shelf, I don't want them to see.
That's what he was doing here all winter, he was shut up in this cabin making these unintelligible drawings. I sit at the table, my heart speeded up as if I've opened what I thought was an empty closet and found myself face to face with a thing that isn't supposed to be there, like a claw or a bone. This is the forgotten possibility: he might have gone insane. Crazy, loony. Bushed, the trappers call it when you stay in the forest by yourself too long. And if insane, perhaps not dead: none of the rules would be the same.
Anna walks out of the bedroom, dressed in jeans and shirt again. She combs her hair in front of the mirror, light ends, dark roots, humming to herself, You Are My Sunshine; smoke twines up from her cigarette. _Help,_ I think at her silently, _talk._ And she does.
'What's for dinner?' she says; then, waving, 'Here they come.'
Chapter Seven
At supper we finish off the beer. David wants to go fishing, it's the last night, so I leave the dishes for Anna and go down to the garden with the shovel and the tin can saved from the peas.
I dig in the weediest part near the compost heap, lifting the earth and letting it crumble, sieving the worms out with my fingers. The soil is rich, the worms scramble, red ones and pink ones.
Nobody loves me
Everybody hates me
I'm going to the garden to eat worms.
They sang that back and forth at recess: it was an insult, but perhaps they are edible. They're sold like apples in season, VERS 5? on the roadside signs, sometimes VERS 5?, later VERS 10?, inflation. French class, _vers libre,_ I translated it the first time as Free Worms and she thought I was being smart.
I put the worms in the can and some dirt for them. As I walk back to the cabin I hold my palm over the top; already they're nudging with their head ends, trying to get out. I make them a cover from a piece of paper torn off the grocery bag, keeping it on with a rubber band. My mother was a saver: rubber bands, string, safety pins, jam jars, for her the Depression never ended.
David is fitting the sections of his borrowed fishing rod together; it's fibreglass, I have no faith in it. I take the steel trolling rod from its hooks on the wall. 'Come on,' I tell David, 'you can use that one for still-fishing.'
'Show me how to light the lamp,' Anna says, 'I'll stay here and read.'
I don't want to leave her alone. What I'm afraid of is my father, hidden on the island somewhere and attracted by the light perhaps, looming up at the window like a huge ragged moth; or, if he's still at all lucid, asking her who she is and ordering her out of his house. As long as there are four of us he'll keep away, he never liked groups.
'Poor sport,' David says.
I tell her I need her in the canoe for extra weight, which is a lie as we'll be too heavy already, but she takes my expert word.
While they're getting into the canoe I return to the garden and catch a small leopard frog as an emergency weapon. I put it in a jam jar and punch a few airholes in the lid.
Tackle box, smelling of stale fish, old captures; worm can and frog bottle, knife and heap of bracken fronds for the fish to bleed on. Joe in the bow, Anna behind him on a life-jacket facing me, David on another life-jacket with his back to me and his legs tangled in amongst Anna's. Before I push off I clip a silver and gold spinner with glass ruby eyes to David's line and hook a worm on, looping its body seductively. Both ends twirl.
'Ech,' says Anna, who can see what I'm doing.
'It doesn't hurt them,' my brother said, 'they don't feel it.'
'Then why do they squirm?' I said. He said it was nervous tension.
'Whatever happens,' I tell them, 'stay in the middle.' We move ponderously out of the bay. I've taken on too much: I haven't been in a canoe for years, my muscles are shot, Joe paddles as though he's stirring the lake with a ladle and we're down by the bow. But none of them will know the difference. I think, it's a good thing our lives don't depend on catching a fish. Starvation, bite your arm and suck the blood, that's what they do on lifeboats; or the Indian way, if there's no bait try a chunk of your flesh.
The island shoreline recedes behind us, he can't follow us here. Above the trees streaky mackerel clouds are spreading in over the sky, paint on a wet page; no wind at lake level, soft feel of the air before rain. The fish like this, the mosquitoes too, but I can't use any bug spray because it would get on the bait and the fish would smell it.
I steer us along the mainland shore. A blue heron lifts from a bay where it's been fishing and flaps overhead, neck and beak craning forward and long legs stretched back, winged snake. It notes us with a rasping pterodactyl croak and rises higher, heading southeast, there was a colony of them, it must still be there. But now I have to pay more attention to David. The copper line slants down, cutting the water, vibrating slightly.
'Any action?' I ask.
'It's just sort of jigging.'
'That's the spoon turning,' I say. 'Keep the tip down; if you feel a nibble wait a second and then give it a sharp tug, okay?'
'Right,' he says.
My arms are tired. Behind me I can hear the tick tock of the frog hopping up and hitting its muzzle against the jar lid.
When we're getting near the sheer cliff I tell him to reel in, we'll still-fish and he can use his own rod.
'Lie down, Anna,' he says, 'I'm gonna use my own rod.'
Anna says 'Oh Christ, you have to do that about everything, don't you?'
He chuckles at her and reels and the line comes in, the water slipping off it; the pale gleam of the spoon wavers up out of the lake. When it skips over the surface towards us I can see the worm is gone. On one hook is a shred of worm skin; I used to wonder how the lures with their crude African-idol eyes could deceive the fish, but perhaps they've learned.
We're opposite the cliff, grey slab of rock straight as a monument, overhanging slightly, ledge like a step halfway up, brown rock-lichen growing in the fissures. I put a lead sinker and a different spoon and a fresh worm on David's line and toss it over; the worm drops, pink, pink-brown, till it disappears in the shadow of the cliff. The dark torpedo shapes of the fish are seeing it, sniffing at it, prodding it with their noses. I believe in them the way other people believe in God: I can't see them but I know they are there.
'Keep right still,' I say to Anna, who's beginning to shift uncomfortably. They can hear.
Light fading, silence; back in the forest, liquid spiral thrush voice, they call at sunset. David's arm moves up and down.
When nothing happens I tell him to reel in; the worm is gone again. I take out the little frog, the ultimate solution, and hook it on securely while it squeaks. Other people always did that for me.
'God you're cold-blooded,' Anna says. The frog goes down through the water, kicking like a man swimming.
Everyone concentrates, even Anna: they sense this is my last trick. I stare into the water, it was always a kind of meditation. My brother fished by technique, he outguessed them, but I fished by prayer, listening.
Our father who art in heaven
Please let the fish be caught.
Later when I knew that wouldn't work, just _Please be caught,_ invocation or hypnosis. He got more fish but I could pretend mine were willing, they had chosen to die and forgiven me in advance.
I begin to think the frog has failed. But it's still magic, the rod bends like a diviner's and Anna shrieks with surprise.
I say 'Keep the line tight,' but David is oblivious, he's reeling like a mixmaster and saying 'Wow, wow' to himself and it's up to the surface, it jumps clear and hangs in the air like a framed photo over a bar only moving. It dives and pulls, the line slackens, it's doubling back trying to shake loose; but when it jumps again David jerks the rod with his whole body and it sails across and flops into the canoe, a dumb move, he could've lost it, on top of Anna and she lurches, screaming 'Get it off me! Get it off me!' and we almost tip. Joe says 'Holy shit' and grabs at the side, I bend the other way, counterbalancing, David is snatching at it. It slithers over the canoe ribs, flippering and snapping.
'Here,' I say, 'hit it back of the eyes.' I reach him the sheathed knife, I'd rather not kill it myself.
David swipes at it, misses; Anna cover her eyes and says 'Ugh. Ugh.' It flops towards me and I step down on it with my foot and grab the knife and whack it quickly with the knife handle, crushing the skull, and it trembles stiffly all over, that's done it.
'What is it?' David asks, amazed by what he's caught but proud too. They are all laughing, joyful with victory and relief, like the newsreels of parades at the end of the war, and that makes me glad. Their voices bounce off the cliff.
'Walleye,' I say, 'Pickerel. We'll have it for breakfast.'
It's a good size. I pick it up, fingers hooked under the gills and holding firmly, they can bite and jerk loose even when they're dead. I put it on the bracken fronds and rinse my hand and the knife. One of its eyes is bulging out and I feel a little sick, it's because I've killed something, made it dead; but I know that's irrational, killing certain things is all right, food and enemies, fish and mosquitoes; and wasps, when there are too many of them you pour boiling water down their tunnels. 'Don't bother them and they won't bother you,' our mother would say when they lit on our plates. That was before the house was built, we were living outside in tents. Our father said they went in cycles.
'Neat eh?' David says to the others; he's excited, he wants praise. 'Ugh,' says Anna, 'it's slimy, I'm not going to eat any of it.' Joe grunts, I wonder if he's
