Fish Tale
The dream again, yeah. Same one. Me and Donnie out past the point off Chéticamp checking the last string before the weather came in proper. You want to know about the weather. Sure. It was one of those November mornings where the sky can’t decide if it’s not raining or not-not raining, just grey all the way down to the water and the water grey right back up at it. Thirty-eight pots to pull and the hydraulic was running slow. Beautiful day, really.
Donnie had the coffee. I had the wheel. We’re out there half-past five and Donnie’s going on about that woman from Toronto. The hiker. Went up the Cabot Trail with her headphones in, didn’t hear the bear until it was, well. Donnie says at least she died doing what she loved. Which was what, I said. Listening to podcasts? And Donnie, he loses it altogether. Just loses it.
Then he says, d’you think she was related to that girl from the Pier? And I said, no b’y, she’s from the Pier, she’d have known better. Which maybe wasn’t the kindest thing. But that’s just how it comes out sometimes when you’re cold and the season’s been poor and you’re trying to get through the morning.
She’d been missing since September, that girl. Mi’kmaq. Family up Membertou way. Everybody knew somebody who knew them.
Donnie went quiet after that, which for Donnie lasted about ninety seconds. Then he said we should’ve brought the good coffee, not this gas station shit, and I said you’re worried about coffee quality at half-past five in November, and he said a man’s got standards. Thirty-eight pots and he’s worried about coffee.
String four, trap seven. Donnie’s on the hauler and she comes up slow. Too slow for the weight she’s carrying. The licence was my uncle Clyde’s before it was mine and it wasn’t much even when he had it, twenty-eight traps and a licence that wouldn’t keep a cat fed. You work what you’ve got.
So she breaks surface and the trap’s fouled in something on the outside. Caught in the mesh. Something large. Donnie cuts the hauler. We’re both looking over the gunwale.
Wolffish, maybe. You know the kind, they come up sometimes in the nets, all teeth, these great flat crushing teeth like they were built to break things. Ugly as sin. Uglier than the ones Clyde used to pull, and he had stories about those. Body like: waterlogged. Pale. The fins spread out in the water like it was still trying to swim.
I said to Donnie, that’s the ugliest fish I’ve ever seen in my life. You could put that thing on a wanted poster.
Donnie just kept his eyes on the water.
And the skull of it.
Wolffish, their skulls are a strange thing. Broad. Flat. Something about the eye sockets, the way the bone sits under all that. From a certain angle, in bad light, on a grey morning when you haven’t slept…
You could almost.
Donnie didn’t say anything.
He reached past me and took the knife off the gunwale. Cut the mesh himself. Didn’t look at me while he did it. We watched her go back down and then we pulled the last of the string in silence, and the whole way back Donnie stood at the stern watching the wake. I made a joke. He didn’t laugh.
You’re asking was it the fish that started the dreams. Sure. The fish.
It’s January now. Dark by three-thirty. Long drive in from Chéticamp, I’ll tell you that for free. But you asked about the dream so I’m telling you about the dream.
Donnie. He, uh. November. There was a — he had a gun at the camp, we all do, and he — yeah. So that’s. That’s why I’m here. I can say that much. The fish is why I’m dreaming but Donnie is why I’m here.
The fish.
I keep thinking about that bear. Whether she had time to take the headphones out. Whether she heard it coming. Whether that girl from the Pier…
The fish is what it was. That’s all it was.
