There are fish stories... and then there are fishing stories. In this stellar first collection by Alaskan-born Melinda Moustakis we get a little of both. The linked stories of Bear Down, Bear North (winner of the 2010 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction) follow the lives of three generations of homesteaders in the raw and rugged landscape of Alaska.
Whether she is describing what seems like a preposterous tale of a teenage girl mushing a dogsled through a blizzard in search of a lost Malamute or a brother and sister landing a 60-pound chrome salmon on the Kenai River or still more siblings rescuing a frozen eaglet trapped in the stinking muck under the hole of an outhouse, Moustakis crafts memorable characters with the raunchy dialogue of those who must grow up fast in the wilderness--"bear down"--or slink off to "the lower 48 in places like Nashville and Omaha."
Moustakis's stories are rich in local lore--the hospital lobby holds a dressmaker's manikin pierced by dangling fishing lures in the body locations where they were removed from patients; where the "Mathew brothers, called Doormat and Hazmat,... backtroll for kings... tossing back a few beers, waiting for the big one to hit"; and where, down at Good Time Charlie's, the regulars "all have stories full of funny accidents and slips and remember-whens and they laugh about it all, but their hands tell a darker truth."
That darkness comes long in Alaska: "It's, as Jack says, F***ing February, when everyone goes crazy and shoots themselves in the head." --Bruce Jacobs