Page 34 of Badd B*tch

I groaned in frustration, sounding a little too much like the bear this morning for my own comfort. "Fuck this. More work than it's worth." I handed the jury-rigged fishing apparatus back to him after only a few minutes of futile effort. "Here. You do it."

Jax just laughed as he took it back from me. "There's a trick to it."

“Yeah, well, I don’t see that trick working for you either, mister, seeing as neither of us has caught jack shit and we’ve been trying for an hour.”

We'd both tried our luck fishing, but so far had come up empty; it was midday, and we’d come to a stream that was dry-feet-crossable but deep enough to have fish big enough to cook and eat. Those fish had proved elusive so far.

The roll of fishing line was wound around a thick length of stick so you could let it unspool and wind it back up. I watched as Jax coiled the line around the stick to reel it in, dangling the hook in front of his face; it dripped diamonds of water that caught the sun.

"Well, we know there's something down there, 'cuz the fucker took our worm," Jax grumbled.

We both had dirt caked under our fingernails from grubbing under rotting logs for worms to use as bait. Jax had repurposed yesterday's now-wet-and-dirty filter sock as a container for the worms, and fished another wriggling little worm, spearing it onto the hook a few times until it was secure. He then uncoiled a couple of arm’s lengths of line and tossed the hook underhand out into the stream with admirably deft precision, landing the hook just upstream from the shaded ripples near the far bank under the lee of an overhanging shrub. He let the line unspool a bit more until the hook was floating in the shadows where fish usually liked to hang out, and then let the bait sit in the gentle current, occasionally giving the line a little tug.

He grunted, tugging the line a little harder, and then I saw the excitement take hold, his whole body tensing as he hooked the line around the stick, tugged, wound, tugged, and wound, then let the line play out, letting the fish struggle a bit before winding it in more.

"Feels big," he said. "I just gotta…bring it in." He paused in the middle of his statement to yank the stick-and-line up over his shoulder past his left ear as he scrambled upstream.

I was holding my breath, watching him carefully work the hooked fish closer and closer to shore. We were both ravenous, and if we were gonna keep anything like a decent pace, we’d need protein, not just the occasional handful of berries, which was all we’d had since the crash-landing.

"C'mon," I muttered. "Bring that big bitch in."

"We need something to use for a net," Jax said, still carefully letting the fish tug and fight before winding it in a bit further; we only had so many hooks, and couldn’t afford to lose one, not to mention the growing hunger situation.

I dug a T-shirt out of the bag, twisted the sleeves and neckline into long handles, and tied a thick knot. This left the torso opening to use as a makeshift net. Not great, but better than my bare hands.

When Jax had the fish a few feet from the bank, I—already shoe- and sockless in anticipation of this moment—splashed out into the freezing water and scooped the fish into the shirt. I scrambled back to land, closing the ends of the shirt around the violently flip-flopping fish, which was in fact pretty big, probably two or three pounds of rainbow trout. I whacked the fish against a nearby rock until it stopped flapping, at which point I cautiously opened the shirt, wary of the thing suddenly coming to life and flopping away from us. When it stayed still, I freed the hook.

Jax was visibly giddy. "We feast!"

I couldn't help but grin back at him. "Good job, Jax. I admit, I'm impressed."

"I'm an Alaskan boy, Tea. Computer nerd I may be, but I'm still Alaskan-born-and-bred. Fishing is just kind of in the blood, I guess." He grinned even wider, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Never caught anything with a stick and line, though. Mostly we fly fish."

"That’s always looked to me like it's got a hell of a learning curve to it," I said.

"Oh god yes," he answered. "But once you get the knack for it, there's just no other way to fish. It's…meditative. It's magical. Just you and the river and the fish, the sun and the mountains. There's nothing like it." He frowned, shrugging. "When it's not a matter of life and death, I suppose. But I'll tell you one thing—this is gonna be the best damn fish you've ever had."

“I don’t think I’ve ever had fish quite this fresh," I said.

He glanced at me as he set the dead fish on a flat piece of rock and set about gutting it, a task I knew how to do, theoretically, but had never done in practice, and was thus more than willing to let him handle it. "No? What kind of survival training did you get, then?"

I laughed. "Evasion, Jax. How to get back to your side if you go down. Yeah, we covered the basics of fishing, hunting, foraging, shelter-making, and all that, but that was a long time ago, and my experience in the wilderness until now has been more about not getting shot or captured. Starvation and freezing your ass off is just part of the situation. When you’ve got the Taliban on your ass, you can't exactly stop to go fishing or rig a lean-to.” Shit, I just said way more than I'd intended; here come the questions. "Not that there's a lot of fishing to be done way the fuck up there. It was a barren hellscape, where I was."

Jax didn't respond for a while, busily cleaning and filleting the fish. When he did, it wasn't what I'd been expecting. "Sounds like a hell of a rough time you had."

Having expected a deluge of questions, I was off balance. "Yeah, it was…" I stopped, since I didn't possess one single word for that whole business. "It was…a lot."

Jax snorted derisively. "Methinks the lady doth protest too little."

"I never know what you're gonna say, Jax, you know that?"

He smirked at me. "Just keepin' you on your toes, babe."

"I'm not your babe," I snapped, and then sighed, feeling bad for snapping. "I don't like terms of endearment. Just as a general rule."

"So your boyfriend doesn’t get to call you sweetheart or baby or whatever?" He glanced my way, tossing a handful of guts into the river and splashing his hand clean. "And also, to most people in my family, ‘babe’ isn’t a term of endearment, really. It's more like…dude. Gender neutral. Just a way of…addressing you, I guess. My mom calls my dad babe, and he calls her that."

"But does your dad call you babe?" I asked.