Drifting on the subtly rippled surface of the lake, I toss out a slug on the end of my line and take out my notebook to write.

I have just returned from eating an irresponsible quantity of raspberries.

Again.

I thought I had found a reliable metric: When they stop tasting good, stop eating them. My body sends me a gradual but clear signal– Stop, I’m sated. But some primordial urge keeps me plucking berries so ripe they look bruised, trembling pendulously from their drooping vines.

I hear Fridolin and Andrea calling to each other, trying to find their canoes on the peninsula. Fridolin sings a shamanic chant from his heart, echoing through the bog and across the water.

I haven’t intended this as a serious fishing trip. I’m borrowing someone’s slugs and it’s more a way to multitask. But bass are breaching all around me, and I spy a fat worm in the slug pile.

I’m not considered a squeamish person. I’ve dealt with any number of open wounds on humans, dogs, and horses, and I started giving my mom injections of multiple sclerosis medication when I was nine. I still squirm in empathy with the half worm I’ve cut with my thumbnail as I push the hook through his body, imagining an echo of a barbed iron spike being driven through my ribcage and belly.

No sooner do I toss him overboard into a bed of rushes off the tip of the peninsula than the chip of red pine bark I’ve wound the line around bobs under, and I haul in a lovely medium-sized bass. She flops for her life as I carefully hold the rest of my line out of the way to keep it from getting tangled. Wrapping my hand around her supple, armored body behind the gills, I silently thank her for her life, and acknowledge the pain of the death blow I’m about to deliver.

I’m always sad when I kill. I don’t try to stop the sadness. I embrace it, accept it. It feels right. I am ending a life in one manifestation so that it can continue in another– the life of my people, literally, as the bass’ flesh becomes our flesh; psycho-emotionally, as we honor our relationship with the bass by celebrating their wonder and hunting them respectfully with regard to their needs as a species; and spiritually, as the spirit of Bass becomes the spirit of Human. Human blood becomes mosquito’s flesh becomes dragonfly becomes bass.

The Hoop of Life, the food chain, it’s all the same thing.