Smoke River Read Online Free PDF

question. He knows the river’s differences and divides, its seasons and its tempers, with an intimacy he’s never shared with a lover or a friend. Wherever he is on it, it’s familiar, it’s home.
    There’s a tug on his line that has some heft to it, some girding for a fight. Elijah feels the tension and begins the tango of tightening and releasing to prevent a snap. The fish is ill-tempered and scrappy; it expected to be left alone in this stagnant bath, where it can ambush frogs and sunfish and exploit its terminal unpopularity to survive – qualities Elijah understands too well.
    Thinking like a largemouthed bass brought him to this spot, kept him patient, helped him choose just the right fly. Now his fly is hooked into the fish’s flat lower jaw and a fourteen-pound line connects the animal to Elijah where he grips reel and rod; it turns them into a single entity, a hybrid of man and fish, at war with itself. Joe will have to wait.
    You need to know who you are
, his mother once told Elijah. She must have had enough of relatives and former friends from the reserve passing her on Doreville’s streets as if she were a stranger, some whispering
witch
under their breath. As the young boy holding her hand, Elijah felt the tremor of hurt run through her arm into the squeeze of her fingers against his palm. The year he turned twelve, she announced they were leaving his white father and the gabled Queen Street house withits balustrades and velvet wallpaper, its languid two-storey views of the Smoke River, to return to their people. But she’d lost more than her official status by then; she was unwanted, as if by marrying a white man she’d bartered away her own skin. So they squatted on the edge of the reserve in a rundown cabin on the piece of land now being fought over. She died a lonely woman, with few comforts and fewer friends. And except for the river, Elijah grew up belonging to no one and nowhere.
    “Did ya hear me there, Barton? You making a statement, fishing this close to town?”
    And there it is: the hiccup in his attention. Elijah loses the tension. The fish dives deep, dragging the line to where it risks being entangled in sunken debris. Elijah jerks hard. Hard enough or too hard, he can’t tell. The fish rockets out of the water, a ballistic of spines and bulldog jowls. It’s a beauty – four, maybe five pounds – and while he takes its measure, the fish slams its tail against the air, jerks its head, and the line snaps. A gleam of muscle noses into the water, disappears back into the murk, taking the exquisite fly Elijah tied himself into the depths.
    He lets his arm drop so the rod is half submerged, hangs his head for a second. The sun is too high for Elijah to start again; that largemouth will sulk somewhere unreachable. He shrugs his shoulders. At least he knows where that bastard fish hunts – the river has only so many hideouts with water quiet enough for a largemouth.
Another day
, Elijah thinks. He gathers his line, wades out of the river, and climbs up the bank. Joe holds out a hand to yank him up, and Elijah takes it.
    “Don’t need a licence, ’cuz I’m native. Remember, Joe? Territorial rights. If you don’t use ’em, you lose ’em, eh?”
    “Yeah, but man, you could fish anywhere. Do you have to do it right in town? In a spot where everybody can see you? Especially now, with the barricade.”
    Elijah unfastens his waders, lets them fall to the ground and steps out of them. “Yes, I do,” he says to Joe. He smiles and claps the other man on the shoulder. “Yes, I do.”
    He makes for his own truck – bright red and meticulously shiny – already thinking about that first yank of a cold beer, the sizzle of grilled steak, succour for the lost fish, when he looks up for half a second and sees her, Joe’s daughter, sunk low in the cab of that godforsaken wreck of a vehicle, her eyes to her lap. He can tell that she wants to be anywhere but here. This is the part of Joe that