Raft of Stars

a cedar tree with his grandfather’s barlow knife. The cedar had soft wood, but it made for painstaking knife work. He was unsure if such labor was tenacious or just plain dumb. The tree was about a foot thick at its base, and Fish had to slice it away, strip by strip. He was thankful he remembered to bring the whetstone. After slicing for about ten minutes, the edge of the blade stopped biting, and he’d have to slice the whetstone for a while. It was a welcome break. The work made his hands cramp, and he couldn’t get comfortable standing or kneeling. Fish stepped back to gauge his work. The progress was slow, but it was progress. He’d sliced away nearly one quarter of the tree’s diameter. A pile of shavings covered the ground. If a beaver could do it with his front teeth, Fish told himself, he could do it with a barlow. They needed about ten or fifteen more trees for their raft. If this is what it took, he thought, then this is what he’d do.

Bread trudged back. “Maybe we could switch awhile,” he said. “The roots keep breaking, and I’m getting sick and tired of it.”

“Can’t you just dig ’em out?”

“I got nothing to dig with.”

Bread sat down heavily near his pack and pulled out a can of tuna. He wiped his dirty hands on his jeans, opened the top, scooped a bite into his mouth, and chewed without enthusiasm. Fish watched his friend looking out at the cool river sparkling through the gaps in the trees. The day had become hot, and mosquitoes rose from the ferns once the boys worked up a sweat. Bread swatted one.

“And these bugs,” he said, his mouth full of tuna, “could drive a cow nuts.”

Fish, too, was covered in welts and bites on his back and arms. Scratching them made it worse. Swatting them did nothing. Fish spat on the whetstone, scraped the blade along its length, and then folded the knife and sat down next to Bread in the musty cedar chaff. Bread handed him the tuna and scratched his arms. The boys looked at the small pile of failed roots, too short for rope. They silently stared at the chewed-up cedar tree.

“We’re never gonna finish this raft,” said Bread.

“We’re making progress,” said Fish.

Bread snorted. Fish handed the tuna can back to him. It was dry without mayonnaise. Fish felt a deep hunger for good-tasting food, for salt and sugar. He thought about a peanut butter and jelly with potato chips and cold milk in his favorite blue cup, but resisted the impulse to dwell on it. He had to be strong. They had to train themselves to go without.

“Behold the beaver,” said Fish, swallowing.

“Behold what?” said Bread.

“We’re in a new kind of life now, Bread. We’re on woods time now, woods food. We are strong and we are good, and it doesn’t matter if it takes ten years to build that raft.”

“What’s that got to do with beaver?” said Bread.

“What it’s got to do with beaver is that beavers don’t know about clocks. Or days or weeks. No bedtime. No lunchtime. No nothing.”

Bread frowned and took another bite of the dry tuna.

“This tuna is awful,” he said.

“I know,” said Fish. “But what I’m saying is that no one can make us eat it, don’t you see? No one can make us do anything anymore.” Fish was thinking it through as he spoke, trying on the truthfulness of it.

Bread tried it out. “Beavers ain’t got homework,” he said, tuna flakes on his lips.

“They don’t have to finish supper,” said Fish.

“They ain’t got to brush their teeth!”

“They only got two teeth to brush!”

“They ain’t got to dig no more dang roots!” Bread stood as he said it and spiked his can of tuna against the cedar tree. He turned toward the river and lifted his fists above his head. Tuna bits spewed from his mouth as he yelled, “I am the beaver!”

“Behold the beaver!” yelled Fish.

The boys sprinted through the trees. The shade beneath the cedars was muggy, and ahead of them the river shone like a bright white field of snow. They ducked beneath branches and laughed while they ran. The footing was soft with needles. The heady musk of bark and moss and ferns filled their lungs.

Fish had his shirt off before he reached the water. He hopped on one foot to tear off his shoe, and when it was bare he hopped on the other. He bolted and leapt and splashed in feet-first. The water was clean and cold and amber-colored, steeped through the pines of its watershed like a glass of iced tea. Fish opened his eyes underwater, reached out, and felt along the cold gravel of the river bottom. Above him hung a ceiling of amber light. Fish arced upward and pushed off with his feet, the way he’d seen an otter do at the Milwaukee Zoo, blowing bubbles from his nose. This was right, he thought, this beaver freedom. They never did have to go back to the world, or answer to it. They were not of this world anymore. They could sleep until noon and howl until midnight. They could skip rocks and swim. They could live on fish and birds’ eggs and cattail roots. They didn’t even have to make fires. They could eat it all raw. Fish became aware of something that shocked him with its immensity. It was possible, he thought—he didn’t yet know exactly how, but knew he was close to knowing—for a person to never again be afraid of anything.

Fish surfaced just in time to see Bread chuck himself off the riverbank. Bread lifted his knees into his chest, hugged them, and plunged beneath the water with a thump Fish felt in his neck. When Bread surfaced, he was smiling. He gave a hoot of satisfaction.

Fish looked upstream. The current wasn’t very strong here. The river flowed through a series of oxbows and islands and sandbars.