The Trap (2 page)

The old man trudged through the deep snow until he was almost under the dead rabbit swinging stiffly in the breeze. He looked at it closely. Its white fur was ragged and full of holes where camprobbers—small, intelligent light-gray birds of the north, had pecked at it. Perhaps a raven may have been at it as well. It was hard to tell the difference. The old man cut the string tied to the rabbit's hind leg with his single-blade pocketknife and tossed the carcass far away. He would set fresh bait above the trap, a long piece of moose meat laced with brown hair and sinew. But first he would clear the area beneath the tree and check to see if the trap was still set.

The old man always placed his traps directly under the bait, so he was careful not to stand too close to where the trap lay beneath the soft new snow.

He studied the snow. It wasn't all that deep. The great boughs of the tree protected the base so that only a portion of snow had filtered down to the ground beneath. The snow was not even up to his knees, while out on the field a dozen yards away it was almost waist-deep. He wouldn't need the shovel. Instead, standing close to the tree with one hand firmly set against its trunk, he kicked away the snow using the flat side of his boot and leg, the way an ice fisherman clears snow above the lid of a frozen lake. Before long, he had cleared away much of the snow, except for the area directly under where the frozen bait had hung.

It wasn't really hard work, but he grew tired quickly and stopped to catch his breath. He was hot from the labor and unzipped his parka until the metal teeth let go of each other and the parka swung open like a tent door. Albert stood beneath the tree for a few minutes until his heart slowed down and he felt cool.

He was almost eighty. The years had been catching up with him, not slowly like the ticking second hands of his old wind-up wristwatch, but in great leaps like spawning salmon jumping waterfalls.

When he was ready, he turned back to the task of removing snow with his boots. Again, he placed one hand on the tree to steady himself and kicked until he could see the frozen moss and grass underneath the snow. He was working his way out from the base of the tree when it happened. There was a soft click as the teeth of steel closed on his leg. The foot or so of snow covering the trap may have slowed its speed. The snow must have muffled the sound too, because he didn't recall hearing it when it clamped down on his leg. This was a sensation he had never felt before. He had always wondered about a moment like this. A moment he had assigned to the suffering of others but never to himself. The steel of his own trap now gripped his right leg—but not as quickly or as sharply as he would have imagined. In fact, it didn't really hurt all that much. It was more a tightness, like when the doctor who flew into his village took his blood pressure. The way his arm felt when the doctor pumped up the black band.

For the first time in his life, Albert understood what an animal must feel, what every animal he had ever trapped must have felt.

The old man raised his foot to see with his eye what he saw in his mind. When he did, the chain pulled itself out of the snow and drew a straight line from the man to the tree trunk only a few feet away. With his foot off the ground, he could see how the steel teeth had closed only an inch or so above the knob of his ankle. There was no blood. The sharp teeth had penetrated the thin brown leather of his boot but not the thick lining or his wool socks that kept his feet warm even to thirty or forty below.

With the low sun so near light's last breaking, skimming on the bulging edge of the world, Albert Least-Weasel put his foot down and laughed. His situation wasn't really a funny thing, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been, more irritating than dangerous. He would simply remove the trap, reset it, and be on his way home, where by late evening he would sit beside a crackling woodstove with his wife, sipping hot black tea and eating moose-nose soup with hardtack for his supper.

From the far side of the wide field came the soft hoot of an owl.

 

 

A long time ago, all the men in a small village along the sea wanted to be warriors. Each morning they ran down to the sea and jumped into the freezing water. They stayed in the water until they almost froze to death, thereby proving their strength. Afterward, they beat one another with branches to learn endurance of pain and to toughen their skin. They all wrestled and boasted of their strength. Then they took turns trying to pull a great tree from the ground. Try as they might, none could tear the tree from its roots.

A
YOUNG MAN
quickly closed the cabin door and leaned against it with all his weight to make sure that it was shut tight. He was around seventeen, tall and lean, with long black hair hanging halfway to his waist. It was warm inside the small log house, and he didn't want the warm air with its smell of wood smoke to escape. When he was sure that he had secured the door, he took off his parka, fur hat, and gloves and laid everything on a wooden crate full of split wood sitting near the rattling black woodstove. He could tell from listening that the stove was burning too hot and too fast, so he turned the threaded damper a few turns until, nearly starved for air, the fire settled down and fell upon itself. Soon, the split birch logs whispered only to each other, the way they were supposed to, once the heavy iron door was closed.

Johnny Least-Weasel had helped his grandfather to fell the trees upriver in the summer, to cut them into six-foot lengths, which they left to dry along the banks until the river froze. When the ice was thick enough, they hauled the logs home on long handmade sleds pulled behind snowmobiles. All of the homes in the village were heated by firewood. Oil cost too much to ship this far north. Besides, the great land had always provided for their needs.

An old woman was sitting on a couch, sewing slow stitches into a moccasin, one of a pair made of tanned moose leather. It was brown and trimmed with beaver, and she was sewing onto its top a floral pattern made of very small red and white and green beads. She had not made the pattern, because the beadwork was far too delicate and intricate for her hands now. Besides, she could not see so closely any longer. The old woman had traded dried salmon strips for the patterns, and now the moccasins would be presents for her children and their children. It was something they all came to expect at Christmas—handmade moccasins and thick wool socks ordered from the Sears catalog. Both would be either two sizes too large or two sizes too small, but they kept them nonetheless because they loved the old woman.

“Johnny,” she said without looking up from her work, “did you get the water like I asked?”

“Yes, Grandma,” the young man said while lifting the lid to a large pot on the propane cooking stove.

The soup was boiling too high, so he turned it down as he had done to the fire. The soup stopped rolling, and he stirred it with a long metal spoon.

“What are we having, Grandma?” he asked without turning.

“Caribou soup. I put an onion and some carrots and potatoes in it. It should be done.” She was still sewing the colorful pattern onto the soft tongue of the moccasin.

The young man stood by the fire for a minute and then went outside to the snowmobile and pulled two blue five-gallon plastic jugs from a metal sled. With one in each hand, each weighing some forty pounds, he carried them into the cabin and set them on the kitchen floor. Then he placed one on top of the counter, and the other he set in the corner to the left of the stove on which the hot pot of simmering soup sat.

“Thank you, Johnny,” the old woman said as she set her needlework aside and got up to check the soup and take bowls and spoons from the cupboard. She moved slowly, the way people who have lived for a very long time always move, as if every muscle was stiff and ached. She had long gray hair, though in fact it was more silver than gray.

Johnny Least-Weasel helped his grandmother. He always had. That was his father's way and the way his grandfather had taught his father. That was the way of his people, of all Indian people. Here, the old were respected for many reasons, not just because they knew about the old ways. They were respected as much for having survived in a world so hostile that the phrase in their language for greeting someone meant “So, you're still alive.”

“Respect the elders,” they had always said. “Help them out.”

When he caught a great many salmon in his fish trap, Johnny always gave the biggest and best fish to the elders who no longer fished or hunted for themselves. And when he was lucky and shot a moose or caribou, he offered them whichever parts they wanted. They always asked for the liver and the heart. When he shot a moose, they asked for the nose to make moose-nose soup.

They also made soup from king-salmon heads. After cutting the head off just before the gills, they slit the head longways, from the nose holes straight back, so that the head lies in two perfect wedges. While exposed, the two halves of the brain, small as grains of sand, are clearly visible.

There is a story that, in the beginning, salmon could not swim down to the river bottom because they had air in their heads that made them float back to the surface, where they were easy prey for eagles and bears. The chief of the Salmon People complained to Raven, who opened their heads and put two small rocks inside so that they could sink to the safety of the depths. Since that time, all salmon can swim deep, and when you cut their heads in half, you can still see the two tiny rocks Raven put there.

Back when the old woman was young, Indians would wait one day after catching salmon before they would cut them up so that the salmon's spirits could have time to leave their bodies. Nowadays, when Indians caught salmon, they didn't wait so long, but they still tossed the skeletons back into the river so that the spirits could return to that place where all Salmon People live. In this northland, the connection to nature was not yet fully broken.

Recently the old woman had become more and more forgetful, less aware, increasingly dependent on the familiarity of the small tilted cabin. During the previous fall, she had asked her grandson to take her berry picking. On the way, Johnny had seen a herd of caribou swimming across a small lake—their antlered heads just above the waterline. He crept down to the edge, hiding behind a stand of willow. There were four of them coming directly at him, and they would soon stand on the shore. Kneeling, he raised his rifle, aimed at the closest animal, and waited. Just as he was about to pull the trigger, his grandmother walked up beside him, standing where the surprised caribou could see her clearly.

“What are you doing, Johnny?” she asked.

Seeing her, the small herd turned and swam away toward the far side of the lake, and quickly vanished into the forest.

The old woman shuffled around the kitchen while her grandson set the table. He tossed the empty and half-empty cans of soda into the garbage and wiped the tabletop in tight circles with a rag. Before they sat down, he turned the old black-and-white television set so that they could see it from the table while they ate.

The house boasted a main room, which included a kitchen area, a dining table with only two chairs that did not match, and a little additional space for sitting. Two kerosene lamps lit the space in a soft, warm light. A door at the back led to the tiny bedroom. There was no bathroom. No one in the village had a real bathroom. Instead, they had outhouses and honey pots for when the need came late at night, when it was too dark or too cold to go outside.

Framed pictures and a stretched black bearskin rug hung on the wall, and a cross hung above the couch. The wood floor was bare and rubbed smooth in places. The entire cabin was slightly tilted from settling. Every year, the permafrost heaved and shifted the house up or down, this way or that way. But it was a comfortable house. Not a particularly good house, but it had stood in this place for more than fifty years, and it was always warm inside, and the smell of coffee always greeted visitors at the door.

The young man could tell that the woodstove was barely breathing, so he opened the damper a tiny bit, just enough until he could hear the fire catch again, the flames coming back from their hiding place deep inside the logs. The Indian knew the secret of wood. He knew that all trees held fire deep in their hearts, somewhere near the core. Great Raven had put it there in the time of long ago to give Indians warmth. And any single tree had only so much heat to give. That was the law of things. Let it burn too quickly and it would be gone quickly. The trick was to bring out the flames slowly, at just the right height, so that the heat could last for hours. In this country, where fire means life, it took skill and years of experience with wood and the ax to bring out the flames and to make them last through the long nights of winter.

Warmth was so precious in the far north that men went to great lengths to trap it. All log cabins, even the very-best-made ones, suffered from crevices and cracks where the hewn logs did not fit perfectly. Into such spaces people pushed moss to keep heat from escaping. They called this chinking. It took hours to heat up even a small log cabin, but once done, once the logs themselves had absorbed the warmth throughout their entire length, to the core, they would stay warm for half a day after the fire had died and embers had turned to ash.

Without fire, no one would survive January or February, when it is so cold that nothing moves. When even the propane that feeds the lights and the cooking stove wants to remain motionless, waiting until the sun warms the metal skin of the tank.

Outside the cabin, all along an entire wall, ran a stack of firewood as tall as the old woman and two sticks deep, except for a gap in the first several yards of the line. The wood had already been hauled inside, tossed into its crate, and later fed to the hungry woodstove that never slept and always rattled while it was burning. Although it never went outside, the stove knew that the wood was there, waiting.

Johnny and his grandmother talked very little while they ate. Now and then, the gas lights flickered and a piece of firewood in the stove popped.