Free The Skeleton Tree by Iain Lawrence Page A

gaff, put the knife in his pocket. “We have to go every day. We have to get at least a hundred fish.”
    “A
hundred
?” I said. “Why?”
    “You want to run out of food in the middle of winter?”
    He walked out of the cabin and away through the forest, leaving me staring at the open door. “What do you mean?” I shouted. But he didn’t answer. I pulled on my stupid shoes and ran after him, yelling at his back, “We’re not going to be here that long!”
    He didn’t even slow down. He just held up his hand to make a rude gesture.
    “Someone will come and find us,” I said. My voice was swallowed up by those huge old trees and the blankets of moss. I ran to catch up with Frank and tugged at his arm. “You don’t really think we’ll be here all winter, do you?”
    “How should I know?” He pulled away from me. “But the salmon won’t be here.”
    I hadn’t thought of that. But Frank was right. When the last salmon in the pool had made its way over the falls, there would be no more till summer came again.
    Along the cliffs, then along the beach, I trailed a few yards behind Frank. He stopped near the
Reepicheep
to cut a coil of rope from a big snarl among the logs. He went straight to the pool and started fishing. There were even more salmon than before, their dark backs rising from the water as they swam against the current. In less than a minute Frank had one laid out on the rocks.
    “Come here,” said Frank. “I’ll show you how to clean them.”
    I was happy that he talked to me, and I knelt beside him to watch how he did it. First, he slit the salmon’s belly. Then he cut away the guts and the heart and the liver all at once. He tossed them into the pool, and the seagulls pounced in a shrieking mass.
    Frank rinsed the whole fish in the pool, and the blood and the scales floated away through his fingers.
    “Think you can do that?” he asked.
    “I guess so.”
    We kept fishing all morning. Frank hauled in one fish after another, and soon we had seven laid out in a row. Frank guessed they weighed nearly a hundred pounds altogether. We threaded ropes through their gills and tied them in bunches, then walked back, bent like old prospectors.
    When we reached the cabin Frank didn’t rest. He cut every fish in half down the spine, making slabs of red flesh and shimmering skin. He hung them from the ceiling.
    “How do you know how to do this?” I asked. “I guess your great
dad
taught you.”
    “Sure. He taught me everything,” said Frank. He used bits of wire to hang the fish, threading the pieces through the scales and skin. “They’ll dry hard, like candy. You don’t need a fire.”
    That was Frank’s way of saying that he had given up on building a fire. He had tried it and failed, and would never try again. But the strange thing was that he actually believed himself. In his mind, he could still build a fire if he really wanted to. It just wasn’t worth the trouble.
    I couldn’t imagine that the salmon would dry like candy, and by the end of that day they were starting to smell. But I didn’t complain, and I didn’t argue. I was afraid that if I made Frank angry he would leave, that I would wake in the morning and find the cabin empty.
    I slept under the table that night, as far as I could get from the door and the window. It was another restless night spent waiting for morning, with the wild singing of wolves in the distance. To see dawn come gleaming through the little cracks made me frightened instead of happy.
    But the thing did not come to tap at the window again. Night after night, as I added marks to the wall, it was the
thought
of that thing that kept me awake. Waiting for it to come scratching around the cabin was nearly as bad as hearing its voice.
    I kept myself busy, and I made myself useful so that Frank would stay around. I collected bottles and filled them with water at the stream. I scraped out a pit to be a bathroom, then made a toilet by bashing a hole in the seat of