Nothing gold can stay by Dana Stabenow Page A

water was brackish and had to be filtered. A clothesline was strung between the house and one of the few trees, an overgrown alder really. There wasnt much between Scandinavian Slough and Bristol Bay that was over three hundred feet above sea level. It was one big swamp south of the Nushagak from here on, and the fish camp was on the leading edge of that swamp. It didnt encourage tree growth.
    Moses came out here every summer, to catch and dry and smoke and salt and kipper the salmon that every year made the long journey from the north Pacific Ocean to the upper reaches of the Nushagak and all its tributaries. He didnt eat much of it, she reflected, staring toward the river, instead giving most of it away to family and friends. He had no place to store it, come to that; Moses didnt own a house. Probably he would have said he didnt own the fish camp, either, he was just borrowing it from the Old Man for a time. As near as she could figure, the sum total of Moses personal belongings amounted to a Nissan longbed pickup, his tai chi uniform and the clothes on his back. He ateand drankin her bar. He slept with her.
    And he communed in solitude at fish camp. It was a good place for communing. Bill had never seen so much sky before, not in Alaska. She was more used to mountains jostling for position with the sun and the stars and the clouds filling up the spaces in between. Here, there was nothing to interfere with your line of sight, only a dome of pale blue over a flat marsh filled with dwarf alders and stunted willows and fireweed and reeds and ryegrass. The water table was very high here. The river had both split and narrowed by the time it got this far north, although it wasnt really that far north, as it hung a right and then another right east of Newenham before correcting course for north again after the Keefer Cutoff.
    It was a place to be valued, a home for hundreds of different species of birds and water-loving mammals. Case in pointan otter poked his or her head above the bank, whistled indignantly, as if to say, I thought you left for the year once already. A small splash and it was off again. Little trickles and tributaries riddled the country in every direction, all winding their way somewhere safe to the Nushagak River, and thence to the sea.
    Tim needed a dog, she decided, a dog to drape his arm around when he was sitting on a dock with his feet dangling over the edge. Maybe the dog would make him look less frightened, less forlorn.
    The door opened and Moses came out, dressed in his sifu clothes, a black jacket and black pants with the cuffs folded and tied closely at the ankles. He walked down the steps and into the yard, faced north, brought his feet together and his hands up, right fist cupped in left palm, and bowed once, holding it for a long moment.
    He straightened, his hands dropped to his sides, he took several long, deep breaths, his knees bent, his arms came up, elbows at his sides, to form two gentle curves before him, and he appeared to go into a trance. Minutes passed, and more minutes, until Bill could see the beginnings of a fine trembling about his thighs and knees, first hinted at by the faint vibration of fabric in his pants. Still he held it, what he called standing post, until the trembling increased into an obvious tremor, and what must have been twenty minutes passed before he sighed, a long, continuous inhalation and exhalation of air, and slowly straightened into an erect posture, only to sink back into it again, and this time from the stance into motion.
    She never tired of watching him practice tai chi chuan. In Chinese the name meant “soft boxing, a form of martial arts dating back five thousand years. It focused more on defense, designed to take advantage of an opponents offensive moves and discourage them, deter them or deflect them.
    Moses in motion was grace personified, wholly concentrated on his art, from commencement to conclusion, through movements with prosaic names like Pull