A Fish Story
Craig Cass and I were camped at Durbin Lake in Thousand Lakes Wilderness in northern California. It was a moderate 3.5-mile hike in from the Bunchgrass Trailhead under our light packs, packed for a short weekend. We moved easily over the trail through the rolling lava flows, evidence of the recent (about 500 years ago) eruption of Tumble and Hall Buttes.
Some people call him Craig Crass, instead of Cass, but only behind his back because he’s this heavy, barrel-chested man, an ex Navy Seal, or so he says “almost” ex Navy Seal, but ex Navy anyway, who went to war in Vietnam, lived at sea with sailors, and did things there he will and will not speak about.
Craig had just told one of his jokes as we sat in the afternoon warmth of the late summer sun facing the lake so we could see it. We were drinking something hot with something hotter poured into it that warmed from the inside out, if you get my meaning. The joke was of the kind that gave Craig his other name, and he liked to tell it about once a month, or whenever out backpacking.
The mechanic says: “You’ve blown a seal.”
The Alaskan says: “No, that’s Mayo. I just had a sandwich.”
Sitting there at the lake edge in the after-moment of the joke, in the little silence that comes after a joke that asks for another joke or no more jokes at all, Craig heard no more jokes at all and set to reading some fast-paced spy novel with a black cover. Soon he fell into a light sleep, a soft dozing, his head nodding up and back.
The lake was half-full (it had been a long, dry summer), and most of it was a dry ring around the inside of the trees, the bare-boned edge of where the fish might have been. But now, in this kind of heat, in this kind of summer, they were huddled in the center waiting for rain.
Laid back in our camp chairs the way we were, I was staring out at the lake when there, just there, a rounded shape emerged from the woods and leaked out onto the dry shore. A bear. A big black bear. It pressed down into a kind of push-up and drank water from the lake.
“Craig,” I said in a whisper, and motioned to the lake with my chin.
“God-damned,” he said.
We watched the bear drinking, and we were drinking too, and then Craig said, “Well, if that’s not a god-damned bear drinking water from the lake.”
We watched, this silence much more pleasing than the silence after the joke, and while we were watching, the bear pressed up into a walking pose, lingered out its nose at us, and then slipped away, dark and silent, into the trees. The ripples from its tongue remained, smoothing out over the water and across the hidden fish.
We looked at each other for a moment, Craig and I, maybe a moment more, and without a word we both rose up and started out to get a look at that bear-place, the place that bear had been, to inspect the tracks so as to be sure. When we arrived there we found it was true what we had seen. The tracks were clear and clean as sky, and shaped to chill the hairs of us: distinctly, yes, they looked almost human. As we left the scene, I turned back and noticed my boot prints, cold and industrial, mingled with bear toes.
But Craig didn’t walk back. No. He removed his boots and waded out into the lake where the bear had been, the soft mud-bottom covering his feet, and then as if suddenly air-born where the water went deep, he began to tread across like riding a bicycle, like a bear riding a bicycle across that shallow water-body choked with water plants, as he pressed through them, parting them with his hands, and then he called to me “Aren’t you coming in for a swim?” but I was wearing my pants and my boots still and so called back “No,” as he worked his way across and came out on the other side covered in green primordial ooze. Noticing this, his creature-hood covered over in green stuff, he waded back in and washed himself off and then tromped a bare-footed path back to his seat. His boots stood empty on the other side.
“Aren’t you going to get your boots?” I said.
“Maybe in a bit,” he said.
Back now in our comfortable seats, that silence came in again, only this time it was a holy kind of silence and we both hoped the other wouldn’t tell a joke to mess it up. And neither of us did. And to consecrate it, we let that moment stand for a long time, a real long time in silence, long enough to feel a little hungry for supper.
Craig, he’s older than me, at least twenty years better than me, old enough to be my father. But it wasn’t like that at all; I’ve seen a bear with my father and that is a different story. This story is about two friends sharing a bear. And sitting up in the mountains in a basin of lakes after seeing a bear, you feel something in the wind that tells you that everything is going to be all right, that night will fall, and in the morning the sun will be born again, and the rains will return one day to fill the lake and spread the fish out into the trees, out into the place of our tracks and the tracks of bear, and the world will continue on like it always has for near forever. You feel all of this between you, between you and whoever you’re with, and you feel it without saying anything at all. Well, that can make a day happy.
Kurt Caswell is a writer and an assistant professor of creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. He is the author or two books: An Inside Passage (University of Nebraska Press), for which he won the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize; and In the Sun’s House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation (Trinity University Press). He is the lead editor of an anthology of nature writing, To Everything on Earth (Texas Tech University Press), and his essays and stories have appeared in many publications. Visit Here: KurtCaswell.
