“Rough as hell, but I got it to the shed. Maybe I’ll play mechanic in a few days, see if I can fix what’s wrong.”
They spent the morning dividing out the food and trying to see what they might make from the staples like flour and sugar, assuming Jack could fire up the solar power system and get the stove working. In the end, rationing as frugally as they could stomach, they calculated enough meals to feed their family for thirteen days.
“That’s not good enough,” Dee said. “And we’re going to be hungry all the time before we actually begin to starve to death.”
“It’s more food than we had yesterday. I saw some fly-fishing gear in the shed, and there’s a stream out back.”
“You took one class, Jack. Two years ago. None of your flies at home ever touched water, and you think you’re going to go out there and catch enough fish for us—”
“How about sending some positive energy into this situation, dear-heart?”
She flashed a fake smile, batted her eyes. “I’m sure you’ll catch more than we can eat, Jack. I know you can do it.”
“You’re such a bitch.” He said it with love.
He assembled a six-weight fly rod in the shed, stocked his vest with an assortment of flies, and carried a small cooler into the woods toward the sound of moving water. Found it fifty yards in—a wide, slow stream that flowed through the aspen. He sat down on the grassy bank. The sun as high as it would be all day. Light coming down through the trees in clear, bright splashes. The sky cloudless. Almost purple.
He filled the cooler in the stream. Got the tippet tied on and chose a fly at random. Took him five attempts to cinch the knot, then walked downslope until he came to a shaded pool several feet deep and out of the ruckus of the main current.
His first cast overshot the stream and the fly snagged on a spruce sapling. He waded across, the water knee-deep and freezing, and clambered out onto the warm grass on the opposite bank.
An hour later, he felt his first tap.
Midafternoon, he hooked a fingerling, Jack tugging the green line and backing away from the stream. It flopped in the grass, and he carefully lifted the fish which torqued violently and then went still, gills pulsing in his hand. Silver. Spotted with brown dots. He unhooked the fly and walked back to the cooler and dipped the trout into the water, thinking, God, was it small. Two or three bites at most if he didn’t completely destroy the thing when he tried to clean it.
They dined at the kitchen table as the light ran out—two cans of cold navy beans split between the four of them, three pretzels apiece, water from one of the plastic jugs Dee had brought in from the Rover.
“How many fish did you catch?” Cole asked.
“One,” Jack said.
“How big?”
Jack held his pointer fingers five inches apart.
“Oh.”
“It’s still in the cooler by the stream. But I saw some big ones.”
“Can I come fishing with you tomorrow?”
“Absolutely.”
Middle of the night, Jack sat up in bed.
“What’s wrong?” Dee asked, still half-asleep.
“I should’ve cut down the mailbox.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The mailbox by the road. The one Naomi saw that led us here.”
“Do it first thing in the morning.”
“No, I’m going now. I won’t be able to sleep.”
He hiked down with the chainsaw in the dark, reached the road at four in the morning. Cold. Below freezing he would’ve guessed. That distant, square-topped mountain shining silver under the moon. He walked out into the road and stood listening for a while.
The chainsaw motor seemed inappropriate at this hour. Like screams in a church. He decapitated the mailbox and carried it across the road and threw it down the mountainside.
Walking back up to the cabin, he rounded a hairpin curve and froze. Heart accelerating at what loomed just twenty feet up the road. It raised its enormous head, the giant rack pale and sharp in the predawn. He’d almost brought the shotgun, decided against it fearing his left arm couldn’t bear the weight. And so he watched the seven-hundred-pound elk walk off the road and vanish into the trees, wondering how long it might have fed his family.
* * * * *
BY midmorning, he had the off-grid power system up and running, water pumping in through the tap from the underground cisterns, and the water heater beginning to warm. They filled five plastic grocery bags under the faucet and tied them off and stowed them in the chest freezer. Tried not to acknowledge the fact that they were all skipping lunch.
Jack left Dee and Naomi to scour The Joy of Cooking for efficient bread recipes that jived with their ingredient list, and took his son with him into the woods.
He’d anticipated Cole wanting to fish, and since there wasn’t any spinning tackle to be had in the shed, surprised the boy with a provisional pole he’d fashioned that morning—an aspen sapling skinned of bark and fitted with an eight-foot length of nylon string and a ceiling screw hook with which Cole might only inflict minimal damage.
The knot tying went faster and the casting smoother, Jack sticking the fly in the vicinity of his intent almost every time.
He’d caught two fingerlings by three o’clock and his first grown-up fish by four—a twelve-inch Rainbow on a dry fly that had been loitering in a pool beside a cascade. Cole screamed with delight as Jack brought the fish ashore, both of them squatting in that pure fall light to inspect the reddish band and the black spots and the micaceous skin that faded into white at the edges.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” Jack said.
“You did good, Dad.”
Jack set his rod in the grass and worked the hook out and carried the trout back across the stream toward the cooler in two hands and with as much care as he’d handled Naomi and Cole as squirming newborns.
They fished until the light went bad, Jack torn between the stream and his son who’d abandoned the aspen rod to construct a pile of polished, streambed stones on the opposite shore. Jack trying to ignore that thing that had been gnawing at him now for two days, that he wouldn’t ever be ready to look in the eye. How could a father? But he saw it—from a distance, an oblique glance—and for right now at least, that was as close as his heart could stand to be.
When they returned, the sun had just slipped below the desert and Dee and Naomi were hanging blankets over the windows and the cabin smelled of sweet, baking bread.
The women had carried in several armloads of firewood from the porch and stacked it around the hearth, and while Cole regaled everyone with the story of catching the fish, Jack built a base of kindling using a dozen of the pinecones stored in a wicker basket and an issue of USA Today.