Bud Sparhawk - Jakes Gift.pdf - Bud Sparhawk - margozap

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Jake's Gift

by Bud Sparhawk

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Science Fiction

A DF Books NERDs Release

First published in Analog, September 1993

The crisp fall wind blew the tops of the pampas grass to and fro, scattering the seed that hung heavy in

their tassels. This late in the year every stand of grass was adorned with their pink plumes, ringing the

marsh and hiding the brackish black waters of the enclosed pond from the nearby creek. Between the

grasses and the water were cattails, displaying their own abundance of seed like fat brown sausages on a

skewer. Nestled among both were the other flora of the Bay, eel grass, sonnet weed, and a broad expanse

of reed, all tough grasses that could survive in the porous sand and resist the incursions of brackish water

that bathed their feet at high tide.

Jake's shack was built on the edge of a small feeder stream between the pond at the center of the marsh

to the beginnings of the black organic muck that was the floor of the marsh, which was home for the

endless variety of frogs and turtles and breeding ground to the twenty varieties of fish that inhabited the

greater Bay beyond the creek. The shack was nondescript, typical of many that sprouted up around the

Bay, its siding turned a uniform gray by the combination of sun and weather. It stood on an assortment

of crazily tilted stilts that lifted the shack's floor above the high tide. Over the years Jake had to add

more supports to prevent subsidence; even buried ten feet into the bottom the poles still did not touch

solid ground. Jake liked to imagine that the black goo beneath him went all the way to the bottom of the

world.

A rambling walkway ran from the one and only door atop a series of floating fifty-five gallon drums to a

small side extension where Jake docked his big boat and, in the other direction, marched on poles and

patches of solid ground to the rutted road that led from the main road to the edge of the marsh. The

walkway was a motley assortment of driftwood planks, rough cut to size and attached to the stringers

with whatever fasteners Jake found at hand; wire, nails, screws, and even worn manila rope dotted the

rail-less walk. Gaps over a foot wide showed in places, since the boards were set to the length of his

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stride. It was a daily labor to replace those pieces that both weather and tides carried away. Many was

the night when he'd stumbled, trying to step on a missing board.

Close by the shack were his collection of small boats, for the most part flotsam brought to his little

world by the storms and misfortune of others; damaged rowboats with broken thwarts, canoes with stove

ribs and the like. Where and how he could, he returned them to their owners, the rest he repaired with

whatever odds and ends were to hand and added them to his own little fleet. Mariah , the small

blackened rowboat whose sides were so badly burned that he simply cut them away, leaving a scant six

inches of freeboard above the gently curving bottom. One decent wave would swamp her, so she was

useless for any work outside the marsh. On the other hand her shallow draft and light weight made her a

responsive and agile vessel for his quiet forays around the marsh. Mariah could glide along with no

more than three inches of water beneath her hull, propelled by Jake near the stern, push pole in hand.

The other boats he'd named Simplicity , Handsome , and Gull , who was a wesort-rigged rowboat that he

used as a day sailer. He had gotten the used sails from a loft across the Bay, near Annapolis, and had

fashioned the mast himself. Her lines were odds and ends of manila and poly and cotton, depending on

their use. Simplicity was the runabout he used to get some fresh fish for his own table and had a nice

little 3-horse outboard fastened to her stern. Handsome was a green sponsooned canoe with rich birch

ribs and three layers of canvas overlaid with a slathering of fiberglass. He'd gone the length of the creek

and up and down the Bay looking for its owner after the hurricane had blown her into his refuge, but to

no avail. Now he used her for his commute to the docks on the far side of the creek when he needed an

occasional job helping the crabbers in the summer or oyster tongers in the winter. It was a way of

making enough to buy his few necessities.

He met Mary on a crisp fall morning when there was a gentle breeze blowing out of the southeast.

Chessie, his dark brown part-bay retriever had awakened him from a sound sleep with a slobbery lick of

his huge tongue. Jake kicked off the covers and scattered the assortment of cats that had chosen to share

the warmth of his bed from the frosty night before. Throughout the summer they stayed on his big boat,

probably thinking that they owned the smelly tub, but more likely trying to figure out with their tiny cat

brains where all the fish were that made the boat smell so good. Since the boat was over thirty years old,

and a fisher for the last twenty, it was no wonder that it had absorbed a certain atmosphere. “OK, OK,

boy. I know its time to get up,” he groused and scratched his head, part of the morning ritual, just as

throwing the door open to air out the place and release Chessie and the cats into the marsh, heating

coffee on the small propane stove, fixing a small breakfast for himself, and taking a dippy bath with a

small bowl and washcloth were a never changing routine.

He took his coffee out the front door and gazed over the marsh. Pretty soon the ducks would be flying

down from the North, and a little later the Canadian geese would follow. The flocks loved the marsh

where there was protected cover and lots of food, bottom grasses, tasty frogs, and minnows. Chessie

would be crazy for weeks when they started arriving, but she was too old for hunting, too old and too fat,

but then, aren't we all, he thought and patted the small pot that spilled over the tops of his jeans.

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“Now where could that damn dog have gone?” he mused. Usually Chessie made a mad dash down the

walkway, jumped onto the sand spit, raced along the stream to the edge of the creek, turned left and

chased waves for a while and then followed the rutted path that passed for a road back to the walkway. It

usually took him about a half hour to make his circuit, until this morning that is. He sipped on the hot

coffee and waited a while longer, planning his day.

He needed to get over to the store for some more ice, some fruit, and vegetables to stock up for the next

week. Then he could see what he had snagged on the trot line he'd put out the previous evening. Maybe

he'd have a nice Rock or yellow Perch for dinner, if luck was with him. Otherwise it was fried whatever

and crab soup. Chessie's barking roused him from his reverie. It sounded like it was coming from the far

side, opposite from the road. Sounded like he'd caught a muskrat, or maybe treed a coon. Well, he'd

better go rescue the poor thing. He stepped onto Mariah , picked up the pole, and shoved off across the

pond.

Chessie's barks sounded more distressed as the boat slid into the high marsh grasses and along a small

channel carved by the freshwater spring farther up, near the tree line. The boat moved quickly along the

channel since the meander was slight and the curves adequate for the length of the boat. Soon he was

within sight of the dog, who was standing on a huge driftwood shoring beam that had wedged itself into

the marsh during some unknown storm years past, before his time even. As soon as he came into sight

Chessie stopped barking and plunged forward, tail wagging furiously. Just like that damn dog, Jake

thought, expecting his backup human to pull him out if it was more than he could handle. He moved to

the stern to raise the bow and gave one final push of the pole to ground Mariah . Carefully placing the

pole on the deck he stepped onto the beam and peered into the break in the grass where Chessie had

disappeared.

* * * *

Mary Hellorin Kelly had grown up in the north end of Baltimore in a staid businessman's home with a

mother more interested in doing good in the community than in pursuing her teaching career. As a

consequence of her parent's desire for the ideal daughter, Mary had been sent to the “right” schools

(where she terrorized her friends and teachers with an assortment of frogs, turtles, and insects that she

collected), introduced in the “right” social circles (where she had a reputation for arranging canoe and

raft trips, camping out, and skin diving), and had been taught all of the “right” arts and graces for a girl

of her social status, age, and community (and which she totally ignored when out of sight of her mother).

For twenty years she had tried to appear to be a dutiful and obedient daughter, the pride of her parent's

eyes. And when her uncle had died, leaving her with a trust fund sufficient to maintain her

independence, she had a fierce argument with the both of them, left her father's dear alma mater,

abandoned the pursuit of the Urban Studies major her mother had selected, and started over again in a

biology major at the state university's main campus, living in the dormitories with a more diverse array

of people that she had ever imagined existed. She loved it.

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Seven years later, Masters in hand, she worked with the Smithsonian Institute at their Rhode River

facility where she learned of the rich diversity of the tidal ecological niche. What the job lacked

financially it more than made up for in the time and hard work demanded. Usually she was up before

dawn, out in the wetlands up to her ass in mud and chill water, aswarm with bloodsucking mosquitoes,

gnats, black flies, and a dozen other denizens of the ecology. The soprano peeping of the tiny frogs

would give counterpoint to the bass croaking of the larger ones. Small birds usually chirped and

twittered in the steel gray pre dawn light, when the insects would began their strident rattles, rasping,

squeals, and screams. Sometimes she would hear a fish splash in its leap for one of the many insects that

dared the surface of the water. Net in hand she would sweep the air, counting the population of the

smaller insects who were individually predator and prey in the rich soup of life. Using the shorthand she

had devised she recorded each sector as she worked her way to the wetland's interface with the tidal

river, moved two meters over and worked her way back. And that was one of the more glamorous

jobs—It sure beat analyzing goose turds, which had been her first assignment.

But her real passion was the wetland flora; the grasses, flowers, shrubs, and bushes that tolerated the

alternating fresh and brackish tidal waters that bathed their roots and managed to wrest nurture from the

sand and clinging muck. Here was adaptation to a harsh environment in its finest form. Every season

presented its own challenges, its own selection process. A pond was populated by the early arrivals, the

cattails and the bottom grasses. Later, as their roots grew and the detritus of previous generations

overlaid one another the water became shallower, eventually forming humps that were dry at least some

of the time. The resulting marsh would later be colonized by the taller grasses, which would add their

own measure of organic detritus to the layers. Finally, the bushes and shrubs would make their presence

known, capturing dirt and mulch in their root structures until the marsh would become a swamp, and

shortly thereafter, dry forest land.

And during all of this process the population of fauna changed continually, meeting the changing

conditions, finding and exploiting new niches, and developing a rich variety of solutions to the problems

that any life on the water's edge presented. It was fascinating. Few of the ponds and marshes that lined

the shores ever made the complete transformation; strong storms and wind driven tides destroyed much

of the build up, tore away much of the growth, and set the transformation back to the beginning.

Eventually her studies led her to a grant of her own: She was to determine the degree to which trace

metals were filtered from the water by various species of wetland plants. This was an outgrowth of Jim

Shepherd's, her mentor, studies on the effectiveness of the Bay's indigenous life in filtering pollutants,

such as the rich, algae feeding phosphates, from the water.

Jim's studies were critical to understanding how the tidal wetlands in the Chesapeake Bay could be

managed to keep it alive and productive. Phosphates entered the Bay from the rivers leading from not

only Maryland , but farms, municipal water treatment plants, and industrial developments in surrounding

states. The watershed that produced pollutants was hundreds of times the size of the Bay itself, and

every bit of algae producing phosphorous in that area found its way into the ecosystem.

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The growing industrial base within the watershed also produced an assortment of poisons that could

combine to reduce the oxygen levels of the bay, adversely affect the development of insect life who fed

the fish, affect the spawning of fishes, and produce infertile eggs in the waterfowl that ate both fish and

insects, and sometimes (horrible cases) kill by direct contact. Her grant would be a small step in helping

them evaluate how much the ecology could help itself.

* * * *

Which was why she was again ass deep in the oozing, sticky, and, at this time of year, chilly, black

muck trying to find her boot that the ooze had snatched from her foot. On a nearby log were the

scattered remains of her labors and the tools she had used, all scattered in her panic to remain upright as

her foot had slipped when that stupid brown mutt had rushed out of the bushes and startled her. Now the

dog's barking near her back drowned out the normally happy sounds of early marsh morning.

“Need some help,” the grizzled old waterman in the worn black sweater, torn jeans, and knee high

rubber boots asked her as he grabbed the dog's collar and pulled it back.

Mary looked up from the log where she lay with one arm immersed up to the elbow in cold mud. “No,

thanks. I just need to find my boot.” There, she could feel the top of it now. “Your dog startled me. I

wasn't expecting to see something that size charging out of the reeds at me.” Damn, if her foot hadn't

missed the log and plunged into the water she would have been all right. Luckily she had managed to

grab a handful of bulrush or she would of toppled into the marsh been soaked all the way through,

despite her working clothes. “Got it!” she said as she lifted the filthy, water filled boot into the air, sat

up, and, with a flourish, dumped the contents back into the water.

“You don't intend to put our foot back in that thing, do you?” the waterman asked. “I'd wash it out first,”

What did he think she was, some fool tourist? Of course she knew that. Carefully she used the boot to

scoop up some clean water and rinsed the inside. She repeated the process until the water poured clean

and then shoved her foot into it and stood up.

“Don't get many visitors around here,” the waterman said quietly, looking off across the marsh where a

blue heron was stalking prey in the shallows with a slow dignity. She caught the glance he had given to

her dissection tools and the samples she had taken. “Collecting roots, I see.”

Mary had enough experience with the people who lived along the Bay to understand that it was a

question, not a statement. People here were leery of outsiders, strangers who had unknown reasons and

strange viewpoints. “Mary Kelly,” she said, extending her hand. “And no, I just need some samples of

cattail roots for my work.”

His grasp was surprisingly gentle, “Jake,” he replied. “Appears I owe you something for what my dog

did. Want some coffee?” he asked and turned back the way he had come. Mary followed, perhaps if he

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Bud Sparhawk - Jakes Gift.pdf

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