Hungry for the World Read Free Page A

and father, highschool sweethearts, both tall and good-looking, both possessed of the same need to escape, to remake themselves. It was 1956 when my paternal grandfather died, and that year, too, when my mother, at the age of sixteen, joined my father, leaving the red clay fields of broom corn and cotton for a high-elevation camp in the wilderness.
    I N THE WOODS , in the logging camps and exhausted boomtowns of northern Idaho, my life was defined by simple existence, or so it seems now. My first home was a wooden trailer, eight feet by twenty, with no water, wood heat, a table, two chairs, and a bed. All around me, the forest rose so high I could not see the surrounding mountains. Except for my extended family and a few itinerant sawyers, we were alone, but I did not know this. What I knew was the early warmth of a tamarack-fueled fire, the whistling of elk calves outside my door. There were venison and huckleberries in the fall, beans and bacon in the winter, brook trout all summer long. There were the creeks full of mussels and minnows, the air buzzing with crickets and locusts, the grass spiced with sage, wild onion, and fennel. Always, there was my mother, never far, warming herself in the sun of late June, preparing our meals, sprinkling the laundry while I read about the engine that could and the saggy baggy elephant and Little Black Sambo who melted the tiger into butter.
    My father left for work and came back, his movement sure as the beginning and ending of our day. In the fall he would leave before dawn to find deer and elk, and I would sit at the window and wait for him to come home, back from thatplace that was full of things dark and wild, full of danger and adventure—where I would have gone, too, if they’d have let me. But I was a girl and too young to go so deep into the forest.
    He came out of the woods into the circle of our logging camp, his teeth flashing white, his brown hair thick beneath his cap. He held his rifle in one hand, a yearling buck slung across his shoulders. Blood flowed down his arms—the trail of it led back into the shadowing trees. When I ran to him, he slid the gutted deer to the ground and gathered me up against his chest so that I, too, might feel the strength there. When he sat me down, the print of his hands remained, a brush-stroked swirl of palms, fingers and thumbs.
    I followed him to the shed, where he severed the deer’s head with a hatchet, hung it by its hind legs, began the skinning—the joint slits, the quick cuts through membrane and tendon. He took the hide in his fists and peeled it down, grunting with the effort. It made a ripping sound, like tape torn from cardboard. He sent me for hot water and vinegar, and I held the heavy bowl as he dipped the rag and wiped the meat clean.
    And then to the washhouse, with its wood-fired cookstove for heating water, its wringer washer, its communal shower, where my father rolled his sleeves and scrubbed his arms with soap. The water, tinctured red, ran from his hands into the drain, the pipe, out into the meadow where, in early summer, moose came to graze.
    “Come here,” my father said. He lifted me to the sink, and I felt the cold sting of water pumped from the spring. He took the towel from its nail and dried my hands between his own. Outside, the air had lost its color. I breathed in the sharpand familiar smell of wood smoke. Across the clearing, I could see that Swede the sawyer had gone to town; his eight-foot wooden trailer looked abandoned without lamp or smoke, and I wondered if he’d be sour when I fetched him for breakfast.
    The house of my great-aunt and -uncle sat higher on the hill, supported by a foundation of concrete, more permanent than our base of tongue, hitch, and wheels. They surely had turned in for the night—my aunt with her hair washed and wrapped in tight curlers, my uncle with his whiskers and rough voice—because the next day was their Sabbath and they must drive to town for church.
    We