The Trap (6 page)

After that, Albert learned to respect the animals he trapped. He also worked and saved enough money to buy his own rifle. He remembered the day he bought it, how shiny and smooth the cold steel was. It was the possession that inspired the most pride in him, signaling that he was becoming a man. He still owned it, the blue-black metal worn shiny in places, nicks and scratches in the wood stock from years of handling.

The old man slept comfortably for an hour or two before something awakened him. It was the sound of wolves. There were two of them standing by his sled. They were tearing off chunks of the moose, growling and fighting for bits and pieces that fell on the snow. Though they had smelled the meat for a mile, they did not know the man was so close. Sitting as still as he was, quietly sleeping against the tree, they had not seen him.

The man stood up and yelled, waving his arms and shouting. At his first motions, they jumped, surprised, then turned and ran away, each carrying a bit of moose meat as they loped across the wide field and into the trees beyond.

For several minutes after they had vanished into the trees and hills, the old man's heart still pounded, not from the labor of standing and shouting, but from fear. If the wolves had attacked him, he would have had no means of defending himself. Chained to the tree as he was, he could not have escaped. It was ironic, he thought, that he had set this very trap to catch a wolf, and now here he was, caught in its steel jaws, and it was the wolves who came to see what the trap caught today.

But they might come back. Normally, wolves would not attack a man. But it had been an especially hard winter, too long-lived and harsh, and there had been few caribou or moose. The wolves had passed the miserably cold and dark days chasing field mice and catching an occasional rabbit to fill their tight bellies.

The old man set his mind on escaping. With renewed strength from his peaceful rest, Least-Weasel took the chain in his hands again, pressed his one foot solidly against the trunk just below the bolt, and pulled with all his muscles. He could feel the sharpness of the effort up through his arms, to his shoulders, and around to his back. He held his breath and then repeatedly yanked so hard on the chain that the jolting of the force felt as if someone were beating him on the back and shoulders with an ax handle. But he ignored the pain and pulled and yanked until he was too tired to try again.

Yet the bolt did not move. It was too far into the frozen tree.

He knelt down on one knee as he had done before and tried to press with his gloved hands on the two sides of the trap to open it. Tired as he was from pulling on the chain, nothing moved.

Convinced that he would not escape, he decided to make a weapon to defend himself should the wolves return, drawn in by the scent of fresh meat on the sled. The old man shuffled around the base of the tree, carefully studying those limbs he could reach. Eventually, he found one that was suitable. It was long and straight and just big enough in girth for his first two fingertips to graze his thumb when he wrapped his hand around it. It took him a while to break the branch from the tree, but eventually it snapped loudly and crashed down onto the snow. The old man broke off its smaller branches, which he saved for the fire. Then he held up the straight pole to better measure its length. It was too long, and the tip end was too small around, so he stepped on the pole a few feet from the end and lifted on the other side. Again, the limb snapped, and the short piece fell away.

He threw the tip end onto the fire. It was the biggest piece of wood it had been fed all day.

Least-Weasel held up the stick once more. Now it was about as long as he was tall, but it had a good heft and the tip was still pretty thick. He sat down on his pile of green boughs and sharpened the tip with his broken-bladed knife. When he was done, he held the end over the fire just high enough so that it did not catch and burn. He did this for a while and every now and then he'd feel the end, whittle a bit more, and hold it once again over the flames. When he was satisfied that his work was done and that the tip was hardened properly, he leaned the spear against the tree.

Now he would not be completely defenseless if the wolves returned.

An hour later, as he sat thinking about his situation, it dawned on the old man that he could use the spear to pull the shovel toward him. He stood up, spear in hand, and looked around for the place where the shovel had fallen into the snow. The wind had shaken snow loose from the highest boughs and deposited it all about the base of the tree. Everything looked the same. It was impossible to tell exactly where the shovel lay, so he began poking and prodding the area where he thought it had been, but in his old age, he couldn't remember things too well.

It was his mind, more than anything, that had gotten him into this dangerous situation in the first place. Things weren't clear anymore. Sometimes he couldn't recall what he had done that very morning or what he had eaten for breakfast or lunch. This lack of clarity had crept upon him slowly at first, like a lynx stalking a grouse or rabbit, but in these last years, it had caught up with him and clouded his mind and his judgment. He wouldn't have stepped into his own trap if he had been thinking clearly.

After a while, not having struck the blade of the shovel with the spear, he gave up and sat down again against the tree.

Far, far off in the distance, up higher than any bird ever dreamed of flying, where the air is thin and cold, a jumbo jet was passing overhead. From the great height, even the wide river in the valley below must look as small as the shrew's meandering trail. Least-Weasel watched its white vapor trail for a long time, wondering what the people on board would think of him, so far below, out in the whiteness alone, caught in a trap he had set, chained to a tree, waiting for wolves.

He was tired and it was getting late.

While there was still light, the old man collected more wood from the back of the tree. He broke up smaller pieces over his knee and bigger pieces by standing them up against the tree trunk and kicking them until they snapped. He took these pieces and piled them near the fire to outlast the darkness. The temperature had been dropping all day, and now it was around twenty below. The old man would need the wood during the long night for warmth, for reassuring companionship, as a rescue signal, and to ward off wolves.

 

 

One day, a terrible hunting accident happened. The men had been hunting sea lions when a large bull killed the chief. After his potlatch and funeral, the villagers decided to avenge the great chief's death. All the men trained hard. One night, after standing in the sea and beating himself with branches, Blackskin returned to the village, and by the light of the moon, he lifted the great tree right out of the ground! Then, so that no one would know what he had done, he carefully placed it back into the earth.

I
T WAS COLD IN THE TINY CABIN
when Johnny Least-Weasel awoke in the morning. He had stoked the stove's belly before he went to sleep, but sometime during the night the fire had gone out, and the glowing bed of red embers had turned cool and gray.

He pulled back the heavy blankets. The top was a quilt his grandmother had made for him when he moved into the small cabin close to his uncle's house. The bottom two were cheap blankets given to him at a potlatch when his great-aunt died. In the old times, the tribe had such ceremonies to celebrate life. Nowadays, they only held them when someone died. The dancers used to drink a special cold tea made from a plant called Labrador tea. They had a name for the brew in their language back then, but few elders remember it. Now, after many hours of dancing so hard that the balls of dancers' feet hurt, Pepsi and Coca-Cola were brought out. The last dance used to be in honor of the dancers and the drummers for their hard work. They used to sing one last song as the tea was brought out. Today, they still have such a last song, but it is called the “Soda Pop Song.”

Some tribal leaders even tried to pitch an idea to one of the beverage companies for a television commercial. They thought it would sell sodas if a commercial showed a bunch of Indians in traditional regalia dancing to the music of old Indian men drumming and singing in their native language, their feet pounding the floor like thunder. They say that if your feet don't hurt after dancing, you aren't doing it right.

At the end, the camera would focus on a young, good-looking Indian who would hold up a soda can, and the superimposed words
Pepsi—The Official Soft Drink of the Potlatch
would come up on the screen in big letters.

The company never returned the phone calls.

“It's still a good idea,” the young man thought, smiling to himself while pulling his pants on both legs at once.

He looked at the thermometer on the wall, the kind that shows both inside and outside temperatures. The cabin was around fifty degrees, which is pretty cold for a house in the morning. It was perhaps five to ten degrees colder at floor level because it was so poorly insulated.

The outside temperature was close to twenty below zero.

Johnny looked out the small front window and wondered about his grandfather.

“He should be home today,” he thought.

It was not that he thought his grandfather was weak. Just the opposite. His grandfather was the toughest man he had ever known. Johnny remembered when he had gone moose hunting with him two years before. He had been around fifteen, and his grandfather was in his midseventies, maybe older. They had taken a green flat-bottom boat way upriver and then followed a winding slough back about eight or nine miles. His grandfather knew of a large, partially shallow beaver pond where he had shot many moose over a lifetime of hunting. They camped on a small rise for two days, shot grouse and the occasional duck, and caught fish. One evening, at the edge of dusk, two bull moose stepped out into the weedy pond and began to feed.

Johnny was alone at the time, hiking along the pond's edge in hopes that something would be drawn to the water before it got too dark to see. His grandfather was resting back at camp after an early supper of fish cooked in tinfoil over a campfire.

When Johnny saw the two young bulls emerge from the scraggly forest of spruce and willows, he crouched low to make himself small and crept into the woods, unseen by the moose. When he was certain the moose could not see or hear him, he ran up the trail to camp to tell his grandfather. They gathered what gear they'd need in a pack and tromped back to the edge of the pond. The two moose were still there, standing belly-deep with their long heads submerged, searching for food. They were both spike forks, too young to grow the large palmated antlers of a mature bull.

Two beautiful white tundra swans had come in from the north and landed on the far end of the pond near the beaver dam. It was a beautiful scene—the distant rolling hills, gold and orange with a light dusting of snow on top, the dark blue sky, and the perfect reflection of the swans upon the calm water. A beaver was sitting on the edge of the lake beside his lodge, eating something. It was one of Johnny's favorite memories.

Most people think beavers eat only vegetation, tender branches. But in his lifetime, Johnny had seen beavers eat the heads of salmon lying on riverbanks or on sandbars after the fish had spawned and died in the fall. From a long ways away he had heard their sharp front teeth crunching into the hard fish skulls. Perhaps, he had thought, it was their way of getting calcium or protein. Perhaps they just liked the taste.

His grandfather told him to shoot the closest moose, which fell on the first shot. The other moose raised its dripping head out of the water, swiveled about its long erect ears, and then, seeing nothing, went back to its meal of pond weeds.

“Shoot that one, too,” his grandfather said. “They're small. It takes two this size to make a big one. Shoot!”

After he had shot them both, Johnny and his grandfather waded across the soggy pond, sometimes up to their chests in the freezing, late-fall water, and each took a moose and dragged it back to shore. It was hard work. Though young, each animal easily weighed six or seven hundred pounds. A full-grown bull could weigh up to fifteen hundred pounds. Even more. Some parts of the pond were shallow, only a foot or so deep, and they had to work hard to drag the dead moose over the pond's bottom until they floated again in deeper water.

Once ashore, out of the icy water, they gutted both bulls, dragged the piles away from the work area, and then propped the ribcages open with stout sticks. It was late by then, too dangerous to be working with knives in the dark, so they went back to the camp, built a great fire to dry out their soaked, beaver pond–smelling clothes, and returned the next morning to finish the work after a warm breakfast of oatmeal, hardtack, and steaming hot coffee.

When they were done, each carried loads of almost a hundred pounds of moose strapped to a packboard all the way back to the boat, about a mile below the hill overlooking the pond. On the first trip, Johnny tripped and fell. The pack was so heavy that he could not get up. When his grandfather came back for him, he reached down with one hand and lifted him, pack and all, right off the ground. It took them several trips to haul out all the meat and their camp supplies.

On the way back it rained in great rolling sheets, pouring down from heavy clouds the color of wet gray aluminum, sliding over the earth like a shadow, and within half an hour the silty river itself began to rise.

Johnny could still remember sitting in the middle of the high-sided green boat, facing backward and huddled under a tarp while his grandfather stood at the back of the boat, his hand on the outboard's tiller, with nothing to protect him from the wind and rain. He could still see the cold rainwater flowing down the old man's face, off his nose, and the way he had to squint to see through the rain to read the river's rapid and always-changing channels.

From year to year, the great river was never the same. It's as if such rivers age, grow new lines and wrinkles, sloughs that dead-end, narrow meandering channels half-covered by trees leaning from the steep, fresh-cut banks where their roots will one day give, tossing the tilted trees into the water to be piled up in dangerous logjams downriver.