by Deborah Blum
Perhaps because I had never been trapping, I was sure that every word Morgan, a gentleman ethnologist and fan of the beaver, wrote was true; at least I wanted them to be true. I wanted the special knowledge that all trappers seem to possess. I wanted their forearms and their expertise with a knife. I wanted to be a part of that brotherhood of whom it was said in bars, and around kitchen tables, and over the open tailgates of dented pickups, “Oh, him? He’s a real bushman. No one knows the bush like he does.”
I drove to Dan’s reserve in northwestern Ontario after Christmas in 1996. The name of the reserve in English is somewhat odd: Redgut Bay (named after a former chief of the band). The Ojibwe name is much longer: Nigigoonsimini-kaaning (The Place of Abundant Little Otter Berries). I have never been able to find a “little otter berry,” nor have I found someone who has found one, so part of me wonders if “little otter berry” is a way of saying “otter shit.” Which just goes to show that if you scratch the surface of romance you’ll find slapstick, and if you scrape off the slapstick you might find wonder, because after all, places (like animals) don’t always give up their secrets.
All of this—romance, slapstick, wonder—were mingled in Dan. About five foot eight and more than two hundred pounds, Dan looks the way a traditional Ojibwe man should look: stocky, strong, black hair, dark skin. He’s also—and I’ve tested this—pretty close to imperturbable. Once, when we were checking traps together on a beaver house, the ice broke underneath him and he fell into the freezing water. All he said after he got out was “oops.” He is indifferent as far as money is concerned. I’ve never known a stronger paddler. When you see him filleting fish or skinning animals, you think to yourself that he was born with a knife in his hands, yet when he sleeps he needs no less than three pillows to be comfortable. His jokes are terrible. He thinks it great sport to tease people in uncomfortable ways in public. He remains one of my very best friends and always will.
Dan mostly traps for two animals—beaver and pine marten (like a Canadian sable)—although he grew up trapping and snaring just about anything that moved. His mother once held the world record for beaver skinning. He was raised on the trapline, moving from the village out to the line in the winter, back to the village in the summer, to rice camp in the fall, and back to the trapline. His first memory is of lying in a rabbit-skin sleeping bag, watching the jagged outline of spruce against the sky.
We drove to the supermarket and loaded up on what Dan referred to as “trapping food”—cigarettes, bacon, eggs, butter, bread, Chips Ahoy!, Diet Pepsi, canned potatoes, oatmeal, and pork chops. His wife drove us out of town on a double-track path through stands of jack pine and over frozen creeks. We followed it for 12 miles and stopped. We offloaded the snowmobile, attached the sled, and filled it with food and clothes, then drove off the road toward Moose Bay—a clear, clean fingerlet of water stretching to the northernmost arm of Rainy Lake. An hour later we arrived at the cabin on a small bay surrounded by balsam and poplar.
Rainy Lake is in the Canadian Shield. There is water everywhere—pond after pond, river after river, lake after lake. According to geologists, the water is still learning where to go, channels and streams hardly set. This land of old rock and new water forms the base of the boreal forest—the largest unbroken forest in the world—and is the world’s largest terrestrial biome. The land is studded with pine, fir, and spruce. In summer, it is almost impassable; in winter, if you step off your trail, 100 yards might as well be a mile through the deep snow.
There might be something about the Great Plains—the openness, the sense of scale—that is good for stories and epic struggles. Not so the boreal forest. Horizons are hard to come by. The sky is a fractured thing. There are precious few vistas. Instead you are enclosed, hemmed in, covered over. It is a good place for secrets and secret knowledge, for conspiracies and hauntings.
The cabin was less beautiful than the country around it and, as regulated by law, rather small—ours was 16 feet by 20 feet. Only trappers who buy the trapping rights to an area are allowed to build one. This one hadn’t seen a human being since the previous year. If what happens on the trapline stays on the trapline, then it’s equally true that what goes into the cabin stays in the cabin. Old cupboards were shoved in the corner between two nonworking gas ranges. A table, three beds (one a stowaway bed like you find in hotels), clothes, a wood stove, a box of beaver traps, and three or four bags of garbage completed the cabin. Under one of the beds I found a stack of Playboy and Penthouse magazines; a centerfold was tacked to the door. The whole place was overrun by mice. That night we cut firewood, got the cabin thawed out—it was minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit—cooked some pork chops, and chopped a hole in the lake to get water. Then I learned the first thing about trapping: how to play cribbage.
Trapping beavers is largely a matter of finding where they live. Before ice-up, either by walking along the shore or by canoe, the trapper will locate the beaver house, beaver dams, food stash, and channels (worn paths near convenient food sources) and place drowning sets at these areas using either 220 Conibears or 330 Conibears. This trap was invented about fifty years ago by Frank Ralph Conibear, an Anglo-Canadian trapper. It was a revolution in traps and trapping, making it much more certain and productive. Conibears, or body-grip traps, are two steel squares attached to one another by a hinge. Steel springs keep the jaws open. To set the trap, the springs are compressed and the steel squares of the trap are held together by a catch from which dangles a trigger. If a beaver swims through and touches the trigger, the catch moves up, and the springs, under tension, slam the steel squares open across the beaver’s chest, neck, or head. Death is quick. Until the advent of body-grip traps, trappers relied on wire snares or, more often, leg-hold traps set in channels and at the entrances to a beaver lodge. These would close on the beaver’s foot and drown it, or, often enough, the beaver would lose a leg in the trap.
Before steel or iron, trapping was another matter entirely. To trap beaver without the use of steel meant tearing open beaver houses to catch the beaver in its den, which is a hollow chamber above the waterline, or isolating the channels and runs under the ice. One would break open the house and wait at each and every channel for the beaver to surface, then kill it—with arrows, guns, or clubs—when it emerged. This was time-consuming and brutally hard work, and it took a lot of bodies—two people tearing up the house and four or five waiting at the channels.
But Dan and I had everything we needed, and we relied on steel body-grip traps exclusively. We would be trapping the entrances to the beaver houses on the string of ponds that, like terraces, are stacked one on top of the other all the way from the big lake deep into the woods, almost to where we were dropped off. We stopped at the first beaver house. Dan showed me how to tell if the house is occupied or “dead”: look for a cone of crystallized vapor on top of the house that looks like a nipple or wick. This is a sure sign that the house is live; the beavers’ warm breath travels through the frozen slurry of mud and crisscross of sticks on top of the house. When it meets the subzero air, it freezes, creating the nipple. In the first pond, one house was live and the other dead. Once we located the live house, we got off the snowmobile, and with Dan in the lead, we tapped around the house with the point of the chisel. The ice is usually thinner over the entrances, worn by the passing in and out of the beavers’ bodies. The chisel broke through, we cleared the ice and sticks away, and using a long bent pole, found the beaver run. We set our traps. Then on to the next, and the next, and the next. We put thirteen traps in the water that first day.
Perhaps this is the strangest thing about modern trapping among the Ojibwe: it is an age-old cultural practice, as ingrained, as natural, as everything else about our culture. The snare, the trap, the trail, the lure, the catch—these are the metaphors by which we make our meanings. Yet it has been many hundreds of years since we have even so much as worn a fur, except as decoration or for ceremonial purposes. As soon as we could, we traded pelts for guns, axes, kettles
, wire, and cloth. Furs are fine, I guess (I have, for sentimental reasons, a beaver-skin cap and moose-hide gloves). But cloth—wool especially, but also cotton—lasts longer, is easier to clean, can be sewn into many more things, and holds up longer. I only know of one Indian who wears furs—Jim LaFriniere of White Earth Reservation has a muskrat-hide jacket. I don’t think he wears it because he’s Indian; I think he wears it because he is, at White Earth, a BIG MAN. Modern synthetics are even better than trade cloth. There is nothing quite like chopping a hole in the ice with an ax and getting covered in dirty slush, only to have it bead and then freeze on my Gore-Tex parka. As for gloves, moose skin gets slick fast when the water freezes, and the ax goes flying out of your hands. But waterproof gloves with rubberized palms—they make all the difference. All the furs we catch—with a few held back for ceremonial use—will go on the market. In 1996 beaver were fetching, as I remember, between thirty-five and fifty Canadian dollars per hide. Occasionally we ate the meat. Mostly we ate pork chops.
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 Playboys 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.