Brian's Hunt Read Free Page A

flared—but a smaller northern came by and Brian could see it was merely defending its territory.
    At last the canoe was positioned right and the northern was still there, in a slightly better place because the lily pad was partially covering the fish’s eyes.
    The bow was strung and, still crouched forward, Brian gently slid a wooden arrow out of his quiver and laid it across the bow, nocked it onto the string, put his left hand on the handle and raised the bow even with the gunwale of the canoe, then a little higher, so the arrow would just clear the side of the canoe.
    Then, holding the bow almost sideways, he pushed it while pulling the arrow back, tucked the feathers under his chin, aimed at the bottom edge of the fish to allow for refraction. He’d learned that the hard way, by missing the fish when he’d first started hunting after the plane crash. He released the arrow.
    The arrow was slowed only a tiny amount as it traveled through the water and hit the northern with full force just above the right eye. Whether by luck or design it was an almost perfect shot and the shaft slammed through the brain, cutting the spinal cord, stopping halfway through the northern.
    The fish, dead in an instant, gave a spasmodic death jerk, a sideways arching of its body, which flung it off into shallower water, perhaps five feet deep. It became still and began to sink, the buoyancy of the wooden shaft slowing the process.
    “Ahh,” Brian said aloud, “I thought it might float. . . .” All fish have air bladders, which they use to control their depth, and sometimes when they are killed they have enough air in the bladder to make them rise to the surface. Sometimes, as with this northern, the air is expelled and they sink.
    Brian was wearing only shorts and he put one hand on each side of the canoe and lift-jumped himself over the side into the water. He slipped beneath the surface with his eyes open and though his vision was blurred and the northern’s color made it almost impossible to see, the arrow shaft was a bright white line. He grabbed it and pulled the fish up to the canoe and flopped it over into the boat.
    Thank you, he thought, as he always thought when he killed. And then, Good meal, full meal. What he had come to think of as a can’t-walk-meal, or a lie-down-and-sleep-meal.
    He could not save fish in the summer. If he had a smokehouse or a way to dry the meat without flies getting to it he might be able to keep some, but in the late-summer heat with no refrigeration it was impossible to keep meat for very long and if he tried and ate spoiled fish, it could easily kill him.
    He had found a government book on the Internet that had been put out for farmers and hunters and trappers back in the 1930s. It cataloged and described each kind of meat and how to raise the different animals and how to slaughter them and preserve them. There were many surprises, such as the fact that venison, and especially moose meat, were very low in nutritional value and protein while rabbit was the highest. He learned that fish meat was vulnerable to a kind of ptomaine and worse, botulism, which was often fatal. There were documented cases of Native Americans dying from eating dried salmon and other fish because of these poisons. There were also many cases of predators, scavenger birds like eagles, and wolves and foxes and coyotes being found dead from eating bad fish that had died and drifted up onshore.
    So he would eat the whole fish, and he smiled remembering the first time: First Fish, and how small it had been and how wonderful it had tasted.
    He still felt the same way about it. He still felt wonder at the food, and he looked for a clearing on the bank to make a fire.
    Good meal. Full meal. Thank you.

Chapter 3

    He had changed. He thought at first that he had changed again, that there were steps in how he had done so, but he realized that he was changing constantly as the world around him shifted, as he learned more.
    His approach