Wild grass formed a soft bed for daydreaming. It was there that I had dreamed of crossing the Rockies to trap for beaver, making detailed lists of gunpowder, salt pork, and trade beads. Gazing at the sky I could enumerate each detail of my outfit and weapons. I fought Indians and Hudson’s Bay Company trappers. But that was the summer; this day was real, and I passed over that dreaming place.
It was a short walk across the clearing to the house. I could see the tiny hump of it squatting in the snow, a rectangular log box with a pitched roof. Out behind was the outhouse and beyond that a dory turned over and hidden in the snow beside the smokehouse.
The light in the kitchen window made a pale square of gold in the snow, and my mother’s shadow passed through it. She waved when she saw me. I held up the rabbit and saw her smile.
“Don’t you bring that thing in here,” she said, catching me at the door. She smelled of homemade food and warmth, and the heat of the kitchen washed around her like surf. “My that’s a big one,” she added. “I guess I know what I’m cooking tomorrow night.”
The darkness around her eyes reminded me of our loss, and I was filled with a sense of panic. There was no father at this house to help me clean the rabbit. Dad would have known how to butcher the animal and probably would have told me a story while he did it.
“You remember how to clean them, right?”
“Yeah, no problem,” I lied.
I turned back to the forest, and beneath a giant spruce I used my knife to open the rabbit and expose the innards. They were cold, nearly frozen, and I had to tug and tear to pull the strange slimy shapes out of the cavity formed by the creature’s ribs. I was making a mess of it, ripping meat and hide, splattering myself with blood. I knew the skin should come off in one smooth slip like taking off one-piece long johns, but I didn’t know how, and there was no Dad there in that cold winter evening to show me.
I looked across the snow to the back edge of the clearing where the berm pile made a shadow in the pale light of evening. I didn’t feel anything like a mountain man. My feet were cold and it was dark under the trees where the night started early. There were cold tears on my cheeks. I knew that Dad would insist that the guts be left back in the trees away from the cabin where scavengers could get them. He would have turned grouchy if I complained.
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
