Free Fishbone's Song by Gary Paulsen Page B

name for a couple of months and only then because the army doctors told him what it was and madehim memorize it before they let him go. Sent him home to his family with his memorized name, and they had to feed him with a spoon. They said he couldn’t hold a spoon in his own hand. And he never did remember the buffalo. All of it wiped clean out of his thinking like shaking dirt out of a rug.
    Didn’t happen much, but this time it did: Fishbone was wrong.
    Said nothing good could come of the drunk soldier poking that buffalo with a sharp stick, but he was wrong.
    Something good came from it. He told me the story and after that there was no way in god’s green earth (which Fishbone said all the time: god’s green earth) that I would try to shove a pointed stick—like a cane arrow—into a bear. Or a wild pig. Which brings up another thing: how can it be god’s green earth when part of the earth is white, at the north and south poles, and blue in the oceans? SoI could ask Fishbone about that; aren’t they part of god’s earth? Of course I wouldn’t. Ask him, I mean. That would just add to his thinking that I was being the worst part of a know-it-all. I didn’t need that.
    Saved me a lot of problems later, though, so that was some good from it. Not for the soldier. Fishbone said if the man was still alive, he was probably also still being fed with a spoon. But for me there were lots of times when I raised the bow, looking at a wild pig or a bear up in a tree where one of the Old Blue dogs put them. But I never pulled it back, never shot the arrow. And I could have, but didn’t. Maybe saved me so I didn’t have to memorize my name and be fed with a spoon.
    Must have been tough, those natives in the old times. Fishbone says they had to be tougher than corrugated iron. And smart. He says they’ve found mammoth bones fifteen, twenty thousand years old, fossils big as elephants, with stone arrow and spear points stuck right in the bone. ’Course wedon’t know how it turned out. Maybe the same as that soldier at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. But they tried, just the same, and I don’t know if I’d even try shooting an arrow into a hairy elephant.
    Maybe if a person is starving.
    Nobody bringing boxes of food back then.
    No stores to get food from.
    You shot the mammoth or bear then or you didn’t eat. Sometimes I get pretty hungry. Seems like I’m always a little hungry. But there’s always enough bacon grease and flour to make biscuits and gravy, always a can of beans. Always something. Fishbone said he knew a family even more back in the hills, so poor . . . dirt poor. Lived in the open under old tarps. Not tents, just open tarps. Had eight children and two grown people, he said, had nothing every day but gravy, sometimes with biscuits if they had flour, but most often not. Nothing. Just burned gravy. Ate off two planks tied to elm trees, ate standing up from plates that were old metal pie tins nailed with oneroofing nail for each through the middle holding it to the plank. Had three spoons they passed around. Most of the young ate with their hands because the older ones got the spoons first. Said they were so bad off they wouldn’t brush the flies off the gravy before they ate. Just scoop them up with the gravy and eat it all.
    And still, with all of that, Fishbone said it was better than back in time when they might have to sit and eat bugs and be glad they had it. That back thousands of years ago, if you didn’t grow it and you didn’t shoot it, you didn’t eat, unless you caught something crawling by.
    Rough way to live. That’s what Fishbone says. Rough way to live and probably nobody alive now could live that hard. But he said that with a lift in his voice, shuffle-pat of the foot, and a lift with an up-tone kind of crack in his voice so you thought . . .
    You thought maybe . . .
    You thought maybe if you