Father Water, Mother Woods Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  FATHER WATER, MOTHER WOODS

  “This book is obviously a feast for the outdoor lover—the hunter, fisherman, or camper—but it will also draw those who love the beauty of the carefully crafted description, so detailed and vivid.… The essence of Paulsen.”

  —Booklist

  “The pieces are rooted in the details of a youth spent in search of perfection: the perfect cast, perfect catch, perfect shot.… On target.”

  —School Library Journal

  “Descriptions of light and water, of fish and wildlife, kindle in the reader a measure of the author’s own complex respect for nature.”

  —Publishers Weekly, Starred

  An ALA Quick Pick for Young Adults

  A Publishers Weekly Editors’ Choice 1994

  REVIEWERS PRAISE GARY PAULSEN

  DOGTEAM

  Illustrated by Ruth Wright Paulsen

  “As Paulsen takes his dog sled for a run on a winter’s night, he carries readers along through the moonlit landscape. Immediacy and brevity mark each part of the poetic telling of the adventure.… The book recreates an experience unusual in picture books.”

  —Booklist

  MR. TUCKET

  “Here’s a real knock ’em, sock ’em ripsnorter.… In 1848, a fourteen-year-old boy is captured from an Oregon-bound wagon train by Pawnee Indians and saved by one-armed mountain man Mr. Grimes.… Superb characterizations, splendidly evoked setting, and thrill-a-minute plot make this book a joy to gallop through.”

  —Publishers Weekly, Starred

  NIGHTJOHN

  An ALA Notable Book and Best Book for Young Adults

  “Nightjohn is an African-American hero, a slave who escapes and comes back at the risk of torture and death to teach his people to read.… Paulsen is at his best here.”

  —Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

  “In just ninety-seven pages of fairly large print and simple phrases, Paulsen exposes the horror of slavery, along with pointing out the lengths some have taken to acquire the skills that most people take for granted.”

  —School Library Journal, Starred

  “Among the most powerful of Paulsen’s works.”

  —Publishers Weekly, Starred

  ALSO AVAILABLE IN LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS:

  CANYONS, Gary Paulsen

  THE CROSSING, Gary Paulsen

  THE ISLAND, Gary Paulsen

  NIGHTJOHN, Gary Paulsen

  THE CAR, Gary Paulsen

  THE NIGHT THE WHITE DEER DIED, Gary Paulsen

  SNOWBOUND, Harry Mazer

  SOMEONE’S MOTHER IS MISSING, Harry Mazer

  WHO IS EDDIE LEONARD?, Harry Mazer

  SHADOW OF A HERO, Peter Dickinson

  Published by

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Text copyright © 1994 by Gary Paulsen

  Illustrations copyright © 1994 by Ruth Wright Paulsen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, New York, New York 10036.

  The trademark Laurel-Leaf Library® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80419-8

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Nick Allemenos, a casualty of our times.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Fishing Down by the Power Dam

  Working the Ditches

  First Strike

  Fishing for Bulls

  Sucker Hunting

  The Ninth Street Bridge

  Lazy Fishing

  Walleye Fishing

  Northerns in the Lily Pads

  Bobber Fishing

  Fishing Madness

  Fishhouse Dreams

  Camping Running the River

  Hunting Fool Hens

  First Shot

  Bow Hunting

  Duck Hunting

  About the Author

  Foreword

  In the thirty to forty thousand letters a year that come asking about Hatchet there are many diversities—questions about Brian, how his life is getting on, how he likes high school, is he old enough now to get married, have children; some readers have even done videos depicting different aspects of Brian’s life, and more than once media has asked where he lives so he could be interviewed for magazines or papers.

  But there is one thread that permeates nearly all the letters.

  Almost without exception there is an overwhelming desire to know how it all started, where Hatchet began.

  It is a simple question, but like so many simple questions it has a complex answer. The knowledge that went into writing Hatchet came from my life, and the forces that shaped and guided that life started not in the woods but in the throes of alcoholism.

  I was one of the wasted ones.

  The ones who turned away.

  It was before foster homes or attempts to understand and help children from “problem” families; before machinery existed to catch young people who fell through the cracks, dropped by the wayside, were lost in the mist, and all those other cliches that are applied to familial casualties—the young walking wounded of the society. I was one of them, one of the emotionally injured, who awakened crying in the night, the boys who saw with wide eyes and could say nothing.

  In those days, there were no programs to help, no government agencies, but the problems were still there; the abuse and alcohol and emotional strain and pain—all existed then and before then, except that when a young person had trouble, there wasn’t any way to fix it. The young would either have to stand and take it, which many did, to great and lasting harm, or they could cut and run.

  I ran to the woods and rivers of northern Minnesota.

  It was, I suppose, a kind of self-fostering—perhaps a subconscious seeking of help from nature—although we did not think of it in those terms. It was simpler. In the normal run of things our lives hurt. When we were in the woods or fishing on the rivers and lakes our lives didn’t hurt. We did what didn’t hurt, and as it didn’t hurt more and more, we spent more and more time in the woods and on the rivers—a natural flow of survival.

  It also, in a very direct way, led to the novel Hatchet for it was there, on the soft winding rivers and quiet blue lakes, in the quick splash of fall color, the hiss of line going off a reel, the soft crack of an old .22 rifle sighted on grouse (fool hen), the shaking hands that aimed at first deer with a straight bow and homemade arrows—it was there that Hatchet was born.

  Fishing

  Down by the Power Dam

  Every year it is necessary for fishing to start. Even though it has gone on year-round it must have a beginning each year, and fishing always started in the spring.

  In the small northern town in Minnesota where we were raised it is possible that everything started in the spring, but fishing was the most important thing, and it became vital to watch for the signs that it would begin.

  There were two primary indications.

  One was the car on the ice.

  Pollution was not then considered nor discussed, and each year the town would
put an old car on the frozen ice of the river and tie wires from the car to a clock on a tree on the bank. The idea was that when the ice started to go out the car would fall through the ice, trip the clock, and there would be an exact record of when this event occurred.

  Much was made of this whole business. It was not just a way to dispose of old cars—although over the years the bottom of the river became littered with them, and God only knows how many fishing lures were lost by people trying to fish around the cars and catching their hooks on door handles or bumpers. More importantly, the old car on the ice became a contest that occupied the whole town.

  Everybody guessed at the exact moment when the ice would progress enough into the “rotten” stage (also known as “honeycomb ice,” which I would come to know intimately and with horror later, running dog teams on small lakes and the Bering Sea) and allow the car to drop to the bottom.

  It started that simply. At the courthouse or the library there was a large bulletin board, and for a dollar you could sign the board and write down your guess to win the car-through-the-ice raffle. Of course, you never met anyone who had won, but only those who knew somebody who had won, and therein, in the winning, the simplicity was lost.

  The raffle dominated the town. Merchants competed with each other to put up prizes for the winner so that along with a sizable cash award there were dozens, hundreds of other prizes, and all of them had to do with summer and most of them had to do with fishing.

  Rods, reels, life jackets, lures, anchors, boats, picnic baskets, motors—it was said that a person could win the raffle and be set for life as far as fishing or summer was concerned, and as the time approached people would find reasons to walk or drive along the river to see the old car.

  “Oh, I had to run down to the elevator and check on grain prices,” they would say. “The car has one wheel through but she’s still hanging there.”

  “My aunt’s been feeling poor,” they would say, about an aunt they hadn’t spoken to in twelve years, “and I thought I should stop by and check on her. The car has both rear wheels down now. She’s just hanging there, teetering …”

  “Your aunt?”

  “No, the car, you ninny—the car on the ice.”

  And as the time grew still closer there were those who would come and sit with bottles in paper sacks and fur caps and boogers hanging out their noses and drink and spit and scratch and wait and sometimes pray; just sit there and wait for the car to fall and make their fortunes.

  Naturally it never happened when anybody thought it would happen, but it always signaled the end, the final end of winter.

  And the beginning of spring. Also, when the ice became that rotten it began the signal to the fish that spawning was close.

  The second indication was the light.

  All winter the light had been low, flat, cold. In midwinter it became light in the morning at nine or so and began to get dark at three-thirty or four in the afternoon on a cloudy day, and most of the time it seemed to be dark and cold.

  But as spring came and the ice became rotten on the river the light moved, was a thing alive. The sun came back north, like an old friend that seemed to have been gone forever, and it changed everything, changed the way things looked. There was still snow, still cold at night, but during the day it was brighter, clearer; everything seemed bathed in soft gold.

  People changed as well. During the winter, talk—what talk there was—was always short and to the point and almost always seemed to be on weather-related problems: how difficult it was to start a car in the cold, who was sick with a cold, who was getting sick, who had been sick and was getting well only to get sick again, how it was necessary to drain the car radiators at night (this was before antifreeze) and refill them with warm water when it was time to start them the next day and how they almost never started and wasn’t it a shame that the car companies, the Car Companies with all their money, couldn’t design a car to start in the winter?

  The light changed all that, made the winter end, though there was still more cold weather, still more mornings when nostril hairs stuck to the insides of your nose and the combed ducktails froze on the way to school, more days when it was possible to play the joke where somebody talks somebody else—and where do they keep coming from, the ones who can be talked into these things?—into pushing their tongue out on a frozen propane tank where it would stick and leave a piece of tongue-skin.

  The light changed all things.

  It was the same sun, and it seemed to come up at the same time, but it rose higher and made gold, new gold that altered everything. Jacobsen’s Bakery, where we would get free fresh hot rolls sometimes in the morning to carry when we delivered papers—two rolls each, one in the mouth and one still hot in the pocket of the jacket for later—the bakery was transformed. It had been an old brick building with a loading ramp on the back for the truck to get the fresh bread, and now, in the new gold light it became a bright castle of fresh-bread smells and beauty rising out of the alley next to the Montgomery Ward (always, always called the Monkey Wards) store.

  The trees near the library, still without leaves, still with scrabbly arms that reached into the sky, did not seem ominous now but reaching. And the library seemed to shine with warmth and beckoned in the new light, and it became impossible to believe in winter any longer, only in the newness of spring.

  And fishing.

  For a moment, a day, a week—for a time that felt forever, everything hung, balanced on the edge. The car … didn’t … quite … fall through the ice, the light promised but spring did not seem to come, the trees tried but didn’t quite bud.

  Just for a moment in the year. Just for a flick of time, everything hung and we would daily go to where the first signals would be, the first true movement of spring.

  Down to the dam.

  The river wound through town without any purpose, a lazy snake. It seemed to barely move as it crawled beneath the Ninth Street bridge, an eighth of a mile wide, past the swimming beach, and under the First Street bridge approaching the dam.

  Here it changed. At the south end of town, years before, they had put a dam straight across the whole river. It was made with two floodgates that could be lowered or raised with large screw-wheels, and at the side, over a wide spillway, they had erected a power plant.

  The backed-up river fought to get through the spillway and in so doing turned two large, whining turbines that furnished electricity to the town, and none of this mattered to us when the light changed and the car came near to falling through the ice.

  At the lower end of the building housing the turbines the water came out in a spillway. With the whine of the turbines mixing into the thundering roar of the water pounding out of the spillway it was difficult to hear anything but the dam, the power of it.

  But when the sun rose high enough to bring the soft light into the recesses of the spillway, or perhaps it was because there was a smell to the rotting of the ice on the river or the way the sun hit the ice—for whatever reason, the fish began to dance.

  Old rhythms, old, very old music drove them. For all the time there is, the fish have run in the spring, and they have memory built into their genes, of being born upstream, always upstream, and their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents—all have the same memory coded into them.

  When the light was just so and the smell was just so, they must run, they must dance, they must get back upstream to lay eggs and fertilize them, and it does not matter that man has put the dam there to stop them, does not matter that there is the whirling death of the turbine there to shred and destroy them.

  It was a thing to see, this dance, this run—a thing almost not to be believed. Carp, sheepshead, suckers, walleyes, and northern pike—all made the run, or tried to. Not at once. There is timing that has been worked out over the ages so that first the walleyes and northerns, then the carp and suckers, each in its turn tried, separated only by days, but separate.

  And they could not make it.<
br />
  None of them could get through the turbines. Even if they could in some way swim against the horrendous speed of the water being driven out of the spillway, the blades of the turbine would destroy them, and above that there was a mesh screen that would stop them.

  They were completely doomed to failure, and yet each spring they tried to make the run and the dance and the water became alive with them. The spillway was perhaps thirty feet across and six or seven feet deep and when the run was on, the water was filled with fish rolling over one another, seething and fighting to get up to the turbines; but even that was difficult. Not just because of the speed of the water or the power of the force kicked out by the turbines, but because of the boys who had come to fish the run.

  It was the first open-water fishing of the year and it was very important—as perhaps all fishing is very important.

  There was great skill involved. Just getting to the water was a problem. Now and then a child fell into the spillway and was sucked downstream to drown, and be fished out miles later, and to keep that from happening, the town had put fencing around the dam and spillway. The fencing was elaborate. Chain link and steel pipes ten feet tall and angling out at the top to keep anyone from getting over, with barbwire at the very top to further discourage the boys, and none of it worked. It is possible that it slowed us, but only momentarily, and then we were over to hang on the outside of the fence, much more exposed to danger now than before because it was necessary to balance on a narrow ledge of concrete while clutching the fence with one hand and fishing with the other.

  So many of us did this, climbed the fence and hung on the wires to fish, that sometimes it seemed a virtual net of lines went down into the water and it was a wonder any of the fish could get through.

  It was not fishing in the pure sense of the word so much as snagging. While running, the fish don’t eat—or nearly don’t. Northerns will hit a lure now and then, but the others ignore bait and so it was necessary to snag them, which might seem crude, but there was an art to it.