Rivertooth

Death comes quietly to a new clearing in the forest, and falls onto a frozen oxbow lake not far from the river bank. He lays there in the cold spring air and snow falls over him. The air warms over weeks and melts the ice beneath him letting him sink. The lake below warms and life begins to fill it. Copepods and fairy shrimp dance through growing duckweed. Spring peepers and bullfrogs croak for mates and lay gelatinous masses of eggs along the pool’s shore. Fish eggs, stuck to the feet of migrating birds, are deposited and hatch alongside the tadpoles. Some grow into frogs themselves and some are eaten by dragonfly larvae and hellgrammites. Adult dragonflies and damselflies flit and hover at the grasses by the shore while camouflaged mantises reach for them. There are more pools than his around, they stretch over the forest floor leaving peninsulas and islands of freshly exposed soil; new plants poking through the bed of leaf decay surrounded by, and surrounding, puddles of light and life. Jack-in-the-pulpits and ferns, trilliums and may apples grow through the high places, and swamp cabbages flourish with cat tails at the edge of the water. Beneath the now thick layer of duckweed, minnows and young bluegill swim around him. Under him salamanders take refuge, and all over him algae grows. His skin is beginning to waterlog and break away, but the fish don’t mind.

Across the forest floor, spring flood waters break the bank of the river and rush through the undergrowth. They carve back into the oxbow lake and flood vernal pools, picking up duckweed and frog eggs; and they pick him up too and carry him along. He is washed along the new riverbed, over drowning plants. The river finds its old path again and sweeps him into a deep channel. Along the bank fallen trees have become hiding places for minnows, roosts for turtles, and dams for floating plants. At the water's edge catfish nest in holes in the bank, and through the open water steelhead swim. He snags on a branch as he travels and it pulls at him; he disturbs a swirl of corralled duckweed from it. Along the bottom he slides over jagged rocks. Crayfish dart past him, as pieces of him settle they feast. Caddisfly larvae build homes from pebbles and from detritus he carries with him. He settles for a time in a deep place, trapped by an overhang. There he spreads out, curious fish swim through him. Leaves fall to the bottom and cover him, their decay mixes with his and becomes a rich silt on the riverbed. The surface freezes, but the slow flow above keeps him safe from the ice. The cold seeps deep into him, drowning the warmth of decay. His body falls apart and the gentle current carries him away piece by piece to mix with the water and the mud and become food for new growth in the springtime. Thaw comes and the ice overhead melts letting the sun shine deep into still water. Spring waters churn him up from his rest and help him on. Along the river, past the bank, vernal pools fountain with life. He reaches the delta, a shallow sand bank connecting river to lake. The river is wide here, and shallow, water lily stems create underwater forests with floating canopies. Across one side water flows fast into the lake cutting a deep groove. Avocets sieve the wet sand and silt on the shore for brine fly larvae, frogs plop into water and burrow in the mud to avoid wading herons. Snapping turtles lay in wait, wormlike tongues extended, for fish to swim too close. wind whips up the river’s surface and its ripples collide with overpowering incoming waves. They delay the outward flow, they let it continue, again with every wave. Here the river deposits all it has carried so far. Decay, of animals and of plants, settles to the bottom and becomes a fertile sediment. River teeth rest here. Where the branch and the trunk grow together, the hardest part of the wood and the last to decay.

The waves push water in above, yet the outward flow below does not stop. He is in pieces now. Some stay in the sand and silt and mud, resting with the river teeth. Others break into open water. Carried first by the river’s current, then by the undertow of the lake, he washes through a sandbar and down a drop to the rock strewn lakefloor. The water is still less than a hundred feet deep, yet even midday light is dimmed by blooms of algae on the surface; perch and sheepshead swim around him. He travels slowly. Storms rile the bottom and move him further from shore. Winters come and he lays still under the ice, spring comes and he moves again. He passes through hulls of freighters and fishing vessels, tugboats and steamships all wrecked centuries before. Trunks of massive trees rest, waterlogged and covered in algae, next to boulders deposited on the lake bottom by glaciers millenia ago. He stops at the base of a boulder. It is winter, and yards above there is a foot of ice diffusing the sunlight. Muskellunge and walleye swim slowly in the open water above, conserving energy in the cold. Crawdads pick at him from time to time. The water soaks through him and algae grows over him. In the spring, fish hooks avoid him. In the summer, divers search for wrecks. Autumn covers him with a swirl of leaf matter and new tree trunks pile around. Winter comes, he rests.