Asylum--Chapter Ten Everything but the Knots

Chapter Ten
Everything but the Knots

About ten o’clock that night, I brushed my teeth in front of the broken piece of mirror hanging by a string above the sink. I washed my face in an enamel basin and looked around for a towel. Beneath the sink, there was an old wooden box labeled, “Yours Truly Biscuit Company” of Seattle, where I found a stack of hand towels and dish cloths. “Crocheted by my mom,” Billy said without a hint of embarrassment. He politely suggested we turn in early. We had agreed not to have sex, and he offered to sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag but I said I’d be uncomfortable with him doing that. We’d both sleep in the bed, but that was all.

While he banked the fire, I closed the curtain—the camouflage tarp dividing the two rooms—put on my long flannel nightgown and got under the covers. He blew out the lamp and came into the bedroom. First one boot then another clunked to the floor. He climbed into bed and spooned himself against me. When he put an arm around my waist and drew me close, I could feel he was still fully clothed.

“Good night,” he said. 

 “Good night.”

After a few minutes, Billy moved his hand across my stomach and then down to my hips, patting me gingerly and confirming his realization that I wasn’t wearing underwear.

“There’s a problem with this plan. Now you’re only wearing one thing.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

I turned over, facing him, and stroked the soft skin of his neck beneath his beard. He pulled me to him and pressed me so close I could feel the buttons of his shirt against my breasts and, against my belly, the knot of the strip of flannel strung through his belt loops. Slowly, he inched my nightgown up my legs, and soon one thing became nothing. 

He was so intent, so serious it made me laugh, the way I used to laugh at my children when they were small. I kissed his cheek and said. “Breathe, Billy, breathe.” He took a huge gulping breath.

“Don’t worry. You’re doing fine. Stop thinking so much.”

“Tell me what to do,” he begged. “Show me.”

I took his hand. “Here. And here. Like this.”

Then it was as if his mind entered his hands, and they explored my body slowly, thoughtfully, reading me, inside and out. The roughness of his palms woke my skin. My skin was alive. I was alive. It was I, then, who stopped thinking. Letting my mind go, it slipped out the door and floated up into the starry night, and the part of me left in that warm cabin was all sensate body, all feeling, someone who forgot she was married, who forgot everything because her body was remembering something from long ago and was rushing toward it. And Billy was moving eagerly to meet me. His breath was coming, now, in great shuddering gasps. I heard myself say a word all but lost from my vocabulary in recent years as I had said no, no, no to myself, to my husband, to my life, to the world.

“Yes. Yes, Billy, yes.”

The word he had waited so long to hear.

 As the early light of an autumnal dawn came through the cabin window, Billy marveled at seeing his own tiny reflection in my eye. He fell asleep with his head on my chest, his curls dark against my white breasts. I lay awake for a long time, wondering what I had done.

I stayed for five days, delaying my return by telling Thomas the last person I wanted to interview was out moose hunting and I was waiting for him to get back. In truth, I hadn’t even called any of the people I had intended to interview. The lie sounded forced and unconvincing, but Thomas was used to me postponing my return home for the sake of more research—hadn’t I put off my return from Alaska by an entire month that spring by leaving Skagway and coming to Eagle? He trusted me, and I felt much guiltier than I had in May when Billy and I had spent our first—and as we thought at the time, our only—night together. Cultivating such feelings was second nature to me, as I had long turned in upon myself anything bad that happened, taking the blame for every disappointment, every pain, every scratch on one of my sons’ arms for so long it was a reflex. So, too, did I blame myself for the problems in my marriage. It must be me. Unfeeling, uncaring, cutting myself off from Thomas even as he pulled away from me. Running, always running. Thus my guilt was a familiar companion, sharing this distant cabin with me and my strange new love.

We spent much of our time in bed. Billy was like an awkward teen, all arms and legs. So sweet, embarrassed, hesitant. He approached lovemaking with a breathless excitement that was incredibly endearing. He had both a young man’s ardor and appetite and the mature man’s appreciation and gratitude for the long-desired and the long-denied. It was thrilling to be the object of such rapt attention, and incredible to me that I—with my middle-aged body and worn-out heart—could elicit such a response from a man, someone with a soft brown beard and strong hands, a flat stomach and muscled arms. This shy boy-man. His hands, which moved so surely when he was sharpening his knife or handling a gun, moved uncertainly over my body’s terrain; they could have been small intelligent robots mapping the surface of the moon, so foreign was this territory to him.

Later, touching was not enough for him. He wanted to see and explore, and I let him. I opened myself to him, and he looked in wonder for a long time. 

 “It’s like liquid velvet,” he said, amazed as if he’d discovered a strange and exquisite sea creature on some undisturbed seafloor. He treated my breasts as if they were an architectural marvel. He traced their outline over and over, lifting each one to examine the skin beneath it. “There isn’t even a seam or anything.” He laughed out loud one morning, both thrilled and proud, when he looked in the mirror and realized he had a hickey the size of a silver dollar on his neck. 

For years, Billy had not been near enough to anyone to hear a whisper. As long as I murmured in his ear, he was mesmerized, holding his head next to mine, his body gone still. We whispered together for hours. He told me later how surprised he had been to find himself sitting next to me on the couch, that first night last spring. “I hadn’t been that close to another person in years.” 

In my own way, I hadn’t been that close to another person for a long time, either. Billy’s complete absorption in me, how his whole attention focused on me made me feel visible and present in a way I hadn’t felt for a long time. He looked into my eyes, he listened—he listened!—and held me through the night. I talked to him about the girl I used to be who loved the mountains and wanted to go live in Colorado. Where had she gone in recent years? Lost somewhere along the way, in between raising kids and working and being as good a wife as I could be, though, ultimately, I felt I had failed at that. 

We let the cabin grow cold and rose from the bed reluctantly to stoke the fire. We lived on tea and bannock. I relished the cabin’s quiet. There was no refrigerator hum or whoosh of central heating or gurgling of plumbing in the walls. Outside, there were no backing trucks, police helicopters, or jumbo jets screaming overhead. There was no yelling; here, we spoke in hushed tones.

Billy described what it was like tending a trap line he’d had out along the Seventymile trail, staying in a canvas tent framed with spruce poles. I couldn’t imagine living in a tent in winter, even for a few weeks, but he explained he set up a Yukon stove for heating and cooking, vented through a stovepipe that exited through a hole in the roof. I asked him why he didn’t just stay in one of the many old trappers’ cabins that were scattered throughout the region, and he said. “Nothing’s colder than an empty cabin. The logs are just cold-soaked and it takes them forever to warm up. Once they get warm, they’ll retain the heat and radiate it back, but that can take twelve hours or more.”

I lay in the crook of his arm, imagining some poor trapper shivering in his bunk while he waited for the logs to warm. Billy fell asleep. The cabin was so still it was as if the very logs had soaked up all noise, drawing sound into them like they absorbed heat from the fire and then released it back into the room. “Quiet,” breathed the cabin walls. “Shush,” they said. I listened to the warm exhalations of the walls and thought of someone living in this silent cabin for fifteen solitary years. 

Billy had told me that one of the old-timers swore that in winter, sitting alone in his tiny cabin, it was so quiet he could hear his own heart beating. I imagined this country in midwinter, the surfeit of silence that overflowed the banks of the frozen river, cascading down the sides of still mountains, eddying around the doorsteps of isolated cabins, swirling like flurries of snow beneath the plank door, stirring the drawstring that hangs on the outside awaiting a visitor that never comes, and settling on a man who sits alone listening to the beating of his own heart.

When Billy stirred and woke, I said, “You should get a cat.” 

“Why?”

“So you won’t be alone.”

Then, without a trace of self pity, he told me about his two decades of profound loneliness, starting from when he lost his first and only love, Julia. He had nursed his broken heart at a fire lookout tower in Arizona, finding solace in the wilderness. Later, as a firefighter, he observed that when he returned to Eagle with his crew after a fire, the family men were welcomed home as if they were conquering heroes. “It was like nobody cared if I’d survived or not. The single men are expendable.” Over the years, his isolation had only deepened. He had a circle of male friends, mostly bachelors, whom he visited on a regular basis. He would walk miles to see one of these companions in weather too cold to drive his truck—thirty-five, forty below—often returning after dark, a solitary figure trudging next to the road, kicking up the snow so someone in an oncoming car would see the swirl of white in the headlights and be able steer clear of him, maybe offer him a ride. 

Gradually, Billy had pulled away from other people. He occasionally went to church or a social function at Redmen Hall, but being in a crowd (in Eagle, anything over a dozen people was considered a crowd) increased his sense of separation. Feeling like one of the untouchables, he came to dress the part, letting his hair grow and going for days on end without bathing. He kept away from others—never coming closer than about five feet, the physical distance echoing the emotional distance he felt inside.

Without anniversaries and birthdays and children growing up, the years slipped by all the same, one after the other. He saw others change around him, couples marry and divorce, kids turn into teens, old-timers grow feeble and die. But nothing altered in his life. He still came home to an empty cabin. I had seen other men like this in Alaska, men for whom time seemed to have stopped, young Rip van Winkles who kept to themselves and let their whiskers grow and marked time through the years until one day they looked in the mirror and found themselves old. 

It was a melancholy picture Billy drew and I snuggled against him. He needed me. I would ease his loneliness. I would warm him and comfort him and he would love me.

“Tell me something fun,” I said.

Billy spun a fantasy of us being young hippies together in Colorado or Maine in the 1970s. “And I would’ve come home and you’d open the door wearing moccasins and a denim skirt and a chamois camisole that I made myself. Or you’d be out in the garden and come in all sweaty and smelling good, kind of earthy.” What an innocent vision, not unlike the ones Moana and I had entertained back in Southern California when we’d vowed to live in the Rocky Mountains someday and our lives would be all love and usic and sunshine. 

Billy may have been a hippy at heart back then but it wasn’t apparent in the photo he showed me of himself in high school, wearing a dorky Civil Air Patrol uniform. Laughter bubbled out of me effortlessly like something had been set loose, like Billy was gently pulling a colorful string of balloons from my throat. My joy at being with him was irrepressible, an abundance of good feeling, rising up and overflowing, finding its voice in laughter. It was a voice I hardly recognized as my own, it had been so long since I had heard it. I fell back against the pillows, laughing, laughing, laughing, while he looked on in delight, wide-eyed and smiling.

Billy said he wanted to show me the outhouse with the best view of Eagle. Intrigued, I said, “Let’s go.” We drove to the base of an old road above town and hiked through the woods. After less than an hour of climbing uphill, we came to a boarded-up cabin. Perched on the edge of the ridge was a doorless outhouse. Sitting down on the rough wooden seat, I looked down at the town far below, bordered by the bright swath of the Yukon. Across the river stretched the flat expanse that continued clear to Canada, every mile of it brilliant with golden aspen trees interspersed with the darker spruce.

Billy was leaning on his elbow surveying the view. In his battered wide-brimmed  hat, he looked like a lovable hillbilly.

“You’re right,” I said, “about the outhouse. I could bring a book and sit there all day.” The late afternoon sun cast a warm glow on the bluff. It didn’t look as large from up here, though it rose over two thousand feet above the river. I told Billy it reminded me of the rocky promontory that stood high above my friend’s house in Idaho. He listened as I described the ranch, its hundred-year history, and the sense of connectedness I’d felt there—to the land, and to times past. 

“Maybe it was getting you ready for Alaska,” he said.

“Maybe so. The Yukon is a lot like the Snake River. Big enough to make you feel really small. I used to be so scared of the river, trying to row across with the oars going every which way.”

“Struggle sticks,” Billy laughed.

“Yes, exactly. I was always afraid of getting swept downriver, so I’d row really far upriver before trying to cross. That way I had at least a chance of landing on the beach in front of the ranchhouse.”

A squirrel cussed us out from a branch overhead, and Billy looked up and talked back to it before saying, “I got myself into a bit of a fix on the river a couple of years ago back when I still had an old motor on my boat.”

“A motor on a canoe? That doesn’t sound too stable.”

“It wasn’t. I was on my way to my friends’ homestead about seventy miles downriver to go moose hunting.”

“You were going to pack a whole moose in a canoe?” I imagined the overloaded boat fighting the current, its gunwales just clearing the water.

“Well, as much of him as I could fit. So I was just going along, ho hum, not paying attention, and I got too close to shore. The prop hit bottom and I overcorrected. The canoe flipped.”

I sucked in my breath, as if I, myself, had plunged into the glacier-fed river.

“What happened?”

“Well, first off, there went my brand new rifle,” he groaned. “I should have tied it in the boat, but I didn’t. Good thing I’d tied in my backpack. There was no way I could turn the canoe over so I just held on and started floating downriver. I tried kicking towards shore but the current was too strong. I must have floated for five miles, and my legs were going numb.”

A chill breeze shivered a handful of aspen leaves off the branches overhead, scattering yellow heart shapes across my lap.

“It was about this time of year. September. Oh, boy, that water was cold. There’s only a few cabins between where I was at and my friends’ place, and I knew I couldn’t hang on much longer. I figured my best bet was to try to get somebody’s attention when I passed the sonar station.”

That was the camp I’d heard about, where Alaska Fish and Game had installed underwater sonar cameras to count king salmon.

“I could see the tents coming up on the left bank, but I knew they wouldn’t hear me if I hollered. So I worked the strap loose on my backpack with one hand and got out a tin cup and started banging on the canoe as loud as I could. It was a good thing they were down on the beach when I went by. They jumped into their boat and came out and hauled me in and pulled my canoe to shore. It took me a while to warm up, I’ll tell you.” 

Billy looked rather glum, and I wondered what he was dwelling on—the carelessness that could have cost him his life, or, more likely, the loss of that brand new rifle.

One morning Billy said there were things he had to do. He didn’t look like he was in a hurry to start doing them, lingering as he was over his second cup of coffee. I was drinking black tea, not having developed a taste for “cowboy coffee” boiled in a pan and poured into a mug along with a good portion of the grounds. I wondered what needed to be done at this time of year in addition to the daily chores. Even simple tasks involved a multi-stepped, time-consuming process. Dishwashing required hauling water from town, bringing the five-gallon buckets in from the truck, carrying in an armful of wood, lighting a fire, heating the water, and when you’re all done, emptying the slop bucket.

“What do you need to do?” I said.

 “Fish.”

To me, fishing was something you did on a lazy summer day. Or people like Huck Finn did, anyway. It was a solitary thing, just a fishing pole and you. At least that is what I imagined it to be like; I’d never caught a fish in my life except for when I’d cast a line into a river in Colorado and had snagged a trout in the eyeball. I was so upset I refused to fish after that. What Billy described was a whole nother operation. Nets, floats, anchors, a canoe, a deadman (whatever that was), and fish—not a skilletfull, but dozens, even hundreds. Not little trout, but sizable salmon. He would be fishing for fall chum, he explained. The king salmon season was in mid-summer and people catch them to put up in jars or dry in strips. The smaller chums, or dog salmon, as they are known, are mostly used for dog food. 

Like everyone else in Eagle with sled dogs, Billy needed to catch enough salmon to feed them through the winter. With two huskies, at half a fish a dog per day, that was a lot of salmon. The chum salmon run was almost over. Already snow had fallen on the mountains and ice rimmed the canoe in the morning. It was time to put the net in the water.

I helped untangle the sixty-foot net and spread it out in the yard. We gathered up the net between each pair of floats and tied the sections with a short length of nylon cord. Billy had to show me, over and over, how to tie a square knot. He couldn’t believe that I, a former Girl Scout, didn’t even know how to make something as basic as a square knot. Though Billy professed he knew only a few knots, I still marveled at how swiftly and easily he made a slip knot or a good, firm hitch for tying up the boat.

I thought of what an old man, a former sailor, had told me once down at The Whistle Stop. I’d asked him how he came to Alaska, and he said he’d sailed solo from Japan in a thirty-three-foot steel sailboat, taking seventy-seven days to make the voyage. It was one of those stories I hadn’t known whether to believe at the time. It later turned out to be true. He said, “Everything in Alaska is different but the knots.” Everything he’d learned about living elsewhere—the Lower 48, Australia, Malaysia—didn’t apply in Eagle. Only the knots were the same. But I didn’t even know the knots. I was entirely at sea here.

Once the net was ready, Billy carefully coiled it in a galvanized washtub and put it in the back of the truck. He also threw in an empty red plastic gas can.

 “The regulations say that you can use any color but red for a float but to people in Eagle, that’s a darn good reason to use red. You can bet if the regs said no green, they’d go out of their way to find something neon green.”  

I gathered up fishing gear stowed in the arctic entry, digging around in the odd collection of stuff, including a canvas anorak that looked like it could have been worn by Nanook of the North and a thick vest made from the wooly back of a Dall sheep. I moved a pair of snowshoes hanging from a nail. Curled around the nail, as if it had been there a very long time, was a small handwritten copy of the Ten Commandments. Number seven: adultery. 

We drove a quarter of a mile down to the river and carried the washtub across the mud flat and along the gravel bar to where it curved out into the river. Across the Yukon, the willows and alders along the shore were shades of burnt umber, ochre, and bronze, with a thick line of bare aspens above them. Beyond the aspen, the hills rose sharply, covered with snow-stippled spruce. We were directly opposite the mouth of a pretty stream.

“They say the Fortymile caribou herd used to migrate through here in the fall. That was a long time ago. Hundreds of them came from up north, swam across the river and then went up Eagle Creek,” he said, pointing to the stream I’d been admiring. 

“I’d love to have seen that.”

“It must have been really something. In the spring, they migrated through in the opposite direction. The ice gets mushy at that time of year and some of the caribou used to fall through and drown.”

Billy continued to narrate the landscape for me. I enjoyed being able to see it through his eyes, with every place holding a story, a memory.

 “See those bare patches of rock? You can spot sheep there in the spring. The peaks just beyond that? Those are in Canada. The border is a couple of miles up the creek.” He pointed out ridges he’d climbed just for the view and more distant folds of the mountains where he had hunted Dall sheep. 

“One time, hunting with Swede, we got so high we were looking down on a golden eagle.”

Billy explained what I was supposed to do, and then we into the canoe. It was secured to the gravel bar with a rope tied to a large piece of driftwood held in place by several heavy rocks—a deadman. As he paddled out into the current and dropped the anchor, I paid out the net. Once it was strung from shore to anchor, Billy untied all the square knots holding the net closed. Then it unfurled, pulled toward the river bottom by the lead weights in the lower edge. 

We checked the net once a day, usually in the afternoon. I enjoyed being in the same canoe we’d floated down the Yukon in the previous spring. But this time we were not playing, but working together. It was a joy to watch the rhythm of Billy’s hands as he hauled in the net and untangled the fish, caught in the gillnet by their gills, or, frequently, by their hooked jaws. My job was to hold the boat against the net, being careful not to let it snag against the rivets.

Some of the salmon were already dead, but many were still thrashing about as Billy brought them to the surface. Those that were particularly lively and difficult to untangle, he thumped on the head with the broken end of an oar. I covered my ears, repulsed by the unmistakable sound of wood meeting flesh. 

The large thick-bodied fish slid into the bottom of the boat, piling up around my feet. Most of the salmon were still bright silver, with olive green stripes on the neck, pink in the middle and black near the tail. But those close to the tributary where they would spawn—remarkably, the same exact stream where they’d hatched—were dying as they swam. Some were nearly blind, their eyes already opaque. Around the mouth and head they were a sulfurous yellow, the color of old leaching pits.

“Why do you keep them if they’re in such bad shape? They don’t even look safe to eat.”

“Once in while they’re too far gone, but most of them are still all right,” Billy explained. “Not for eating, but for the dogs. Besides, I don’t want them to just go to waste. After being caught, they’re usually pretty played out.”

One male, still struggling weakly, had a couple of circular spots the size of half dollars on his side—necrotic tissue, Billy explained, already dead. The flesh of the salmon’s head was sloughing off where it rubbed against the net. As Billy pulled him in, a pale tendril of milt flowed out. Billy cradled the exhausted fish in one hand and stroked his belly, milking another gray cloud that swirled through the water. He whacked him with the broken oar, and this time it seemed merciful, not cruel.

The female chums were smaller, with more uniform purplish gray markings along the length of their streamlined bodies. One was so spent her tail was almost completely worn away, with just a few straw-like projections left. I asked Billy if we could let her go and he agreed. As he picked her up in both hands, a cascade of bright red eggs spilled out, streaming across my knees as he swung her to the other side of the canoe.

He held the fish for a moment in the water before giving her a gentle shove. “There you go, girl,” he said, sounding regretful his net had delayed her passage, perhaps beyond her endurance. “Who knows, maybe she’s heading to Eagle Creek.”

I looked across at the mouth of the creek just a few hundred yards away and hoped he was right. A few minutes later, a large male flipped and spanked at the water as it struggled against the net. When Billy pulled him over the side I held out the oar, but he waved it away and started working him loose, keeping his fingers clear of the sharp teeth. 

“We’ll let this guy go, too.” 

 “Why? He’s a nice big one.” His flesh was firm, with the tiger stripes on his sides still vivid.

 “Because he has a lot of fight still left in him. He’s still healthy—look, his gills are nice bright red.”

Billy put the fish over the side and it kicked loose out of his hands as it hit the water. As we watched the salmon heading strongly upstream again. Billy said, “He might make it.”

It was getting late in the day, and I felt tired and chilled. 

      “Looks like there’s snow coming at us from upriver.” Billy pointed.

I turned and saw a mist flowing down the river, whitening the water before it as it came. Small ice crystals pelted us, and in just a few minutes, the cloud had passed by us, continuing toward town. While it enveloped us, the mist had felt cold against my face. It clouded my sight until I couldn’t see the far bank. The current pulled at the boat and my fingers were so stiff from cold I could barely hang onto the net.

     Billy’s hands were such a bright red I couldn’t imagine how he could keep picking carefully at a snarl around a salmon’s jaw. An owl hooted along the shore. There was just a small patch of blue left in the sky between the dark clouds. Upriver, only one snow-covered peak was still visible, the other mountains were just a jumble of dark slopes, humps, and ridges.

A blunt, grunting sound came from the direction of the creek.

“What was that?”

“Bull moose.”

 I watched with anxiety as the light faded by the second, the sun gathering in the light from the water as it sank in the west, directly downriver. I was terrified of being on the Yukon after dark. Two more sections of net to go. We were ankle deep in fish.

“Can’t you hurry, Billy? The light is going.”

“Don’t worry, I can do it by feel if I have to. Old Stephen from the Native village was blind, and he still got salmon every year. Somebody else drove the boat, but he got the fish out of the net.”

Billy worked quickly but without hurry. I’d never seen him in a rush. He moved at his own pace. 

The last section of net. We were in shallow water now. Only one fish. Thank God. The surface of the river still held a bit of light as Billy quickly pulled us along the net to shore. We left the salmon, about thirty of them, in the bottom of the boat and walked as fast as we could across the gravel bar and the wide mudflat to the riverbank. I was scared, knowing there were bears about, and my hand felt small and cold in Billy’s strong, even colder hand. Once we were back on shore, I felt a huge sense of relief. We still had the walk back to the cabin in near total darkness, and we didn’t have a flashlight, but at least we were off the river. Billy could find the way home.

 “But what about the salmon? Won’t the bears get them?”

 “Most of the bears are on the other side of the river. The fish will be all right until morning. The ravens might peck their eyes out, but that doesn’t matter. We’ll be back to get them first thing.”

It wasn’t until the next morning that Billy explained that yes, bears can, and do, swim the Yukon River; he just hadn’t wanted to worry me. As we were walking across the gravel bar to the boat, Billy paused and I looked down to see the bones of a grizzly bear’s forearm and paw, complete with wrist and knuckle bones, embedded in the sand. The old bones were stained a lovely amber and still held several tufts of brown fur. I rinsed the bones in the river and put one of the tufts in my coat pocket just so someday, back in San Jose, I could put my hand in my pocket, feel the grizzly’s hairs between my fingers and remember this day.

While Billy was cleaning the salmon on a table set up near the water, he asked me to check the trotline at the other end of the gravel bar. I would rather have just waited for him to do it himself, but he had a couple dozen fish still to gut.

 “What am I supposed to do?”

“Just pull in the trotline and see if there’s a burbot on any of the hooks.”

Sounded simple enough. I knew the trotline was a long line sunk on the river bottom, with large baited hooks set every few feet. There hadn’t been a fish the last two times we had checked it, so I wasn’t too concerned I’d find anything.

To my surprise, when I pulled in the line, there was a burbot—a flat and ugly, with eyes on top of its head and a wide gaping mouth. Now what? I looked at Billy standing at the cleaning table, a long ways up the gravel bar. He was too far away to call. I waved my arms, but he was engrossed in his work and didn’t see me. Remove the hook. I knew that much. The hook was big enough that I could get a good hold on it, and I managed to pull it out without too much trouble.

Now the burbot was just lying there looking up at me balefully. It was a primordial-looking thing, with whiskers like a walrus. Poor man’s lobster, they called it, for its rich, tasty flesh. The next thing to do was kill it. Whack it on the head with something. There was no driftwood in sight to use as a club. The trot line was anchored on shore with a lead pipe. That would do. I couldn’t bring myself to actually feel it connect with the fish’s body, so I held the pipe over my head and threw it down as hard as I could. It made a sickening thump and the burbot quivered and went limp. I’d done it. I’d killed something for the first time in my life. 

I felt suddenly guilty and looked around to see if anyone was watching. Billy was squatting at the water’s edge, washing out a salmon. I wanted to run away and leave the burbot there but I reluctantly picked up the heavy fish by its tail and carried it up to Billy. He was inordinately pleased, proud of me, the fisherwoman. I felt repulsed at the thought of eating something I had killed, so I ate only a couple bites of the burbot that night, enough to assure Billy, yes, it tasted just like lobster.

We put the salmon to dry on the fish rack at the edge of the clearing—the same rack that had attracted the grizzly bear a few years earlier. Billy stood and looked at the our handiwork with satisfaction: dozens of silver, eighteen-inch-long salmon split and hung on spruce poles, their heads all facing the same way, jaws agape. Skeins of eggs—a treat for the dogs—dangled from twine, gleaming red in the slanting morning light. To me, it was just a pleasing sight, but to Billy it was security for the winter.