The Missing One by Lucy Atkins

Author:Lucy Atkins [Atkins, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Published: 2014-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

British Columbia, late spring 1976

As they motored up the coast one day, they came across an old claw-foot tub that had been abandoned on a shingle beach. The three of them hauled it into the boat, then squashed themselves around it and motored back to base.

They pushed, dragged and heaved it up the steep path to the campfire. There was a mound, overlooking the bay, over to the left of the fire, surrounded by tall, skinny pines. ‘Bathroom with a view,’ said Dean.

The guys got shovels and began digging a fire pit, where they planned to put the bath. Elena went and got firewood from the tarp on deck, lugging it up in three loads – one to them, two to the main firepit, where that morning’s embers were still glowing beneath the green branches Jonas had put over them. She crouched down to try to revive them, blowing at an angle as the guys had shown her. None of them had eaten anything since a peanut-butter sandwich at lunch. Her arms and legs felt stringy, and each time she turned her head it was as if the world took a second or two to catch up.

The sun began lowering itself towards the horizon. Jonas and Dean were like kids, messing around together in the dirt.

Elena took Jonas’s sharp, curved fish-cleaning knife and sliced into the Chinook’s belly. She tugged the blade along in a swooping motion, the way he showed her, and opened the fish up. Then she scraped out dark, twisted, fish-stinking entrails into a bag before cleaning out the cavity with patient strokes. She tied the guts tightly in their bag. Then she made her incisions under the pectoral fin, and snapped off the fish’s injured head. When she looked up, the men had heaved the bath over the pit, and were filling it up by lugging buckets of seawater from the shore. She went back to the salmon, drawing the knife along its spinal column, concentrating hard to keep her hand steady.

She washed the heavy salmon fillets down and laid them on the cedar plank as Jonas had shown her – the Native Canadian way. She had watched him spear the fish with a Swiss army knife corded onto a branch that afternoon in a stream that was teeming with Chinook. He stood very still on a rock, halfway out in the rushing water, holding the spear point below the surface. After a bit, he eased the knife towards a fish and then, with a sharp downward stab, he pinned it there. But he didn’t lift it out right away – he went into the freezing water, up to his thighs, and dug down with one hand to grab it. He came wading out of the water with an enormous salmon on the end of his spear. His eyes shone and were deep blue, like the sky behind him. She saw his Viking ancestors in his broad shoulders, the big fish in his hands and his solid, wet thighs coming over the rocks towards her.

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