Free Moon Tide by Dawn Tripp Page A

the skin peeled easily. Now, she tests the sinews close to the haunch to sense the age. If it is a young rabbit, the flesh will be nut-sweet and come without trouble from the bone. If it is older, she will sharpen the knife against the doorstone and then cut the animal, always the same way, into five pieces, four legs and a lower back section. She puts the meat in a washtub of fresh water with a teaspoonful of baking soda to soak out the rest of the blood and the gamy taste.
    Jake watches his mother until she is done. It is the residue of the act he loves, the rose-colored water left over and the fresh metallic smell of white soda on her fingertips.
    Later, when the white goose is fricasseed and they eat, Jake will not taste the long journeys stored in the bird’s flesh, the meadows of arctic ice it came from. He will taste the grief of its mate. He will taste the aborted flight and swallow it whole.
    After dinner, Jake helps his mother wash up the plates. His father and Wes have moved into the front room for a smoke and a game of dominoes. When the pots are scoured and put away, Jake pulls on his boots and walks outside. He crosses Thanksgiving Lane and walks down tothe river on the wagon path through the juniper woods that divide the Coles property from Skirdagh. The nightjars roost on the roof of the house. The library window is lit, and he can see the old Irish woman, Elizabeth, hunched in the beveled light. She nods slowly like the shadow of a fish through the glass.
    He walks down to the Point Meadows that jut into the west branch of the river. The wet earth sucks at his ankles, and he keeps to the wheel ruts made by the wagons that come down twice a year to harvest the meadows for salt hay. He crosses the stone bridge to the marshes and walks along the narrow stream until he reaches the beginning of the muskrat runs. At the edge of the creek, he can see the steel glint of the mink trap Wes has set on the east end, by the tidal mouth. It pulls him, a gentle tug that he imagines is magnetic and not unlike the way a spawning trout is drawn back into its natal stream. He finds two minks in the trap. A thick female and her slender child. Their black pelts are unscarred. She will bring thirty dollars at least, the little one maybe fifteen. The moon coats their fur like oil. Wes has set the trap close to the burrows that run under the marsh and baited it with duck skin and rat grease. He will not trap on dry land. A land trap will bring only feet. They will chew off their own legs to get free.
    The tide is on the flood, and the water has already risen to their chests. The mother nibbles at the rawhide binding, and Jake hears the crack as she breaks a tooth on the steel. He does not touch the trap. He waits with them, crouched on a flat rock as the tide soaks around his knees. The cold draws the blood from his legs until his flesh is taut and has the hardness of bone. He waits with them, keeping three feet between himself and the trap so when they cry, their voices strained against the dark, he will be too far away to reach out.
    He offers words, soothing passages he remembers from the books he has read, bits of stories about men who have perished under waves by the thousands, whole cities that have fallen into the ocean, nameless continents drowned in ancient seas. He tells them about the girl he saw rolling down the hill with the sun tangled in her hair; how she was a wheat field, a bale of hay, ivory-skinned.
    He does not meet their eyes. He does not watch how their mouths wrangle to chew themselves from the trap. He waits with them until the tide has covered the steel and the black surface of the water has grown still. Then he walks along the river to the gravel beach at the end of Cape Bial and sits down on the high-water marsh, his clothes soaked in the cold. He looks up into the sky. He listens as the ebb tide pulls through the stones, and he floats there, on that extended margin, his body hovering between the dream of