• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 419 0

—especially if the streams had frozen and the ice skim tinkled under my boots—I would startle a black duck or a mallard into flight. The marsh gave off a complicated mix of dark and musky smells that were dank and pleasant at the same time—tidal mud, rotting vegetation and swamp gas—and these odors mixed with the light tincture of the oil I had wiped my gun with the night before. It was a familiar smell, a reassuring and agreeable concoction, and it appealed to me possibly in the way that the pencil-lead-and-chalk smell of the classroom might appeal to a good student. I heard, and even felt, wing beats in the night—I was that close sometimes when the ducks exploded off the water. Their startled squawks traced their ascent. Now and again I would see them cross the light circle of the moon.

Sometimes, too, I heard ducks coming into the marsh, dropping out of the pool of black sky, especially when the great flocks were migrating south. Their wings whistled by and seemed to brush my head, though I knew the birds weren’t really that close. They only seemed to be as their wings, either propelling them forward or turned down to brake them for a landing, beat the cold air into turbulence. Otherwise it would be quiet enough for me to hear them touch the water with a small splash and glide on the ponds where they set about their contented chucking. Once in a while, I heard animals that I could not see break through the marsh, splashing and snorting (maybe a deer) or scampering through the reeds (maybe a mink or a coon). Sometimes my flashlight momentarily illumined the yellow eyes of a creature that I had caught unawares as I moved quietly through the corridors of bulrushes. The eyes would blink and be gone as if the animal had made itself invisible by the action of closing its eyes.

At the center of the northern marsh, there was a hummock of cedar and sassafras, a small dry island that was surrounded by a savanna of marsh grasses the flatness of which was broken only by the rounded mounds of the muskrat lodges. If I had time, I sat there across a log, my gun in my lap, and watched the ducks gather into a line, scatter and regroup on the waters of the bay as the sky lightened from black to purple. The other, southerly marsh had a pond at its center, more accurately the widening of a stream, since the water in it flowed ever so slowly toward the bay. The bay I’m speaking of is the great Barnegat, or what was then my corner of it. The southerly marsh had a few muskrat lodges, but there the marsh blended more with the lowland and woods, a transitional place of ankle-high bushes, mossy hummocks and sassafras, and the muskrats lived mostly in dens that were dug into the banks of the stream. Some mornings I caught a muskrat or two in my traps, sometimes none at all. I had to be home before the sun rose to change into clothes for school and be ready for the bus. So all of my work was done in the dark or the magical half-light of a winter morning. Sometimes it snowed, which seemed to me a miracle. On those mornings, it was hard to leave the marsh for school.

Now even in those days, which is going on forty-five years ago, it was a little unusual for a thirteen-year-old boy to be seen walking along the road carrying a shotgun at five in the morning. Given the hour, my witnesses were few and far between, and they were mostly people forced by a long commute to be in their stillcold and sputtering Fords and Chevys, maybe to Trenton or New Brunswick. They must have lived thereabouts, because there would have been no other reason for them to be in this nook of the town. Of course, there must have been those, too, who were actually just getting home at that hour, returning from the graveyard shift at some factory to the north or a night of local debauch and drink. I don’t know and never considered it. I was submerged in my own thoughts and pleasures, happy to be warm in my clothes and feeling the straps of the pack basket on my shoulders. But people did see me, and since my trapping was no secret among my friends on the school bus, it was only