Read Online Fishbone's Song by Gary Paulsen - Free Book Online Page B

dropped in the soup. Both chubs and crayfish—all outside the trap—came for the guts and had them clean and gone before they hit the bottom or drifted downstream.
    No waste nor want, Fishbone said when he was talking about the bible, or anything else, for that matter. Woods, life, weather, food, souls—it should all close in back of you as you move through life. Come in, go out, not a ripple left. Like a knife through water. Like stovesmoke. No tracks, not a wrinkle to show you were there. No waste. No want. No bother to nobody or no thing. You be there, he said, then you’re not there. He’d smile. We’re all here because why, why? Because we’re not all there. Now you see us, then you don’t.
    Once I washed it out in the creek, I wrappedthe rabbit in dry grass to take back for Fishbone. He dearly loved rabbit dusted in flour and fried in bacon grease. Thick coating, crispy fried. Not his favorite thing, but one of them. Second favorite was ’coon meat, cut in chunks and fried the same way. In bacon grease. So deep it bubbled when you fried it.
    Good as bear, he said. And bear was the best meat of all. Way back, when they went into the hills to start making ’shine, even before that, when there was just a frontier and a man had to clear his own land with his hands, when he could barely even own his own land, when he used a rifle that sparked flint and fired a round ball, even then they knew what was best. Deer were everywhere, and in a pinch they would eat deer meat. But the fat was bad, covered your lips and inside your mouth like candle wax. So they’d take deer for the hides, for buckskin, which made good clothes when it was soft and supple if it was worked up right. Itwas so good buckskin was shortened to just buck, and that became a rate of money. A single note was called not a dollar but a buck. Five bucks was five deer hides, stretched and salt cured.
    But for meat they took bear.
    Rich with good fat, clean fat, to use for cooking. Nothing, Fishbone said, absolutely nothing, tasted like biscuits fried in bear grease. It could preserve leather, help a small cut when it was rubbed on, grease a squeaking wagon wheel, and, when stored in a glass jar, would predict weather a day before it came. Sharpen a knife with liquid bear grease on the stone and you could shave hair with it after four swipes.
    Best thing ever.
    So I guess rabbit was third. Bear first, raccoon second, and rabbit third.
    But I hadn’t shot a ’coon. I’d seen them now and again. Usually on a tree limb when one of the Old Blue visiting dogs stuck them up an oak or anelm. They’d sit up there and snarl and spit at the dog. One of them, an old boar, must have weighed twenty or twenty-five pounds, maybe more, put up with it for a while, then dropped down and cleaned up on the dog, just beat the bejesus out of him, so he came running back to me and sat on my foot, bleeding a bit here and there, making a kind of small sound. Fishbone said they were water animals, ’coons, and if one of them got a dog in the water, he’d sit on his head and drown him all the way down. Drown him dead. Just hold his head underwater until it was done.
    But I’d never shot one even though I had few chances for a shot. A hollow cane arrow was fine for a rabbit or grouse or squirrel but anything bigger . . . no. Not if I wanted a clean kill, a quick kill. A meat kill. Food. Raccoons were just too tough for a simple sharp stick and as for the other, bear.
    Well.
    Saw a stump near the creek, big old stumpmaybe three feet across and six or seven feet tall. Or had been at one time. Completely torn to pieces, torn down and ripped to shreds by a bear looking for grub worms. Which I tried once because Fishbone said bears ate them and some natives ate them, but I couldn’t hold one down. Too squishy and gutsy and smeary in my mouth and just made me lose it and puke everything up. I think I’d starve to