missed it. I wanted that polecat real bad, for a trophy. Hurricane, now, he’s a great coon dog, ain’t you, fella? That dog, he just loves to tree coons.
Coon
, huh?
Coon!
Hey, Hurricane!”
Hurricane looked back at his master with tolerant incomprehension.
“You want to go tree a coon?”
The dog eyed me. A very faint glimmer of hope showed behind the film of rheum. Coons, though, were outside his imaginative range on that particular Saturday morning. Some dim spirit of canine realism asserted itself, and I watched the hope die in his eyes.
“Hurricane?”
Harry Caine?
was how the carpenter actually said the name.
Obliged to respond in some way to this torrent of questions, the dog shifted heavily off his butt and went to eat Alpo out of a bowl with his name custom-printed on it in German Gothic lettering.
“That
is
some coon dog.”
“Looks like a fairly keen Alpo dog, too.”
“Coon’s out of season yet, though. When the coon season starts, that dog … shit, there ain’t nothing Hurricane likes better than treeing coons.”
He laid his shotgun across his lap, posing for his own self-portrait:
The Settler, 187–
. Hurricane broke wind and slept. I said goodbye, leaving the carpenter to his solitary, adolescent make-believe, and went back to my boat to get on with mine.
The rags of blown foam on the water were copycatting the rags of high cloud that came beating north across the sky. I kept the boat headed into the waves. The whole trick, according to Herb, was never to get caught broadside … “She’ll roll you right over” … and I could feel her doing her best, snatching at my bow and tugging it sideways, knocking loudly on my hull and trying to come in.
The river was squeezed into a twisty crevice between high bluffs, and the wind, thickened with sand from the bars, went scouring into every cranny and backwater. The forest came down sheer into the water on both sides, broken by outcrops of ribbed limestone, staring out of the solid cliffs of green like the faces of Easter Island statues. Fall was still a couple of weeks away, and the leaves hadn’t yet begun to turn. Shaken by the wind, they caught the sun and winked. The river, barred black and silver, was too bright to take in all at once; I had to watch each wave, looking for the rim of shadow under its breaking crest, and steer the bow into it.
I wound through a string of narrow islands, following the lines of buoys. The path was puzzling. It kept on going straight in to the shore and opening onto another stretch of river whose existence had been a well-kept secret behind a false wall of tamarack and swamp oak. Blunt-nosed tows came foraging out from what I’d thought unbroken forest, and I learned to look for their giveaway inverted commas of diesel smoke tethered above the treetops.
The bluffs widened, and the Mississippi spread itself into a great islanded pool, two miles from shore to shore. It was Boulanger Slough. Two nights before, sitting in the restaurant in Minneapolis, I had crossed it on the charts as casually as if I’d been planning a country stroll. Boulanger Slough in life, though, looked horribly different from Boulanger Slough on paper.
So this was what a stump field was: a barbered forest. For as far as one could see, the rotten tree trunks stood up, some just below, some a few inches above the water. It had been, perhaps, a hundred years since they’d been cut down, and they looked as if they were already halfwayto being coal. The river slurped around their blackened roots and boles. The channel here swung out and east through this waste of water, bog and timber. The wind was bowling long gusts from the right-hand shore, where it began as a riffle on the edge of the stump field, then built up a rolling swell as it came north across the mile or so of peaty water.
By the time it reached me, it had accumulated a frightening height and weight: lines of chocolate combers ran straight up and down the channel.
Coon
, huh?
Coon!
Hey, Hurricane!”
Hurricane looked back at his master with tolerant incomprehension.
“You want to go tree a coon?”
The dog eyed me. A very faint glimmer of hope showed behind the film of rheum. Coons, though, were outside his imaginative range on that particular Saturday morning. Some dim spirit of canine realism asserted itself, and I watched the hope die in his eyes.
“Hurricane?”
Harry Caine?
was how the carpenter actually said the name.
Obliged to respond in some way to this torrent of questions, the dog shifted heavily off his butt and went to eat Alpo out of a bowl with his name custom-printed on it in German Gothic lettering.
“That
is
some coon dog.”
“Looks like a fairly keen Alpo dog, too.”
“Coon’s out of season yet, though. When the coon season starts, that dog … shit, there ain’t nothing Hurricane likes better than treeing coons.”
He laid his shotgun across his lap, posing for his own self-portrait:
The Settler, 187–
. Hurricane broke wind and slept. I said goodbye, leaving the carpenter to his solitary, adolescent make-believe, and went back to my boat to get on with mine.
The rags of blown foam on the water were copycatting the rags of high cloud that came beating north across the sky. I kept the boat headed into the waves. The whole trick, according to Herb, was never to get caught broadside … “She’ll roll you right over” … and I could feel her doing her best, snatching at my bow and tugging it sideways, knocking loudly on my hull and trying to come in.
The river was squeezed into a twisty crevice between high bluffs, and the wind, thickened with sand from the bars, went scouring into every cranny and backwater. The forest came down sheer into the water on both sides, broken by outcrops of ribbed limestone, staring out of the solid cliffs of green like the faces of Easter Island statues. Fall was still a couple of weeks away, and the leaves hadn’t yet begun to turn. Shaken by the wind, they caught the sun and winked. The river, barred black and silver, was too bright to take in all at once; I had to watch each wave, looking for the rim of shadow under its breaking crest, and steer the bow into it.
I wound through a string of narrow islands, following the lines of buoys. The path was puzzling. It kept on going straight in to the shore and opening onto another stretch of river whose existence had been a well-kept secret behind a false wall of tamarack and swamp oak. Blunt-nosed tows came foraging out from what I’d thought unbroken forest, and I learned to look for their giveaway inverted commas of diesel smoke tethered above the treetops.
The bluffs widened, and the Mississippi spread itself into a great islanded pool, two miles from shore to shore. It was Boulanger Slough. Two nights before, sitting in the restaurant in Minneapolis, I had crossed it on the charts as casually as if I’d been planning a country stroll. Boulanger Slough in life, though, looked horribly different from Boulanger Slough on paper.
So this was what a stump field was: a barbered forest. For as far as one could see, the rotten tree trunks stood up, some just below, some a few inches above the water. It had been, perhaps, a hundred years since they’d been cut down, and they looked as if they were already halfwayto being coal. The river slurped around their blackened roots and boles. The channel here swung out and east through this waste of water, bog and timber. The wind was bowling long gusts from the right-hand shore, where it began as a riffle on the edge of the stump field, then built up a rolling swell as it came north across the mile or so of peaty water.
By the time it reached me, it had accumulated a frightening height and weight: lines of chocolate combers ran straight up and down the channel.
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