What Dies in Summer (25 page)

I was daydreaming about Diana when suddenly I felt a sharp jolt, as if the boat had hit something. Don quickly cut the throttle and tilted the motor up out of the water. There was another jolt,
then another.

“What
happened
?” Diana asked shakily.

Don looked over the side, then reached down and brought up the stringer. The two smaller fish that had been clipped to it were gone, and the biggest one had been bitten off just behind the
gills, leaving nothing but the head and a dangling string of gray gut.

“What was it?” I asked Don, my mouth dry.

He unsnapped the head from the stringer and tossed it away. “No telling,” he said. “Muskie, maybe.” He tilted the motor back down into the water. “Had to be a hell
of a fish, if that’s what it was.”

“They don’t have alligators up here, do they?” I said.

“Not that I ever heard of,” Don said. “No gar either, as far as I know.”

As we got under way again I could see from his expression that he was still thinking about what it could have been, but if he had any theories he kept them to himself.

I looked at Diana. She swallowed hard, watching the water as if she expected something to rise up out of it and grab her.

A few minutes later we reached the south shore and Don killed the motor as we glided into the cove. The boat’s bow crunched up onto the gravel, and Diana climbed out to tie the bowline off
to a snag a few feet up the beach. She looked around, stretched and wandered off to inspect the rocks and chunks of white driftwood along the edge of the water. Thick, dark woods surrounded the
cove and seemed to isolate us from the rest of the world, as if this were a huge theater and we were the only audience, waiting for the curtain to rise.

Don reached back to grab the cooler, saying, “Good a place as any for some lunch.”

Diana walked up in the direction of an old windfall lying at an angle from the brush line down across the rocks toward the water.

Don said, “Even cold baloney tastes like steak to me out in the open air like this.” He took off his jacket and laid it over the seat.

I opened the tackle box, pawed around a little, then looked into the eye of a green Lazy Ike in the top tray and saw that something terrible was about to happen.

“
Don—
” I began, knowing everything depended on what he did next.

“Wow,” said Diana, looking down on the other side of the log. “They’re like fat puppies! Hey, Biscuit, Daddy, come look!” She was about to climb over the log.

Don looked from me to her. “Honey,
STOP!
” he screamed.

Diana froze. There was a bleating sound, and two black bear cubs about the size of coons scampered up a bare pine snag on the other side of the windfall. At the same time, I saw something much
bigger running toward us along the beach, looking like a huge shimmying black cannonball, moving faster than I would have believed any animal could. In one movement Don grabbed the fillet knife
from the tackle box and vaulted over the bow, stripping off the knife’s leather sheath as he ran.

“Back up!” he yelled at Diana. “Get behind me!” He was facing the charging bear in a crouch, holding the knife out in front of him, its thin blade maybe as long as his
hand. As Diana scrambled behind him Don threw back his head and roared, “
GOODNESS GRACIOUS, GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!
” with so much force that his face turned red and the veins stood
out in his neck. The sound echoed off the trees and out across the lake, and the animal skidded to a stop with its hair standing up along its back, huffing and glaring from Don to the dead tree and
back.

“Please excuse the tone, Miz Bear and forgive me if you’re not a Jerry Lee Lewis fan but I know you’ll understand I got a lot on my mind here,” Don said in a reasonable
tone, keeping the knife pointed at her and looking down at the ground in front of her, not meeting her eyes. “We’ll just go on back to the boat now move with me honey but nothing sudden
don’t look directly at her and whatever you do don’t even turn your head toward the cubs so you don’t have to worry about us ma’am we’re on our way out of here God
knows I wouldn’t want to have to try and stick this little chickenshit knife in your ear while you’re biting my head off and now that we’re on that subject you can bet your sweet
bear ass we’re never comin’ back out here without a gun.”

They inched toward me. I gripped one of the oars in both hands, trying to keep my movements invisible as I adjusted my grip toward the right balance point to swing it if I had to, imagining it
coming around at the bear’s head in ultra-slow motion, getting there too late, wishing to God boat oars were shorter and lighter. And had ax heads on them.

The bear gave a deep woof and made a quick fake at Don, and Diana clapped her hands over her mouth and said, “Nnk,” but kept moving slowly with him.

“Yeah I know ma’am,” said Don, sounding sensible and friendly. “If they were my kids I’d feel exactly the same way and as you can see I’ve got my own to think
about so I do understand your reasoning you get into the boat first honey get low and curl up tight as you can facedown and cover your head and Jim you ease that oar over toward me.”

Trying to keep my hands from shaking, I slowly swung the oar far enough forward for Don to reach it. As Diana climbed into the boat and got down behind the front seat, Don carefully set the
knife down on the bow and took the oar with one hand. He brought it around and held it crosswise in front of him as he backed slowly into the water beside the boat. “You’re gonna use
the other oar to push off, Jim,” he said. “What I’m gonna do in a second is roll over the gunnel, and you need to have us moving straight out as soon as I do.”

The bear’s head swung from side to side, her muzzle lifting as she tested the air, watching Don with a nearsighted expression.

“One-two-three,” Don said softly, and swung over into the boat as I pushed as hard as I could against the gravelly bottom with the other oar. We scraped off the beach and glided
silently away from the shore. Don dug his oar into the water on the other side of the boat to straighten us out and gain some more distance, then looked back at the bear, which whuffed again and
turned to waddle away toward the fallen tree. The cubs clung to opposite sides of the trunk they’d climbed, one a little above the other about twenty feet up, watching everything.

Diana peeked up over the bow, then looked back over her shoulder at me. Her eyes were huge and her knuckles were white as she gripped the gunnels. “Bears!” she squeaked. She turned
to Don. “The bears almost got us, Daddy!” She took a shaky breath and swallowed.

Don was still trying to get his own breathing under control. He rubbed his hand over his nose and mouth. “Got caught a little out of position there, I guess,” he said. He turned to
look at me. “Scare you, Jimbo?”

“Naw,” I said, noticing that even my feet and toes seemed to be trembling.

“Scared me,” said Diana, nodding to herself.

“Really ought to go heeled out here this time of year,” said Don. “Should’ve brought my weapon.” He yanked on the Evinrude to start it and we backed out of the
cove.

“I know what,” said Diana. “Let’s eat lunch in the boat.”

AFTER THE BEARS
Diana had no more interest in fishing, and Don decided he wanted to get the charcoal going for tonight, so I was on my own.

“How about if I go back out by myself?” I asked Don. “I wanted to try that rocky point next to that last little creek we saw.”

“For muskie?” He grabbed the bag of charcoal.

“Yes sir.”

He thought about it as he slit open the top of the bag with his pocketknife. “Might work, at that,” he said. “Think you can run the boat okay?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then you got a deal,” he said. “Just don’t put in anywhere along that south shore, and get back by dark.”

I anchored thirty yards off the point where the creek drained into the lake between the high dark firs and spruces. Across the creek mouth was a wide flat with a few big rocks and stickups in
the water.

I tied on an eighteen-inch steel leader and a red and white muskie lure, and cast as hard as I could, watching the huge plug carry up and out a surprising distance before splashing down onto the
water. I slowly retrieved it and cast again, then again and again, with no results. I kept casting, becoming so engrossed that several times I forgot to worry about L.A. and Gram back in Dallas. I
even forgot to ask myself why I was still worried.

Then something stopped me. I looked around at the water and the trees on the shore and up at the sky, but nothing had changed. I thought about bears, and dug the blue stone out of my pocket. I
sat looking at it for a minute, wondering if it had been born in the earth or had fallen from the sky, and then, taking a deep breath, I threw it as far as I could out toward the center of the
lake. It plinked into the water, and in a couple of seconds the ripples disappeared.

I cast again, and was about to start the retrieve when I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Out to my right beyond the creek channel a table-sized region of the surface swirled into
a fast-moving arrow of water driving across the open flat, straight for the lure, leaving a wake like a submarine. A dome of water boiled up under the lure, and an unbelievably huge fish reared its
long-jawed head clear of the water, shook once with the lure in its mouth and then blasted a white wall of spray into the air as it slammed back down through the surface and disappeared.

The fish went for the center of the channel cut where the water was deepest, taking line from the drag without effort, the rod bent almost double as the line sliced through the water. I planted
my feet on the gunnel and leaned back against the pull, feeling the boat come around to the end of the anchor line as it tried to follow the fish’s run.

But I knew better than to think I was going to turn this fish. Nothing was going to do that.

And then it stopped. I couldn’t feel anything now but the thing’s massive weight, so immovable that I wondered for a second if I had snagged a rock or stump. But then the fish gave
three slow shakes of its mighty head and came directly at the boat, and before I could take back the slack line it drifted up alongside, a yard under the surface—tremendous jaws jagged with
teeth and a soulless yellow eye the size of a clock face looking through my own eyes and brain and into the exact center of my soul, then the gray-green armored gills and the fish’s barred
side passing like a slow train in the fog. The creature looked as long as the boat, and when it was gone the water suddenly seemed as empty as space.

In the next instant the fish hit the end of the slack, emptied the reel in one straight run out the channel, and the line snapped. The surface gradually settled back to stillness.

I sat and breathed for a while, waiting for my heart to stop banging in my throat, feeling the small rocking motion of the boat and hearing the light lapping of the water against its side. The
sun was dropping lower in the sky, looking bigger and redder and softer. Finally I pulled up the anchor, stowed the rod inside the gunnel and started the motor.

As I brought the boat around I saw something floating on the water out near the spot where I’d thrown the stone. I eased the boat alongside it and leaned down to pick it up. It was the
lure, or what was left of it, the steel leader and a short length of line hanging from the front eye hook. The plug was made of cedar, thick as a shovel handle, but the back half was gone, treble
hooks and all, the wood marked by the fish’s teeth where they had sheared through it.

Looking at it, I could feel that something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t figure out what. I stared at the ruined plug a while longer, then dropped it into the tackle box and snapped
the lid down. Bringing the boat’s bow around, I gradually opened the throttle and headed back toward the cabin.

I NEVER TOLD
anyone the whole story of the muskie, just said I hooked one but lost him when my lure came apart. It was probably selfishness on my part,
and I don’t really know if I was afraid of making what happened smaller by talking about it or if there was some other reason, but I ended up keeping most of it for myself, like a miser
hoarding his coins.

In the morning Don let Diana and me take the boat out again for a picnic. Marge looked worried, and for a second I was uneasy over how much she knew about my thoughts.

“Are these two going to be all right, Don?” she said.

Don was busy at the end of the dock shaking ashes out of the grill into the water. “Long as they leave the bears alone,” he said without looking up.

“Bears,” said Diana, swallowing. Reconsidering, maybe.

“Islands only, Jimbo,” Don said, shooting me a look for emphasis. “It’s a really bad time of year, with the cubs as young as they are.”

I nodded and pushed the boat away from the dock with an oar, thinking there might be a lot of things for Don to worry about, but us messing with any more bears wasn’t one of them. I pulled
on the starter rope a couple of times and the motor growled and blubbed smokily in the water. I eased the boat backward out into open water and brought the bow around to head us out toward the far
end of the lake.

We cruised along like old people, with Diana leaning over to trail her hand in the water, until we were out of sight behind the point, then I gradually opened the throttle to get us up to speed.
Diana took off her sweatshirt, and I saw she had on a light green swimsuit under it. She threw back her head and held her arms out wide, her hair flying in the wind. The sun was already warm on my
face.

When we got to the little island where we had caught the walleyes I cut the motor and we coasted in to the beach side. The island was partly covered with trees and had a long tail of beach on
one side and some kind of dark green grass growing here and there in the water around it. When Diana jumped ashore with the bowline, half a dozen goldfinches spilled away from the high branches of
a poplar at the water’s edge and scattered across the sky above us like chips of sun. She tied us up to a limb on a big piece of driftwood as I tilted the motor up out of the water, and we
carried our stuff up to a dry flat spot under a couple of pine trees. I set the cooler down as she spread the two big blue and white towels on the pine needles.