Free Fishbone's Song by Gary Paulsen

death before I could actually eat a raw grub worm and hold it down. Of course I’ve never really starved, where I thought I was going to die of it the way some people have starved right to death. So it’s hard to say for sure. But they’re pretty bad. Gooey. Grub worms.
    So I was looking at this stump thinking it must have been a giant bear, some kind of wild crazy demon bear, and then I saw it. Little thing, couldn’t have been more than forty or fifty pounds soaking wet, tearing another stump to junk with just its front paws, digging in with claws as sharp andhandy as knives, just pulling with strong front legs, ripping and pulling the old wood away like some kind of machine.
    And I thought. No.
    Don’t shoot a sharp stick into something like that. It would come at you and the last thing you’d think was that you’d made some kind of perfect know-it-all mistake shooting a sharp stick into a bear. Last thing, while it used those claws and strong front legs to pull you to pieces like a rotten stump. Last thing. And that was a small bear.
    Big one. No. Just clean bite your head off. Wouldn’t even have time for that last thought about how stupid you were to shoot a sharp stick into a bear. One bite. No head.
    Fishbone said before they sent him to Korea to get shot some they sent him to a place called Fort Sill in Oklahoma for training. Said it was about artillery, big guns which he never got to use because he got shot and took that ride between the two frozendead men on the jeep hood before he got to shoot back even with a small gun, let alone the big ones. But they took him out in a kind of mountain-hilly country with other men where they watched the big cannons fire to learn how artillery works. Then farther out, miles out in the same kind of country, to see how they exploded when they hit. Place with old tanks and car bodies for targets and they just blew them all to pieces.
    Had chiggers there. Mean little things that got under and inside his boots and underwear and ate on him, he said. Sores all over that itched worse than anything. Worst. And snakes, rattlers and water moccasins, in and around any pond or big puddle, and spiders all over as big as your fist.
    Just not a good place.
    Said he hated Fort Sill. Hated all of Oklahoma because of his time at Fort Sill. Said it was where Geronimo, the famous Apache warrior, was held prisoner until he died. Fell off a wagon that droveover him and broke his neck, they said, but Fishbone said he probably died just to get out of Fort Sill, take his spirit back to the deserts in Arizona where he was from. Like Jimmy Applecore. Where there were no chiggers and not as many snakes.
    But near where they trained on the big guns was a kind of huge park, Fishbone said, where they kept animals in a kind of refuge, about as big a place as some small eastern states. The soldiers were put up in this animal refuge area in small tents, called pup-tents, sleeping on the ground, some of them said, so the chiggers could get at them and eat on them better, and make them into tougher and meaner soldiers.
    Probably not quite true, Fishbone said, but it seemed to work that way just the same.
    Soldiers got tougher, and maybe meaner, and hated Fort Sill a little more than they would have if they’d been inside clean buildings.
    But where they were camped, near the artilleryrange, there were other animals. Elk, deer, coyotes, and some buffalo. Thing is, Fishbone said, they had a lot of free time. Lower-rank soldiers weren’t allowed to have strong liquor, like ’shine or whiskey, because they were told they couldn’t handle it. Only officers were allowed what they called strong drink. Lower-rank soldiers were allowed beer.
    That’s where the trouble came from, Fishbone said. ’Shine would set you to singing, maybe, foot shuffle dancing, telling good stories, but it was too fast, hit a little too hard, for much else. Man would get a little tooted on