The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (46 page)

 

The next day we had three beaver in our traps. Not bad for one night's sets. We checked the traps all that morning, napped, and then spent the evening skinning. Or, rather, Dan showed me how to do it on one beaver, and I spent the rest of the night working on the other two (since they were caught in sets I had made). As with any kind of hunting or trapping, the killing is the easy part; skinning and butchering are where the work is. Beaver have incredibly thick hides, which, when rough-skinned (taken off the body but not cleaned), are thick with fat, especially around the tail, that I can only describe as blubber.

I learned quickly to rough-skin a beaver in ten minutes or less. Fine-skinning, or fleshing, is much harder and more important—leave too much fat on, and the hide won't dry right; slice or put holes in the hide, and that lowers its value. There are many methods for fleshing. Dan pinches the hide between his thumb and middle finger, and using his index finger to provide tension, he takes long, smooth strokes with his knife; the fat peels away smoothly and cleanly. It took me hundreds of hours of practice to approximate his skill.

As I struggle to separate the fat from the skin using a fillet knife, Dan, smoking a Player's Light and drinking Diet Pepsi, tells me that all the furs are taken to the fur buyer, graded, and bought, and then the fur buyer takes them to a fur auction where lots of furs are bid on, purchased, and then sewn or made into something. Since the British have stopped wearing funny-looking beaver hats, I'm not sure who's buying them. Dan says the biggest buyers are the Greeks, Russians, and Chinese.

It was uncomfortable, to a degree, to see the beavers undergo the transformation from beautiful animal to a skin worth
x
dollars. Hunting is, to many people, more palatable, I suppose. Eating an animal you killed seems more just. On the other hand, maybe it only seems that way. It is largely a myth that Indian people were somehow natural conservationists who used all the parts of the animal. We were as wasteful as every other people living on the move without electricity or refrigeration: we ate what we could, dried what we could, and left the rest for the wolves. And trading an animal's life for the resources that you need is not, as far as Dan is concerned, a bad trade. His response is that if our ancestors had had the same ethical concerns, we wouldn't be here today. (By comparison, my father—of European stock—had no use for trapping. But the “old ways” of doing things were one of the things my father admired, perhaps romanticized, about the Indians he befriended when he moved to Leech Lake in the 1950s.)

Dan was clearly less worried about it than I was. And why should he be worried? Why, just by virtue of being American Indian, should he live out ideals (about the sanctity of life, about the equality of animals) that have largely been foisted on him by James Fenimore Cooper and Rousseau and every other conscientious outsider? Dan is an Indian who loves to trap, who loves the animals he traps, enjoys the process of handling them, and who, at the end of all that, loves to golf and needs new clubs.

After the hides are fleshed, they are nailed onto boards on which a series of concentric ovals have been drawn. The size of the beaver determines which oval you use. Stretching beaver is its own art. Too loose and you cheat yourself of profits because the beaver dries to a smaller size than it might have. Too tight and the number of hairs per inch is reduced, your furs are graded down, and you lose money. We leave the beaver carcasses on the ice for the eagles and the wolves—there's not a trace left come morning. The fat and muscle skinned off the hides are chopped into baseball-sized chunks as bait for marten and fisher (a sort of cross between a marten and a weasel but much larger).

New Year's passes, and we listen to the country countdown on the radio, play cribbage, skin and stretch beaver. Every day is blessedly the same. There are no other people. Nothing moves. Occasionally we hear a plane far overhead or a snowmobile in the distance. I hear wolves at night. We have caught sixteen beaver and a few marten by the first week of the new year.

And then Dan says, “Think you can handle this on your own now? I've got to bring our furs back to the reservation, and then I have to go to work. I showed you how to do it beginning to end. No problem, right?” He leaves the next day, and I will be, for the next two weeks, on my own. Since he is taking the snowmobile with him, I will also be on foot.

 

The days blended into one another. I left the cabin after first light carrying a shotgun, an ax, a pack with lunch, and coffee. I was finally getting the romance I thought I wanted. Our line of traps was 17 kilometers long, and I walked it every day. I checked and reset the traps, skinned the beaver on the ice and put the hides in my pack, caught the occasional rabbit in a snare, shot the occasional partridge. I would return to the cabin after crossing a wide bay of Rainy Lake and sleep for a few hours before fleshing and stretching. After that I read, wrote, and went to bed. I bathed by heating up water and pouring it into a five-gallon plastic bucket. I saw a lot of trees. I saw a lot of snow. I caught a lot of beaver, and I skinned a lot of them. I read and reread
Confessions of Felix Krull
, and when I ran out of cigarettes I began ripping out pages from the back to roll tobacco and read the
Playboy
s instead. I read Tim O'Brien and T. C. Boyle and marveled at the odds of two of my favorite stories—“On the Rainy River” and “King Bee”—existing in this trapping cabin far from any other kind of print. I began to dislike airbrushing for the same reason that long ago I really liked airbrushing.

During the nights I listened to the ice booming on the lake. During the day, when I went to fetch water from the hole in the lake, I began to see how subtle changes in temperature and wind affected the thickness of the ice. I heard a lot of wind and came to like the difference between wind through spruce, wind through balsam, wind through bare poplar, wind through red oak, wind through marsh grass, and wind through dead cattails. I saw what wind and sun did to old moose tracks and deer tracks and squirrel tracks and rabbit tracks and fisher tracks and marten tracks and fox tracks. I once crossed a pond to check my traps, and when I crossed back ten minutes later, seven sets of timber wolf tracks had crossed over mine. I learned that, despite everything, I wasn't very comfortable with the idea that there were so many timber wolves so close to me. At night, when I fleshed and stretched the hides, I listened to country music. I memorized “Strawberry Wine” by Deana Carter, “Is That a Tear” by Tracy Lawrence, and “Little Bitty” by Alan Jackson. I liked “Little Bitty” least of all, but I found myself singing it more often than any other.

I learned I liked quite a bit the mediciney smell of beaver fat. I learned that each and every animal I killed and then skinned was more or less perfect. I learned that each and every animal had been designed to live a certain way and had acted according to that design. I learned that walking upward of 17 kilometers a day, chopping through inches of ice, cutting firewood, and hauling water on a diet of pork chops and oatmeal gets you in very good shape. And then, one day, I learned that steel was a pretty amazing thing and that without it very little of the bounty around me would be mine.

I had been chopping through the ice to check one of my beaver sets. Each night a couple of inches of ice formed over the hole, and so every morning I had to remove that ice. It was soon mounded all around the hole, and the hole itself was like a funnel. I had finished chopping and had scooped out the ice and slush and placed the ax behind me, and before I knew it the ax slid down the funnel and disappeared into the water. It was the only ax I had, and without it I wouldn't be able to check any of the other traps. Without it I couldn't split any wood for the stove, and dry wood was scarce near the cabin. Without the ax, I would have little to do and our fur count would plateau and I would be reduced to eating out of cans. In a flash, I came to appreciate my tribe's age-old hunger for metal and later plastic. One of the great criticisms of my tribe's behavior in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was our so-called dependence on trade goods. But try living without metal knives, or axes, or even a pot to cook in.

I knew I had to do something about the ax, and there was only one thing to do: I stripped down, set my clothes on the ice, and lowered myself into the hole. The water was 34 degrees, and it hurt everywhere at once. The good news was that the water wasn't any deeper than my armpits. The bad news was that I had only a few seconds during which I'd have feeling in my toes. I found the handle with my left foot, took a breath, ducked under the surface of the water, grabbed it, and got out as quickly as I could. It took me an hour of fast walking to get warm again.

Dan came back after two weeks and brought with him more coffee, more cigarettes, more food, and the feeling that instead of romance I had gotten intimacy. With him, to be sure. But also with the animals under the knife and the place itself. After a while I had to try very hard to locate the danger and excitement that writers like Morgan and many others attach to the bloody business of professional trapping. For Dan, growing up on the trapline and then returning to it after high school had been the most peaceful times of his life. Indian boarding school, life in the mainstream, these had been bloody and hard. Trapping, by comparison, was guided by rhythms and activities that were, in themselves, small, finite, measurable, and, paradoxically, eternal—a quiet, steady kind of work that was reminiscent of a life outside of time. For me, after a while the thrill of trapping gave way to a deeper satisfaction much harder to name and much more profound than romance and danger.

This became the rhythm of the rest of the winter: two weeks alone, Dan for an extended weekend, repeat. It was part of the most profound years of my life, at the end of which there were many things I could do that few others could, and many things I could do that I never imagined I could. And none of what I had learned really mattered in the larger world. I was pleased to discover that trapping rewards a mind that is organized, creative, and neurotically interested in details. Which is to say: trapping is an activity made for a mind just like mine. I became a trapper.

 

For the next five years, I spent a few weeks every year trapping with Dan and a month or two trapping on my own back home on the Leech Lake Reservation. In 2002, after having trapped beaver, mink, marten, fisher, and otter, my brother Micah and I decided to expand our trapping techniques to include more snaring. We hoped to snare a fox. We talked to as many trappers as possible, read books, went to trapping forums online, and after buying and treating (boiling, dying, and waxing) our snares, we were ready to begin.

We hung our first snares at the beginning of the holidays in December. It was warm and there wasn't much snow and we didn't know what we were doing. We set our snares too high or too low; we set them on rises and humps so they were too clearly silhouetted on the trails. We set a snare in an area that we thought was a fox run and came back the next day to find a porcupine caught by the neck and foreleg. He squirmed in a kind of slow agony. We used natural funnels—places where the game trails narrowed to squeeze through dense brush or swamps or between deadfalls—but we didn't trust the snares themselves and blocked up the trail with sticks and branches so that the fox would have nowhere to go but into our snares. It must not have looked right to them: no fox came near our sets. We did almost everything wrong. Every morning we got up, excited at the prospect of fox after fox dead in our snares. Day after day our snares hung empty. Christmas came. It went.

On the twenty-sixth of December our mother called all of us over to her house—her partner, Ron; my siblings; and our spouses. She had news, she said: she hadn't been feeling well for some time. She had been coughing a lot. Her ribs on her right side hurt her constantly. She was tired and had lost a lot of weight. She'd gone to the doctor, and they had taken X-rays and made scans and had detected a large lump, a tumor, in the lower lobe of her right lung. The tumor had grown so large as to push past and envelop her ribs. These had become brittle and had, at some point, broken—the source of the pain. They had taken a sample to be biopsied and she would, she said, know more soon. She had been a steady smoker for over forty years. It was, in all likelihood, lung cancer.

I can't remember how we reacted. Some cried, I'm sure. Some didn't. Some started strategizing—as though the cancer were an enemy we could fight. I think this was probably my response. It would be a week before we got the results of the biopsy. In the meantime we carried on. We got groceries. We went to the bank. We watched movies. We argued. We did everything we could. We did nothing at all.

When Micah and I went to check our snares, I noticed that the fox we had been trying to snare had begun using the ruts my truck tires left in the fields of big bluestem we crossed. So, on a whim, we cut down a small jack pine, dragged it close to the tire tracks, and wired a snare to it.

On New Year's Eve my mother gathered us together again and told us that she had lung cancer. The doctors planned to operate within the week. I don't remember much of that time. I don't remember living in any conscious way—that is, making decisions or acting purposefully—but I must have. I do remember thinking a lot about snaring.

Snares are elegant tools—there is something beautiful about a snare, whereas there is little that is beautiful about a metal trap. Metal traps, no matter what kind, are nasty, brutish things. A snare is so simple: a piece of wire formed into a loop. One end is anchored to the ground or to a drag stick; the other ends in a lock through which the wire passes. When an animal walks through a snare, the lock slides down the wire and the snare tightens around the animal's neck. The animal struggles, and the snare gets tighter and tighter, until the animal can no longer breathe and it dies. With a piece of wire and not much more than that, a man can survive for a long time.