The Dogs of Winter Read Online Free Page A

commercial fishermen who fished the ocean, the Yuroks at the river’s mouth, and the licensed sports fishermen loosed to fish anywhere they pleased, the Hupas’ take was drastically reduced. As a consequence, some had been coming downriver anyway, fishing Yurok water. There had been incidents of violence. The government had empowered certain Indians to enforce the boundaries. It made foran ugly situation. Hence the meeting. The bad blood, however, ran deep and went way back and included transgressions, imagined and real, from a time before Travis was even born and thinking about it was enough to keep him awake, in the dark room, with the sound of the waves which might otherwise have put him to sleep.
    At length, he got out of bed. He fixed a cup of coffee, dressed and went outside. He found the streets empty and wet with a frail light beginning to gnaw at the edges of the sky.
    He crossed the street and walked along a narrow strip of land which skirted the bluff. The ocean thundered beneath him. A chunk of pale moon wandered off above the town of Sweet Home. Beyond the distant pier, he could see the masts of boats marking the harbor and in some interior place could hear their rigging like the mail of ghosts and heard as well the cries of circling gulls, though in point of fact, he could hear neither where he walked along the cliff for the sea was too loud here and even the birds had been driven away by its agitation.
    He walked the wet strip of grass, coming in time to a half circle of stone and concrete where a single wind-bent tree held forth against the elements and found that he was not alone with the morning.
    There was an old man there, bearded, bundled in a sailor’s peacoat, sporting yellow slickers and a Greek fishing cap, and when Travis caught sight of him, he smiled and went up beside the tree and the corrugated railing upon which the old man leaned.
    “What’s up, Pop?” Travis asked.
    His father regarded him with a sideways glance.
    “Waves get you out of bed?” the old man wanted to know.
    Travis allowed that they had.
    He leaned against the rail and for a moment neither man spoke. They watched the light collecting above the sea. The two sometimes met here. They lived only blocks apart but by some mutually agreed upon arrangement, neither ever dropped in on the other. They spoke on the phone, or met along the trail that skirted the cliff.
    “Damn swells will muddy the water,” the old man said.
    Travis nodded.
    His father had come to the town in the forties, at the end of the war. He had logged and fished and worked in the mills. He hadmarried a Hupa woman. She had given him a son and two daughters and died of cancer at a premature age. One of Travis’s sisters had died young as well, in a traffic accident. The other lived in San Francisco and neither man had much to do with her. Travis had come back to Sweet Home after college, alive with a sense of purpose. He’d come back married to an Irish Catholic girl he’d met at Berkeley. When that ended, he had married a Hupa woman—which union had gone only the better part of a year. Now he was alone, with two children by different mothers, in a shabby apartment with alimony and child support eating up two-thirds of what he made. To his father, married eighteen years to the same woman and faithful even to her memory, these follies did little to elevate Travis’s stature. It wasn’t that the old man rode his case. It was a look was all, a word here or there. Each man pretty well knew what the other thought. In point of fact, Travis was rather fond of the old man. As for his part, the old man would have to make do with the cold comfort of feeling superior to his only son. Travis would have had it otherwise, but things were what they were, and he imagined they would live with it.
    “Give the fish something to eat,” Travis said. He made reference to the debris stirred up by the storm.
    “You say,” his father said. The effects of weather upon the