In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [1]
On the other side of the spring, the root cellar squatted deep in the bank beneath its cowl of sod. It had begun its service as a bomb shelter, dug out in one day by Uncle Ed during the Cuban missile crisis. I cannot imagine why the shy Swede believed Castro might target him and his family deep in the wilds of Idaho, but his panic and furious excavating became the stuff of family legend. He leveled the dirt floor, built the walls and roof of rough-cut cedar and hung a door so heavy the hinges shrieked when it opened. He filled the shelter with tins of food and brown Purex bottles of water. Finally, he cut a hole in one wall and added a large crank air vent. It reminded me of the meat grinder my mother used to make sausage, and when my brother and I together turned the handle the wind sang in fresh and cold.
By the time we came to live in the hollow, the shelter had become a catchall for old clothes and empty boxes. We hauled case after case of pop bottles over the hill to Headquarters, pulling our wagon along the one-mile stretch of road, stopping each time a logging truck geared for the rise. When we gave a high, imaginary tug, the driver let loose a brawling blast from his air horn and we’d howl with pleasure. In Headquarters, the store saved its outdated comic books, covers torn away, in a pile behind the fishing gear. With the dimes from our turned-in bottles we could each head home with two comics and a chocolate cone, our wagon rattling empty behind us.
Across the track was the dump with its brown corked bottles, the bits of metal and porcelain we carried home like booty. The deer bed was there, fragrant grass crushed beneath an overhanging branch of yellow pine. We would lie down and smell the musk, pick tufts of hair from the needles, imagine the warmth of a fawn nestled tight in the curve of its mother’s flank. We hunted the grouse that roosted near the house. Sometimes my brother and I would find them huddled in the woodshed. “Fool hens!” we’d shout, pumping our pellet guns, shooting them near the shed, where their wings beat against the metal siding.
We fished no matter the season, first testing our luck in the shallow spring, then in Reeds Creek, cutting through the meadow a half mile south. We knew each shadowed pool and the fish that stilled themselves there: many times we jerked them free of the water, only to see them sail from our hooks like silvery kites. Always, we knew, they would return to their favorite bend, where grasses hung down and fat grasshoppers fell.
The meadow spread out from the creek on either side, a marsh, really, spongy and thick with cattails. Deer fed at its edges and once, just as the big rainbow I had caught and lost five times before gave in to my patience and took the worm I let drift one last time by its hole, from the corner of my eye I saw the ground shift and settle. In a nesting of dry fern lay a fawn, curled against itself and nearly invisible. The rod jumped in my hands but I could not look from that spot. I was afraid the shape might disappear, my sight might deceive me, though the fawn huddled so close I might cast my line across its dappled back. As still as it was I could see the body tremble, the nostrils flare with the scent of me.
I knew I’d lost the fish. The tension in the line was gone, and the rod no longer quivered as though it held life of its own. I backed away, looking up the trail toward home only after I had lost the white spots and dark eyes to the tall grasses. There was a secret there, more mysterious