Gill Netting the Beaver Pond

GILL NETTING THE BEAVER POND / Jim Barnes i. Packing Strange to think after so many years that I worried about what to take fishing overnight up Holson Creek. It seemed I was leaving on a journey I had my doubts about. An odd sadness made me see the washed out road leading through the hills without the many ruts and rocks. I did not know how deep a night was. I took too little food and a quilt I would not use. I remember that I thought of storm, of being taken under by some monster in deep water while we defied rain and thunder to stretch our net through the shadows of trees on the pond. I did not pack one fear intentionally: I acted the twelve-year-old I surely was, hoisted the duffel up on my back, and marched to cadence like a good scout should before he dies. ii. The Netting We had heard stories of big bass, lunkers wallowing like grown hogs in the old beaver pond near the bog where cottonmouths parted the grass at night. My brother knew his way in woods and water and I stayed close on his heels at the end of day after we had set the gill net. The sun had fallen red into the timberline, and the pond grew 222 · The Missouri Review immense before the lingering heat turned chill. The quiet flap of bream we thought tangled in the net seemed a portent of a bounteous stream. At midnight we ran the net. No bass, no bream, but half a dozen eels squirming, crying their human cries, and their soft round faces so full of pain I could not hold them in my weak sand-coated hands. A dim moon rose. We skinned and gutted them. I knew I could not eat their flesh, but morning woke a hunger in my head, and I ate what I had been in the deep night in a dream of fish when I had hung limp, by the gills, tangled in a web of threads no eel could mistake for Sargasso swells. iii. Driving Home No matter where I looked the low mountains were waves on some blue sea I'd lost my way in. At my feet, on the floorboard in a wet toesack , six other eels lay in the slime of their only defense. Low limbs clutched at the windshield as we climbed up the rutted road that led home. The motor made a steady whir, and I know I thought of stars, for some reason I cannot fathom, unless my mind had taken on some migrant trait not everyone would want to trouble with. The sun somehow was still setting as red as the evening before, and the high thin stars began to offer light Jim Barnes The Missouri Review · 223 webs across the sky as we reached home. I felt myself suddenly caught at twelve by a motion I could not stop: I swam in the night like a moth. 224 · The Missouri Review Jim Barnes ...