Mattie Mitchell by Gary Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

measured his days
and seasons by his wandering way of life, it was the end of
nothing. It was just the beginning of another wonderful winter of
trapping. Mattie always carried with him a brown, pocket-sized
Catholic prayer book that had been translated into his native
Mi’kmaq language. Mattie was literate enough to read portions
of it. Nowhere in his cherished book could he find a date for such
a foolish portent.
    He had spent the short, glorious days of autumn trappingand hunting along the many rugged coves and coastal plains and
tidal river valleys. The English demand for fancy beaver-skin
hats had taken its toll on the animals all along the coast. Mattie
would trap them on his winter trapline far inland, where few
others went.
    A big part of his fall trapping along the coast was for otter.
Their rich autumn pelts were in good demand, but around the
windy coast they were harder to trap than they were in the rivers
and ponds. The otters that frequented the saltwater bays and inlets
were usually much larger than the freshwater variety and fetched
a better price when cured just right. Mattie used a short piece of
net obtained from a fisherman friend of his, with which he netted
herring for bait to trap the otters.
    He was paddling along the shoreline in the middle of the
afternoon. The day had been too windy to chance paddling along
the cliffs that bordered the water. He had spent the time picking
ripened berries that grew on every bank above the tide line. He
had taken a good nap, too, with the cool breeze from the ocean
rustling the low bushes all around the place where he had lain.
    Now with the wind dropping and showing every indication of
dying, he set off in his canoe. His net had been set yesterday just
around the bill of the point he was now approaching. When he
paddled around the point, he saw the shorefast net running down
to the water and the small wooden buoy bobbing at the outside
end of the net, but not one of the cork floats between shore and
buoy could be seen.
    At first he thought a whale had become entangled in the
net—a minke or a pothead, maybe. He rested his paddle on the
narrow gunnel and waited. The imagined whale never surfaced
and, upon considering, Mattie figured one of these small whales
could have parted the mooring lines and swam off still entangled
in the netting.
    He approached the net and, looking down into the depths, saw
what had dragged the floats under. From the foot-ropes to the head
yarkins the net was filled with silvery herring. Their combined
weight was too much for the cork floats to bear. Many of the fish
were still alive, and wriggled and twisted to free themselves from
the narrow meshes. Their struggling caused thousands of shiny
scales to break free and float away on the current, flashing and
glistening, only to vanish into the green depths.
    The dead ones hung limp and motionless. Yellow, short-legged crab, and pink and green starfish with five fingers spread,
were feasting on them. Below the net, wide-mouthed sculpins
and squished-mouthed flatfish, their black eyes looking up,
waited for the carrion.
    Mattie had seen nets sunk with herring before. It was a
common thing for the fishermen along this coast to witness. The
schooling herring swam along these waters by the tons, both
in the spring and fall. Mattie had seen them in the mouths of
streams, with the milky sperm from the males clouding the tidal
pools for days. At such times it was easy to scoop up hundreds of
the fish by hand or with dipnets.
    Mattie suddenly remembered another time when a small
section of his net had been carried under, and it wasn’t by herring.
An otter had been chasing herring and its paws had become twisted
in the mesh. Its frantic struggle for life had only entangled the
animal more. Mattie found the drowned otter hopelessly rolled
in the linnet a few feet below the surface. Looking down at the
hundreds of herring and remembering the otter, he had an idea.
    He knew where to find several