry. Too easy. Goofy little bastards. And besides I’ve come to love them for themselves, more than I love to shoot them.”
“Two woodcock make mighty thin soup,” I said.
He broke his gun and hooked it over his forearm. “I’ve got nothing against you shooting. The limit is three a day. But lately I’ve counted one enough. There’s always tomorrow.”
Not necessarily, I thought.
Ben perched himself on a deadfall and lit a cigar, blowing lopsided smoke rings while Jake and I hunted the covert. In the old days it was fun pushing through alders like Superman, batting them down with a forearm, slogging through the black muck, waiting for the next flush. Now it was damned hard work. I looked back at Ben. An old man in a dry season. Well, that description fit both of us. When I came back with a pair of birds in hand, he smiled.
“Nice shoooting,” he said. “It’s fun to see someone else fold ’em, and even better to watch the dog work from a distance. He’s good, isn’t he? Better even than Gayelord in a way.”
“Steadier. More biddable. He’s a very savvy dog.”
“He should be. He’s eleven years old, older than us in dog years. But he remembers what he’s learned. Hell, Hairball, I’m no savvier now than I was back then, in Gayelord’s day. Look how I fucked up my life.” He blew a smoke ring and stared off after it, toward the river. “Lorraine.”
“Maybe something happened along the way,” I said.
“You mean Korea?”
“Yeah, you know—shell shock, combat fatigue, post-traumatic stress syndrome, that kind of thing.”
He frowned. “Marines don’t get that kind of stuff. If they’re prone to it, they never make it through boot camp.”
“Still, it might help you to talk about it.”
“You’re an eye doctor, not a shrink,” he said.
He stood up and went back to the canoe, hauled out a cooler. Then he set to work building a fire ring. “Get some firewood for us, hey? My stomach’s yowling for sustenance and we’ve still got Heartbreak to face before we get into the steelhead water.”
Florinda had loaded the cooler with eggs, bacon, butter, home-baked sourdough bread, and a waxed carton of heavy cream to go with our coffee. The All-American thrombosis. Well, we’ve come this far at least.
Better to die on a full belly than an empty one.
Heartbreak Rapids lived up to its name, but with unintended irony. There’d been no rain for close to a month and the water was bony. Ribs of granite reared around every corner, interspersed now and then with a grinning, glacier-scrubbed skull—new fields of hazard opening up at each swing of the Mad River’s bow. We worked our minds and arms numb finding dodges to avoid them, scraping off lots of Kevlar in the process. In many places we had to get out and drag the canoe, waist and armpit deep in rushing water. Water travel had never been this tough in the old days, but then the human memory has splendid shock absorbers. It smooths out the ruts and frost heaves of the past so that, a year later, all you remember is the scenery. When we finally reached the bottom of the run, we were dead beat.
“We’re five miles from Gitche Gumee as the crow flies,” Ben said. “Maybe ten or twelve as the river twists and turns. And we’ve got a week until ducks are legal. Lots of time on our hands.”
I studied the woods on both banks. It all looked like prime grouse and woodcock cover—popple, larch, alder, spruce. No posted signs.
“What say we find a good spot to make camp and just explore this country? Fish or hunt whenever and whichever the mood that strikes us, or just lie around and relax.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said. “This weather can’t hold much longer and we could use a spate of rain to bring the salmon and steelhead into the estuary. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of brown trout to keep us busy.”
Half a mile downriver we spotted a clearing on the west bank, backed by an endless covert of quaking aspen. After we’d pitched the tent and collected an ample supply of firewood, we took a well-earned snooze. We’d been on the go for twenty-four hours straight, pretty good for a couple of geezers.
When I opened my eyes, the sun was clocking fast toward the western horizon. Ben was out in the river, working the far shore in the low sloping sunlight. His flyline traced long looping words against a yellow-green vellum of spruce and popple. I couldn’t quite read them, but they had the grace of those Gothic scripts you see in medieval psalters. Illuminated manuscripts. Kate had a thing for miniatures. We’d traveled to Italy, Belgium, France, and even New York City to see them. The Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves. The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry. The works of the Franco-Flemish Limbourg brothers, Pol, Jan, and Herman.
And Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Kate’s favorite, whose art drew from the Limbourgs’ only a century later. She loved Brueghel’s squat, thick-legged, red-cheeked peasants, the physicality of their lives, fishing boats foundering in the windspiked harbors, hunters in the snow returning with their quarry through gabled hamlets where magpies soar past welcoming pillars of woodsmoke. The Inn of the Stag.
“This is the real world,” she’d say. “Those were real lives. You can almost anticipate the evening ahead, the songs and prayers and laughter, and smell the wild boar turning on a spit.”
“Real lives,” I snorted, but only once. “The Middle Ages, like the people who lived then, were short, brutal, and ugly.”
She looked at me with pity.
Of course, I thought, all lives are that way, even today. Nobody lives forever, though some may hope so. As my well-traveled daughter once said, “Europeans accept the inevitability of death. Americans think it’s an option.” Ah yes, death—it’s patently undemocratic. But why does time have to accelerate with age? Why, when I was a kid, did the school year seem to last a decade, while I crept toward adulthood like a snail across a bathroom floor? Now you blink and . . . you’re old.
Dear God, I prayed now, here on the bank of the Firesteel. Can’t you put on the brakes, at least for this one last week? Please???
He must have heard me. The days that followed were full of slow riches. The weather held clear, hot during high daylight, the grass furred with hoarfrost at dawn. In the early mornings while the dew was drying we fished the river, upstream and down for miles, casting streamers to cruising browns. They were big
fish just in from the lake and charged with the angry hormones of their spawning season, quick to strike at anything that dared to drift past them.
During the afternoons we pounded the endless covert for ruffed grouse. It was a vast stretch of aspen that had been cut progressively for pulp over the past half century or more, so that every stage of growth was represented. Thick stands of doghair popple to provide grouse with safe cover in which to raise their broods. Long reaches of half-grown trees so close to one another that predatory goshawks could not interrupt grouse mating rituals. And tall islands of fully mature aspens with their craggy bark, branches drooping with the burden of catkins on which these birds relied for sustenance. Mixed in with the aspens were stands of hardhack and occasional volunteer apple trees. Partridges picked the seeds from the rotting windfallen fruit. It was ruffed grouse heaven. We hunted it hard, Jake sometimes flushing twenty birds in an afternoon. We’d pause every hour or so to let the dog cool off. Maybe eat an apple from one of the old-time trees or drink from an icy spring. Our legs grew strong, our eyes quick, and we returned to camp each evening full of hunger and that wonderful sense of lassitude that results from a day spent on nothing but what pleased us most. At night we ate what we’d killed, never a whole lot, and played music to the starlit river.
On our forays into the woods we found old cellar holes, family graveyards, an Indian mound, an ancient steam tractor from Paul Bunyan days flaking its hull into red dust, a nest built by golden eagles that contained the sunbleached skull of a coyote. Change and decay in all around I see. Deer bounced away from us but Jake never chased them. Once we encountered a bull moose, his neck beginning to thicken with the oncoming urges of rut, but he did not see us and we slipped away without incident. We found a giant white pine log full of carpenter ants. The blowdown had been ripped apart by a bear. Ants scurried around, trying to repair the damage to no avail. At the edge of a clearing one late afternoon we spotted a red fox stalking mice in the tall grass. Ben had Jake sit, and we watched for half an hour. The fox leaped high, tail plumed and black tipped, forepaws spread like a cat’s, and never missed. He glowed in the sunset light. Then he caught our scent and poof . . . he was gone.
On the seventh morning we woke to the sound of rain on the roof. Drops splatted hissing on the coals of the fire. Ben peered outside. “At last,” he said. “It’s here for a while, and about time. This’ll bring the big fish in from the lake.”
“Ducks too.”
“According to the regs you can’t start shooting at migratory fowl until noon on opening day. That’s not a duck hunt to me. Let’s skip it today, let ’em move in and get used to the area. Then hit ’em tomorrow at the crack of dawn.”
The rain was pelting down now, the Firesteel rising by the minute. The wind picked up from the northwest, the temperature dropped, and we rigged a reflector for the fire with a sheet of corrugated iron Ben dragged up from the brush near the river-bank. We spent the day sorting through flies and shell boxes.
Toward evening I said, “How’s about some chai?”
“Sure.”
We boiled water and steeped a pot of Lapsang Souchong. Florinda’s sourdough had gone stiff and stale but we toasted a few thick slabs of it over the fire. Ben spread the toast with the last of our butter and honey.
“Just like Winnie the Pooh,” I said.
Ben looked at me, empty-eyed, then shifted his gaze. Glum weather always took him this way. Nowadays they call it Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD. They’ve got a new acronym for every quirk or foible of the human condition nowadays, as if by merely renaming our woes they can cure them. Fat chance . . .
Or maybe it was the tea, with its Chinese name, had turned Ben’s memories back to Korea. He stared at the racing river for a long while, then squared his shoulders.
“You want to hear about Chosin?” he asked.
“If you’re ready.”
As we ate and drank our tea, Ben told me about Chosin.
The teapot was down to cold dregs by the time he’d finished. We fed Jake a few leftover crusts of toast. Ben stared off into the rain.
“That tiger was really something,” he said.
“Whatever happened to Sergeant Stingley?”
“I heard he died in Vietnam, during the siege of Hué in ’68. It was all house-to-house fighting, not his style.” He clammed up then, busied himself with a Rey del Mundo, the last of them. He lit up and took a deep toke. Then he coughed for a minute or two.
“Florinda packed a quart of bourbon in her care package,” I said. “I think you could use a toddy about now.”
He thought for a moment. “Naw. I’m through with that poison. Funny, just being out on the river again seems to have taken away my taste for it. Maybe I’ll stay here forever.”
We hit the rack early. Tomorrow promised action.
My dreams that night were of Gitche Gumee. The Shining Big Sea Water. But this was an inland sea gone weird and tropical. The Apostle Islands had become the Isles of the Blest. Coral atolls came and went over the horizon, waving the fronds of their coco palms to the beat of southeast trades. I was cruising this sea in a pahi, one of those elegant double-hulled sailing canoes carved from pandanus logs in which the ancient Polynesians made their stupendous voyages of discovery. Whales broached and blew and sang in the distance and I sat crosslegged on the deck between the hulls, playing my horn. I was riffing changes around the songs of the whales. We were approaching a high island with a lopsided volcanic cone rising above verdant slopes that were cut with quick rushing streams. The sound of distant waterfalls came to us over the billows. Shoals of wahoo and tuna quickened the surface, and dolphins sported alongside. The volcano puffed smoke rings that wafted out to us across the water. The smoke smelled like Ben’s Rey del Mundos. Then as we neared the high island, I saw that the volcano was Ben, with a fat cigar clenched in his teeth. He was grinning at me and his arms were draped around the shoulders of two lava maidens. Kate and Lorraine.
We had to run the gap in the reef to reach Ben’s island. The current raced through coralline jaws, twisting, eddying, surging, and I could see fangs of bright coral waiting to rip our canoe. Across the lagoon a pair of young dogs frisked on the beach, awaiting our arrival . . .
CODA
It was still raining at 4 A.M. when Ben woke Harry. The rain was a steady thrum with the taste of sleet in it. Full dark, and a north wind rattling the tent walls. He handed Harry a cup of hot tea, black and bitter as the weather. Two hours until sunrise. “There’s that little inlet downstream aways,” he said. “Good spot to set out the blocks. I heard ducks moving awhile back, high on the wind, a big flock of ’em.”
“What flavor?”
He shook his head. “Too dark to see, but from their talk I’d swear they were bluebills.”
“Scaup? But it’s way too early for them, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, they usually don’t show till November, when there’s skim ice on the water. But with this freaky weather we’ve been having lately, who knows?”
“Global warming,” Harry said. “It’s fucked everything, even the seasons.”
They ate another thrombotic breakfast—fried eggs, fatty bacon, toast slathered with butter and hunks of rattrap cheese to top it off, delicious—then broke camp, loaded the canoe, and set off downriver. Jake could hear the ducks pass overhead. Silk slashed by a knifing wind. He looked up into the rain and shivered. He whined and mumbled to himself. Waiting.
Short of the cove they pulled ashore. Ben tied the canoe to an ice-sheathed popple trunk and they pulled out the bag of decoys. They waded down the bank to the inlet, skidding on shallow rocks. The water was cold through their waders. A small knot of ducks held against the northwest bank, heads tucked snug beneath the random wind. Redheads or canvas-backs by the way they swam, blocky and low slung, tails down in the water. It was still too dark to distinguish color.
“We’ll have to move them out of here,” Ben whispered. “That’s where I want to put the spread.” He
sent Jake around the inlet with instructions to spook the ducks. When they’d flown, the men moved. They waded out into the lee and placed the decoys, unwinding anchor lines stiff with frozen sleet. “Leave a nice-sized hole in the middle of the spread to draw new arrivals,” Ben said.
“Yeah, Benjamin, this isn’t the first time I’ve ever been duck hunting.”
“Sorry, Doc.”
Back on the bank they cobbled together a makeshift blind of juniper branches. Ben hacked them with his K-Bar and Harry stuck their butts in the mud, interwove the tough, soft-needled branches. Then they sat behind their dark green wall and shivered, waiting for first light. From time to time, eyes cocked skyward under the brim of his cap, Ben gave a come-hither purr on his call, alternating it with a low throaty whistle or a loud, impatient scaup! scaup! scaup!
The sky overhead was shading from black to charcoal gray and then they could see streamers of low black ragged cloud wavering across it from the northwest. Fine weather for ducks. Shifting clots of them blew through, yammering at each other, too high and determined just yet to respond to the call’s seductions. Then a band of pale light appeared above the eastern horizon.
They crouched lower in the blind. Ben called, two loud blats. Jake shuddered. Harry put his hand on the nape of the dog’s neck and felt its warmth melt the sleet. “Easy boy.” Ben’s upturned eyes were fixed on something now, they circled, the call purred again, soft and happy. He nodded his head. They were coming. Harry kept his head down and listened, heard a rip overhead, the soft quick flap of slowing wings. The birds circled once, twice, then on the instant they were committed.
The Run to Gitche Gumee Page 25