Free Surfacing by Margaret Atwood Page A

in season, VERS 5¢ on the roadside signs, sometimes VERS 5¢, later VERS 10¢, inflation. French class, vers libre , I translated it the first time as Free Worms and she thought I was being smart.
    I put the worms in the can and some dirt for them. As I walk back to the cabin I hold my palm over the top; already they’re nudging with their head ends, trying to get out. I make them a cover from a piece of paper torn off the grocery bag, keeping it on with a rubber band. My mother was a saver: rubber bands, string, safety pins, jam jars, for her the Depression never ended.
    David is fitting the sections of his borrowed fishing rod together; it’s fibreglass, I have no faith in it. I take the steel trolling rod from its hooks on the wall. “Come on,” I tell David, “you can use that one for still-fishing.”
    “Show me how to light the lamp,” Anna says, “I’ll stay here and read.”
    I don’t want to leave her alone. What I’m afraid of is my father, hidden on the island somewhere and attracted by the light perhaps, looming up at the window like a huge ragged moth; or, if he’s still at all lucid, asking her who she is and ordering her out of his house. As long as there are four of us he’ll keep away, he never liked groups.
    “Poor sport,” David says.
    I tell her I need her in the canoe for extra weight, which is a lie as we’ll be too heavy already, but she takes my expert word.
    While they’re getting into the canoe I return to the garden and catch a small leopard frog as an emergency weapon. I put it in a jam jar and punch a few airholes in the lid.
    Tackle box, smelling of stale fish, old captures; worm can and frog bottle, knife and heap of bracken fronds for the fish to bleed on. Joe in the bow, Anna behind him on a life-jacket facing me, David on another life-jacket with his back to me and his legs tangled in amongst Anna’s. Before I push off I clip a silver and gold spinner with glass ruby eyes to David’s line and hook a worm on, looping its body seductively. Both ends twirl.
    “Ech,” says Anna, who can see what I’m doing.
    “It doesn’t hurt them,” my brother said, “they don’t feel it.” “Then why do they squirm?” I said. He said it was nervous tension.
    “Whatever happens,” I tell them, “stay in the middle.” We move ponderously out of the bay. I’ve taken on too much: I haven’t been in a canoe for years, my muscles are shot, Joe paddles as though he’s stirring the lake with a ladle and we’re down by the bow. But none of them will know the difference. I think, it’s a good thing our lives don’t depend on catching a fish. Starvation, bite your arm and suck the blood, that’s what they do on lifeboats; or the Indian way, if there’s no bait try a chunk of your flesh.
    The island shoreline recedes behind us, he can’t follow us here. Above the trees streaky mackerel clouds are spreading in over the sky, paint on a wet page; no wind at lake level, soft feel of the air before rain. The fish like this, the mosquitoes too, but I can’t use any bug spray because it would get on the bait and the fish would smell it.
    I steer us along the mainland shore. A blue heron lifts from a bay where it’s been fishing and flaps overhead, neck and beak craning forward and long legs stretched back, winged snake. It notes us with a rasping pterodactyl croak and rises higher, heading southeast, there was a colony of them, it must still be there. But now I have to pay more attention to David. The copper line slants down, cutting the water, vibrating slightly.
    “Any action?” I ask.
    “It’s just sort of jigging.”
    “That’s the spoon turning,” I say. “Keep the tip down; if you feel a nibble wait a second and then give it a sharp tug, okay?”
    “Right,” he says.
    My arms are tired. Behind me I can hear the tick tock of the frog hopping up and hitting its muzzle against the jar lid.
    When we’re getting near the sheer cliff I tell him to reel in, we’ll