7/31/2019 Hudson Booksellers' The Best Books for Summer 2012
16/16
20121 of the best of
The Stark River owed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way
blood owedthrough Margo Cranes heart. She rowed upstream to see
wood ducks, canvasbacks,
and ospreys and to search or tiger salamanders in the erns. She
drited downstream
to fnd painted turtles sunning on allen trees and to count the
herons in the heronry
beside the Murrayville cemetery. She tied up her boat and
ollowed shallow eeder
streams to collect crayfsh, watercress, and tiny wild
strawberries. Her eet were
toughened against sharp stones and broken glass. When Margo
swam, she swallowed
minnows alive and elt the Stark River move inside her.
She waded through serpentine tree roots to grab hold o water
snakes and
let the river clean the wounds rom the nonvenomous bites. She
sometimes trickeda snapping turtle into clamping its jaws down hard
on a branch so she could carry it
home to Grandpa Murray. He boiled the meat to make soup and told
the children
that eating snapping turtle was like eating dinosaur. Margo was
the only one the old
man would take along when he fshed or checked his animal traps
because she could
sit without speaking or hours in the prow o The River Rose, his
small teak boat.
Margo learned that when she was tempted to speak or cry out, she
should, instead,
be still and watch and listen. The old man called her Sprite or
River Nymph. Her
cousins called her Nympho, though not usually within the old
mans hearing.
