Читать книгу Barefoot at the Lake - Bruce Fogle - Страница 5

I peered over the side of the boat, looking for the flat rocks I knew crayfish hid under. My father used crayfish for fishing for bass, pickerel and muskies. Grace rowed. In the rowboat we could go far down the lake, farther than we would ever go if we walked in the shallow waters along the shoreline. Less than 500 yards from our cottages a grove of cedar trees had collapsed in a storm into the lake. It was too deep to walk around them and there was too much poison ivy on the ground around their trunks to get past on land. In the rowboat we were on a new adventure, visiting a part of the lake past the fallen trees we had never visited before.

Looking through the calm, clear water I saw small circles of clean rocks and knew that’s where fish – rock bass, I’d been told by my uncle – had spawned just a few weeks before. He had told me that this is how fish made their homes attractive for their partners and said that’s what my mother did with the cottage. Close to shore I spotted unending flat rocks in the shallows and told Grace to row to the shore. We tied the row­boat to a tree and went hunting.

‘Walk slowly,’ I commanded. ‘Don’t scare them.’

Grace knew how to do this. She was as good at catching crayfish as I was. All these rocks were just perfect. We both knew that but neither said so out loud. In slow motion Grace lifted one end of a flat rock off the bottom without causing a ripple on the lake’s surface and there it was, a perfectly camouflaged crayfish, the colour of limestone and sand. My father had shown all the children on the point how to catch bait, worms at night by muffled light, minnows in minnow traps under the dock and crayfish under rocks. Slowly, like Mr Everett’s brown dog stalking a rabbit, she put her hand into the lake and lowered it towards the crayfish, then in a flash with her thumb and her forefinger she grabbed it behind its claws and pressed it to the bottom of the lake. When she was sure it couldn’t bite her she raised it out of the lake and showed it to me. Its big claws swung back on both sides, trying in vain to hurt her.

‘That’s too big for fishing,’ I said, but she kept it anyways and put it in the rowboat.

I was pleased with Grace, even proud of her. None of the other girls in the cottages on Long Point ever wanted to go crayfish hunting, but she always did.

We decided to work in opposite directions, me on one side of the rowboat and Grace on the other. Silently, with bent backs and eyes close to the water we looked for flat rocks lying on other rocks, places where crayfish could hide from us, and those rocks were everywhere. Just about every rock we lifted had a crayfish hiding underneath and within a short time the rowboat was crawling with dozens of irritated crayfish. In their anger some were biting others. Each time another was thrown into the rowboat, the nearest crayfish raised its opened claws. In the white bottom of the boat

they looked like a congregation of praying scorpions in a

dry desert.

After a while Grace got bored and walked to the shaded shore where she sat on a large rock between two great cedars that leaned out over the lake. Behind her was a meadow of summer flowers, airy and shimmering and light, gently dancing to the soft south wind. I could see that no one had ever walked through that meadow. ‘I wonder whether this is what heaven’s like,’ I thought. On the shoreline spring storms had washed away soil from around the trees’ massive chocolate-brown roots and peering out from within those roots Grace saw two tiny eyes.

‘Get the flashlight,’ Grace ordered, but I knew I couldn’t. It wasn’t there.

Rowing at night shortly after we arrived, Uncle had broken our shared silence by saying, ‘Let’s throw the flashlight into the lake.’ I was disturbed by the suggestion. I didn’t want to. The flashlight had made me feel safe and, besides, it was my father’s.

‘I’ll buy another. Turn it on. Let’s throw it in the lake and watch what happens.’

I turned it on. Holding it in both hands, not really wanting to throw it in the lake, I asked my uncle, ‘How long will it shine?’ and my uncle, smiling a broad grin, said, ‘Long enough to entertain all the fish in the lake. Then, when it’s served a purpose, when it’s had a reason for living, it will go out.’

I liked that answer so I gently placed the flashlight into the water and watched as it twinkled into the deep. For a moment I had an impulse to follow it, to see what lived at the bottom of the lake.

I didn’t tell Grace why the flashlight wasn’t there, I just said, ‘It’s not here,’ and quietly walked over to where she was.

‘I can’t see anything,’ I said.

‘Stupid! It’s your fault it’s gone.’

‘It’s not my fault. Anything would run away just looking at you!’ I hissed.

Sometimes Grace was like Angus. She didn’t think first. She just said things or did things. That made me angry and I said things I didn’t really mean. We both decided not to talk to each other ever again and to go back home.

Rowing back to the cottage – with Grace rowing because she said so – the army of angry crayfish marched this way and that on the bottom of the boat, all their claws raised in anger. Grace rowed squatting with her feet beside her. I sat backwards with my feet over the transom. That boat filled with crayfish was just too thrilling and it didn’t take long for Grace to speak.

‘Mr Muskratt says that crayfish are tasty and we should eat them.’

‘When did he say that?’ I asked. Mr Muskratt lived up the lake, on the Indian Reserve. He was thickset and strong. His leathery face was the colour of the woods. Even his dark brown eyes blended into the landscape. He never said much, almost nothing at all. ‘Yep.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Eh?’ when he wanted you to say something again.

On Friday, when he came in his canoe selling fish, he saw the crayfish my dad had for fishing and told him that instead of wasting his time fishing with them, my dad should just buy Mr Muskratt’s fish and eat the crayfish instead. He said that Mrs Muskratt sometimes boiled them and sometimes roasted them for Mr Muskratt and their children.