Читать книгу Never Cry Halibut. and Other Alaska Hunting and Fishing Tales онлайн

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Growing up, I didn’t sympathize much with her. I couldn’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t want their house to smell like a rutting buck or a salmon spawning ground. Why change your clothes or take a bath when you’d be dirty again a few hours later? Up until the point Nintendo was created, there was nothing cooler than pelts, bones, and stuffed game animals. Forget Disneyland. A trip to visit a taxidermist—even an amateur whose road-killed critter mounts looked like they’d suffered horribly botched plastic surgery from the shaky hands of an Amazonian witch doctor—was once my happiest place on earth. Each antler, hide, and bone was fought over. My mother’s greatest victory was excommunicating our dad’s sheep and goat mounts from the living room. Over the years, after my brothers and I left home, she reclaimed her house. Only one dead animal memento remains—a stuffed ten-inch golden trout I caught with a worm when I was a small kid.

Back then, my friends all seemed to have Nintendos, and when I visited them and played Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Street Fighter, it felt like heaven. It was even more fun than looking through the stack of Playboys one of my friends’ dads left out. Who cares about girls or being in the outdoors when you can make an Italian dwarf do flips onto a psychedelic mushroom? When I tried to convey my passion for video games and begged for a Nintendo of my own, my folks were oddly quiet. Screaming, throwing fits, and running away for a few hours didn’t do much good either. Finally they had enough.