Gone to the Woods

by Gary Paulsen

  And inside the space, inside the beauty, the stream slowly, gently slid along. On both sides of the canoe, lily pads leaned and danced with the current, as hordes of dragonflies moved from pad to pad catching flies and, sometimes, each other.

  He looked back to see Sig, still kneeling. He had stopped paddling and was letting the canoe coast along. He pointed to the right with his chin, barely moving, and in hushed words again said:

  “See, look, see…”

  And there it was—the moment—the very split second, of all the minutes of all the time the boy would ever have, that would never cease to exist. The moment—though he would not know it or understand it fully until he was an older man—when he would never again be able to, nor even want to, separate himself from nature. He had become folded into it; he had become an integral part of water and trees and birds and dragonflies. The moment was so pure, so profound, that he caught himself holding his breath.

  On the right side of the stream, just above the lily pads on the bank leaning down to get a drink of water, was a whitetail doe. He had seen pictures of deer and had seen them in passing rapidly from the train, but he’d never seen one in this way.

  This perfect way.

  Her coat was full and shiny and thick, colored nearly red, and the hair looked as though it had recently been brushed and groomed. As the canoe floated into her vision, she raised her muzzle from the water and droplets fell from her lips like jewels to splash back on the pads in sparkling rivulets. She watched carefully, probably wondering what kind of log would drift by with two such weird limbs sticking out of the top.

  The boy was so intent on studying her that he almost missed a fawn standing just to her rear. He—and he had no idea why he thought it was a male but he did—was staring at them with the wide-eyed innocence of the young, the way a puppy looks with wonder and awe at everything new.

  Driven by curiosity, the fawn took a step toward them, so that his front feet were in the water. The doe, caught by his sudden movement and wanting to protect him, turned and nuzzle-pushed him up on the shallow bank into the willows. He blended so instantly and completely that he disappeared. The boy took a deep breath. She heard him breathing—they were that close—and it broke the spell of the moment. She turned away and vanished with the fawn into the willows along the bank. He heard Sig’s paddle dip into the water as they pushed forward.

  They didn’t say a word for what seemed like hours as they paddled. He was trying to help, though the paddle was much too big for him. All his pain and discomfort were gone—there was so much to see and try to understand that the pain disappeared—and the canoe seemed to grease along over the water in silence.

  There was a constant flow of questions in his head and he kept turning to ask, but stopped himself before he opened his mouth. It seemed wrong to speak, to make a sound that didn’t fit into where they were, what they were doing. The boy couldn’t make it quite clear, couldn’t articulate the feeling, the knowledge, but he knew. Knew it was special, and he stayed silent so as not to ruin the moment with noise.

  And there was more.

  More than that. Sig was there in that place, in that time because he was supposed to be there, kneeling in a canoe moving through this endless beauty, just as he had been at the table drinking coffee and smiling with Edy. And, by association with him, the boy was included. He was no longer the wiseacre kid singing in bars in Chicago chomping fried chicken and guzzling Coca-Cola, watching stupidly drunk men try to get close to his mother. He was here, part of this, a living part of what Sig was, by being in this place, being part of the beauty, part of the flow. Part of the joy.

  And he was supposed to be here, where he was, who he was, how he was sure he would always be, to be here, to know here, to be.

  To make a sound, to utter even one single note of a sound, would be wrong, would, in a very real way, ruin it.

  So he held his questions and he thought, When it is important for me to know something, I will learn it without making noise.

  MUSHROOM HUNTING

  There were large flies around the man and the boy, only they didn’t ever really bite. They would land to bite, but then buzz off without biting, and he watched and learned it was because the dragonflies would catch them—sometimes in flight—and eat them. One dragonfly landed on the front edge of the canoe, holding a fly while he ate it, letting the wings fall off as he chewed, then flew off to get another one.

  They didn’t hurry, yet the canoe kept sliding along, and the boy began to understand that, by being still and quiet as they moved, there was no line or gap between them and where they were. That they fit perfectly. As if the canoe had always been there and they—even the boy, not just Sig—had always been there, a living part of a living world.

  They came around a bend and he saw another deer. This time it was a male, a buck, and his antlers were new and in velvet and his coat wasn’t as pretty as the doe’s and the fawn’s. The buck saw the boy and Sig but, as with the doe, did not seem particularly concerned by the canoe drifting down the stream.

  Sig made a strange choke-clicking sound with his mouth and tapped his paddle softly against the side of the canoe, and the buck, instead of being alarmed, seemed to get angry and aggressive. He snorted a quick blast of air and stomped his front feet on the stream bank. Then he seemed to grow in size, his front shoulders getting larger, and he turned sideways so they could see that he was bigger, and he snorted and moved away and up through the willows and was gone.

  The boy had started making a mental list of questions—not to ask now, but maybe later when it was all right to make a sound—and he added the buck deer incident to the list. He had questions for later about the sound Sig had made, and how and why to make a deer angry.

  There was a kind of spell about how they were moving. Magic. They did not seem to be actually going along as much as it seemed that they were sitting still, floating still, and the stream and forest were moving past beneath and above them on some huge endless roller, unmeasured streams of beauty sliding past them that would never end, never need to start again.

  After a time, after a long time, the boy realized how exhausted he was, how completely dead tired he had become. He tried to fight it and paddled the best he could as one beautiful curve of water and lily pads with blooming yellow flowers and circling butterflies led to another until he found himself, without thinking, stretching the paddle across the canoe, resting his arms on it sideways, then laying his head on his arms. Just, he thought, to catch a wink or two.

  Not really to sleep, not really. Just a quick doze.

  And out he went.

  He was not sure how long he slept that way, but he was awakened by a soft bump as the canoe came against a grassy bank. He turned to see Sig using his paddle on the bottom to push-swing the rear around against the bank so the canoe came to a stop sideways to the grass.

  “Out,” he said, pointing with his chin. “We’ll set up camp here.”

  The boy climbed out of the canoe, pulling himself up the bank by grabbing grass and willows.

  “Here,” Sig said, standing next to the canoe, “take these and find a flat place.” He threw the bedroll and pack by the boy’s feet, and then pulled the canoe completely out of the water onto the bank while the boy gathered the bedroll and pack the best he could—a little clumsy—and continued weaving along the bank until he finally came to a relatively flattish place. As he looked around, it seemed to be the best he could do and he was about to point out that—along with all the incredibly new things happening to him—he had never before had to find a place to set up a camp. He had never camped. He had never—

  He stopped. That was not a box he wanted to open—the list of new things happening to him that he thought needed explaining. Besides, that would be in the nature of asking a question—to bring it all up—so he dropped the bedroll and pack and stood there.

  Waiting.

  With the canoe well onto the bank, Sig stopped near him, looked at the place he had pic
ked, and nodded. “Good.”

  Then he gestured for the boy to follow him and they went to the side of the clearing and a stand of poplar trees. They weren’t large—the biggest about the size of Sig’s leg—and toward the lower end of each tree, the boy saw dry dead branches.

  Sig broke one off to show what he wanted. “These are air dried and good for a fire. Get as many as you can”—he smiled—“and then double it. We’ll need smoke-fire all night for when the blood drinkers come.”

  Oh good, the boy thought. The blood drinkers come in the dark. Just fine. Silly to worry about what he didn’t know when all he really had to do was get ready for the blood drinkers. This time he had to ask. “Blood drinkers?”

  “Mosquitoes,” Sig said. “They don’t take prisoners. They come thirsty and they come in clouds.”

  He had seen a few that day in the canoe, but the deerflies and horseflies had been the most bothersome. Still, they were not that bad, really. You could brush them off easily. But the sun was still well up and he was to find they would not become troublesome until after dark.

  He was busily breaking off sticks and dry limbs for a fire, stacking them in a rough pile. He was never out of sight of the camp and he worked with his back to the woods so he could see what Sig was doing. He was setting up the campsite, but the way he was working, moving, it looked like a dance to the boy.

  In smooth, almost greased movements he put the bedroll down, unrolled it, separated two wool blankets, and laid them on the tarp that had formed the outer layer of the bedroll. Inside the roll, an old large coffee can and two spoons had been packed, and he placed them next to a circle of rocks he had already laid out as a small fire pit.

  From the pack, he pulled a saucepan, two tin cups, a large sheet-metal frying pan, a small jar of what looked like white butter but turned out to be lard, a smaller jar of salt, and a medium-size jar of what turned out to be dried, ground-up tea leaves. He reached back in the pack—it seemed to be bottomless—and grabbed a cloth bag full of corn-bread biscuits. He rummaged again and pulled up a wooden spool of black fishing line that already had small lead sinkers and a hook on the end.

  The boy had stopped collecting the dead limbs to watch him. Sig looked up, saw him, and motioned him to come closer. The boy gathered what wood he had and brought it over to the fire pit and dropped it on the pile.

  “We’ll need more,” Sig said, shaking his head. “But for now we’ve got to get some food.”

  He pointed at the stream and waved his hand for the boy to come. “You know how to fish?”

  The boy shook his head and thought, Here’s another thing I don’t know, as Sig stooped, pulled a knife from his belt sheath, cut a long willow, cleaned off the small branches and leaves, then cut and tied a long piece of the fishing line on the end to make a fishing pole.

  Just like that. Set up camp; make a fishing pole. Couple of minutes and it’s all done.

  “See those rocks?” He pointed along the stream at some small flat stones stuck in the bank. “Go flip one of them over and grab a worm.”

  “In my hand?”

  He had a way of looking at the boy where he didn’t have to say anything but let his eyes do the talking; and they were saying, Sure, in your hand, how else would you pick up a worm? Or maybe the question was, You mean you can’t pick up a worm? What kind of person can’t pick up a worm?

  So the boy went to the stones, flipped one over, and sure enough, in the bare moist dirt beneath the stone there were several earthworms. He made a grab at one, but it slipped back down in the dirt. On the second attempt, he caught one in time—before it could slide back into the ground—and pulled it out and up.

  Slimy, he thought, soft and slimy. He carried it over to Sig, pinched between his thumb and finger, and held it out. Sig took it, threaded it onto the hook, swung it out over the stream, and lowered it into the water.

  “I’ll do the first one,” he said. “After that you can—”

  He was going to say more, but the willow wand jerked down and he swung it up and away from the water and a fish came with it. The boy would find later it was called a sunfish—pan-shaped and perhaps eight or ten inches long with a fat, golden belly—and it flopped on the bank until Sig knelt down and took the hook loose. Then he handed the pole to the boy.

  “Get a new worm for the hook and start fishing. We’ll need at least eight of them, maybe more.”

  The boy didn’t see how he could possibly make it work, though Sig made fishing look so easy. But the boy had just spent most of a day trying to simply paddle a canoe. That he could catch a fish—or “eight of them, maybe more”—seemed impossible.

  But he got a new worm and, after several squirming tries, managed to skewer it on the hook while it squirted dirty goo all over his fingers. After untangling the line, which had seemed intent on knotting up, he moved to the edge of the bank and swung the hook out and down.

  And here the fish took over. He had barely enough time to silently worry he would never catch a fish before one of them hit the worm and set the hook. He jumped back without thinking and wheeled the fish out and onto the bank next to the one Sig had caught.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  But there it was, flopping around. He dropped the pole, ran to it, and held it down with his knee while he wiggled the hook out.

  “I got one!” Hardly had he said the words before he watched in frantic disbelief as the fish slid out from under his knee, made two energetic flips, fell back into the water, and was gone.

  “Had one,” Sig said. A short smile, then the look: Can’t keep a fish? Really? But then a different look, different smile. Kinder. “I’ve had that happen. More than once. You have to get them higher on the bank away from the water or hit them on the front of the head with a stick and stun them.”

  It was, for Sig, a long sentence and probably good advice, but the boy was into it now and he flipped a rock while Sig was talking, pulled out a worm and baited his hook, threw the line out into the water.

  Another fish.

  They bit nearly as fast as the hook hit the water. He lost a couple that wriggled off the hook before he could get them up on the bank but, in no time, had taken eight of them, and Sig almost laughed. Quick smile into a near chuckle.

  “Easy,” he said, “take it easy. We still have to clean them.”

  “Are they dirty?” Really asked that, was honestly that new and a hair shy of terminally ignorant. He was not sure what he expected to happen, how you ate a fish or what you were even supposed to do with a fish after you caught it. His sum knowledge about gathering food was singing in a bar in a small soldier’s uniform for fried chicken and potatoes, and Coca-Cola. He didn’t think he had ever even come close to a fish, let alone caught one and eaten it. Although by this time he was hungry enough to eat anything. It had been a long day.

  Another one of Sig’s looks. “No, not exactly. Here.” He reached into his magic pack—as the boy was coming to think of it—and handed him a large spoon. “This is yours—come on.”

  He selected a heavier piece of firewood and held and clubbed each fish, then hooked his fingers into the gills of four of them, motioned for the boy to bring the other four, and moved back down to the water. Watching him, the boy jammed his spoon into his shirt pocket as Sig had done and wiggled his fingers into the gill openings of four fish. They were a bit slimy, but he had been putting worms with black slimy goo from their insides all over his fingers on hooks for a while now, so a little fish slime no longer bothered him.

  At the stream, Sig took one of the fish he was carrying, wiped it firmly on the grass to get the slime off, then rinsed it in water and placed it flat on the grass. He held the head tightly down with his fingers in the eye sockets and, using his spoon as a reverse drag against the direction of the scales, he pulled and scraped all of them clear until the skin no longer had any scales. Then he turned the fish over and did the same on the other side, rinsed the fish thoroughly one more time, before pulling out his knife an
d slitting the fish neatly down the belly. With two fingers, he pulled the guts out, flicked them well out into the stream, and stopped.

  He looked at the boy. With that look where he didn’t have to say anything.

  With a small nod, the boy took one of the fish he was carrying, washed the slime away, put his finger and thumb into its eye socket—another new thing, fingers in eye sockets—and started scraping with his spoon backward.

  He did not feel that it went well, or easily; it was practically impossible. He kept losing his hold on the eye sockets, which seemed to be bulging out around his smaller fingers. Then, too, the scales didn’t exactly jump off the fish, as they seemed to do when Sig was scaling, and he thought of swearing in frustration with some of the real corker swear words he’d learned in the Chicago bars. But he’d never heard Sig swear, so he held back.

  Finally, after many scraping and wobbly attempts, he got all the scales off, rinsed the fish one more time, and held it out toward Sig. He didn’t have a knife and thought Sig would have to do that part.

  Sig took the sunfish, slit the belly open, and handed it back to the boy. “Clean it out.”

  He had already asked once, when he first picked up the worms, about using his hands—although the question came quickly to his mind—so that was out. He cringed at the thought of sticking his hands in fish guts. It wasn’t something he thought he could be good at doing.

  But Sig’s look was still directed his way, so he reached out, took the fish by the eye sockets, held it up, put his hand into the guts, and scraped them out onto the ground and dry heaved—he hadn’t eaten anything to puke up all day—right on top of them.

  It was very quick and he thought perhaps Sig had not seen it, but of course he had and this time he didn’t do the look, but nodded and said: “Don’t worry. Everybody pukes the first time. It gets easier. You’ll be fine.”

  He didn’t believe him for a minute—was sure Sig never puked—but kept his mouth shut and accepted it as a sort of compliment, which turned out to be right.