[Favorite Childhood Object] Real Big Fish

[Scaramouche Fandango]

When she’d come down from the mountains, Real Big Fish hadn’t taken much with her. Her clan was nomadic, and she didn’t have a lot of personal possessions at the time. It was different here, now that she was largely settled, but back then she had to travel light. She didn’t have the complex collection of tools that she now owned- no nets, no traplines, no crafted baits, no weirs. Back then, all she fished with was her own ingenuity. She still fished like that sometimes- plunging in after a fish, scooping leaping salmon as they forded a cataract- it was you against nature, and there was something pure and beautiful about that. Other styles were valid, and she practiced many, but fishing the traditional way was deeply nostalgic for her.

Kin against nature was an eternal struggle. Swamp-dwellers didn’t really experience it that frequently- during big floods, maybe, but most of these kin would never know the harshness of winter the way mountain-dwelling Totoma did. She didn’t fault them- they had their own struggles, and not having to face storms wasn’t a softness or anything like that- but knowing the extent of the Totoma experience was simply beyond their ken. You had to be hard in the mountains, hard and weathered like a boulder. Her grandmother had told her that time and again. She’d been a brute, Real Big Fish’s grandmother. A massive, scarred doe. One eye at the time Fish knew her, though presumably she’d had two in her youth. Ears ripped to shreds, armour cracked and chipped- she was a brawler, and had successfully led her clan and several others through numerous territorial wars. Border scuffles she could take on alone, and there was nothing that could bring her down. She’d been undefeated, a legend in her own time.

Until she came up against an enemy she couldn’t win. Old age didn’t play fair, and even the strongest could be brought down by the diseases and infirmities that crept in. Real Big Fish didn’t know how long her grandmother was sick- even though she was barely an adult when the old doe died, she was perceptive enough that she would have realised... if her grandmother hadn’t been so good at hiding it. Fish loved her parents of course, but her grandmother was her clan leader. The big boss. Everyone listened to her, and she loved to impart her wisdom, training, and experience on her grandchildren. Fish had always been a favourite because she was bold, brash, and bearish- just like the old girl.

So when she came down from the mountain, Real Big Fish traveled light. There was one thing, however, that she took with her. One thing she would never let go, a thing she’d been given as a precious gift when he was just a little girl.

Once, back when she was just on the cusp of growing in her horns, her grandmother came home with a hunting party. This wasn’t sustenance hunting; there had been wolves threatening the border, and a lamb had been taken. It was too dangerous having them so close, so the group had been dispatched to keep the clan safe. It had been a hard, pitched battle, judging from the wounds that kin came home with, and nobody bled more than Fish’s grandmother. Concerned, she had sprinted to the old doe’s side. Her face, a wasteland of scars, was beaming as Fish realised that much of the blood wasn’t hers. “Fish,” she’d croaked, for Fish had earned her name young, “the bastards chipped my armour. I can’t reach the break, and it’s right in my peripheral vision. Driving me absolutely nuts. Get it for me, would you?”

Fascinated and faintly disgusted, the young Fish did as she was asked. In a gruesome parody of a kiss, she reached up and snapped the piece of loose armour from her grandmother’s cheek. She tasted blood- wolf blood, Totoma blood- and was filled with a fierceness. Her grandmother had fought, and her grandmother had won. Nothing had stood in her way, and though she’d gotten hurt, it hadn’t slowed her down.

She kept the piece of armour. Worn smooth by the years, the chipped bony bit was more than a good luck talisman for her. It represented her family, her years in the mountains, the strength of her grandmother, and the strength of a hunter. Touching it transported her back to that place where she’d first learned what it meant to be Totoma, to be brave and to be fierce... and it called to mind a scarred smile and a bright beaming eye.

She missed her grandmother more than she missed the mountains, but she’d never truly be away from her. Her grandmother’s spirit lived in her, and the piece of her armour was a constant reminder.

(804 words)