Northern Lights: A Scorched Earth Novel

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Northern Lights: A Scorched Earth Novel Page 15

by Boyd Craven III


  Then I just took handfuls and slowly let it tumble from my fingers. I’d been snapped before, and it hurts. I didn’t want my friends to see that happen to me, so I took my time. When that was done, I used a stick flat against the ground to sort of smooth things over a little bit without putting pressure near the trigger. Lastly was leaves and the shiny round piece of metal.

  “That’s pretty slick. Does it work for more than small animals?” Brian asked when I was done.

  “That works for pretty much all animals,” I told him. “I didn’t do a lot of fur trapping as a kid, but I’ve read about it— “

  “In a book, or watched a YouTube video,” they all chorused and I grinned.

  “Yeah,” I admitted, turning red.

  Apparently I’d used that line a bit, but it was true. Sometimes there was no way a person could have hands-on knowledge of everything. That’s the beauty of books and reading about things. I knew they were more picking on me more than disparaging my methods, so I just gave them a grin and showed them where the next traps were.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon doing that and, after the third set, Denise suggested I let everyone take a turn setting off and resetting the traps. She had better insight than I did and I totally should have done that from the outset. The last trap was triggered and dirt was everywhere, but there was no animal.

  “What happened here?” Jordan asked, but it was his woman who answered.

  Tonya had blossomed from a shy woman into a very outgoing one. She could follow spoken conversation by lip reading and she quit being shy and started using her own voice to communicate with us when it was the whole group. Instead, she saw something and walked over to the tree the anchor cable was strapped to.

  She laid her hand out, showing everyone the deep scratch marks on the bark and turned to me and placed her hand on the scarred side of my face. I shivered. A bear had set off the trap. It probably triggered it with one massive paw and tried to push the tree over before it just pulled the trap off. I knelt down and found some black hairs on the forest floor about three feet away and held a small tuft of it up, showing everyone.

  “It’s that last bear,” Brian said.

  “Let’s go,” Tonya said suddenly, startling everyone.

  I decided right then and there that I wasn’t going to be scared off.

  “No, let’s set up another trap,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me funny but they all took several steps back, probably scared I was going to do something stupid. I took off my daypack and pulled out one of the large cable snares I’d made up in the cabin. The loop on it was pretty large, the cable pretty stiff. I figured out my height and attached it to the heavier cable at the base of the tree where the rabbit was, and then pulled a roll of cotton string out of my pocket.

  It was something I always carried. It was more like yarn than mason’s line, but I’d always used the green filament for this sort of thing. I lightly tied the open end of the loop with a box knot and then stretched the line over to another tree. Next, I made the loop the size I wanted again, and tied a piece of string with the same kind of knot near the cam locks on the snare and tied the other end higher up on the tree. Now the loop was anchored to the tree near the base of it, and the loop was open into the game trail at the height I thought the bear was going to be when walking on all fours. Now, for bait…

  “The string won’t cause the snare to hang up?” Jordan asked.

  “With something as heavy as the bear, it’s used to pushing through brush. It’ll break that string easily. With rabbit snares, I use something lighter, sometimes long stalks of dried grass.” I told them, “But we’ve got to bait this one.”

  “With what?” Denise asked.

  “Part of your sister’s rabbit,” I told them.

  They looked at me surprised, but I shrugged. It was something I’d done countless times. I tied a heavier line of paracord around a tree branch, at a little over eye level height, with a bow knot, then I tied it to one leg of the rabbit, behind the foot joint. Next I made a slit around both feet and sliced straight down the leg towards the stomach area. I joined them with a Y and made a shallow cut down to the neck.

  Tonya was watching me especially closely. She hadn’t done it before and I offered her the knife and she nodded. She’d seen me do it, but I’m not a great teacher. I should have been teaching them some of the stuff instead of just showing them. She made a scissor motion to the rabbit’s front paws and I nodded, finding the joint and showing her. She nodded and worked, separating the foot from the leg. Then she did the other side and made similar cuts to the back legs, connecting them to the slit just below the neck. Then she cut out the tail and the rear end and started pulling.

  She’d seen me do this and it surprised me to see she already had a handle on it since it wasn’t something I’d ever seen her do. The skin separated as she pulled, and the hide separated from around the legs with some heavy pulling. Not all of the guts fell out when she did that, but it opened the cavity. She stopped pulling when the hide was down by the head.

  “Now cut it there,” I told her pointing to the neck.

  She hadn’t been squeamish about the warm wet inside of the hide thus far, but her face looked mildly disgusted as she used my belt knife to sever the head. It came off with the pelt. I took the hide and draped it over a tree limb and pointed for her to go on. She handed me back the knife and reached in and pulled out the entrails. I stopped her, showing her the heart and liver, which we kept in a plastic bag.

  I thought I was going to be grossing everyone out, but I heard somebody’s stomach gurgle behind me. I turned to see if I was going to get puked on, but when I looked, everyone was just watching, waiting. She finished gutting the rabbit and handed me the knife. I separated the head from the hide and kicked all the guts and head into a pile in front of the snare.

  “And bears eat that?” Jordan asked me, not a trace of disgust on his face.

  “I don’t know, honestly. I think they eat anything and everything. This time of year, they have to be almost ready to hibernate, right?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I kind of thought that they had moved on. After the kid killed momma bear, we only saw the one other bear.”

  “Maybe something happened to them?” I asked.

  “Maybe a dominant male came in and ran out all the others,” Denise said.

  That made my blood run cold. I didn’t know how big a range bears had, but being close to a lake was probably well within their daily travels for water and easy food. Also the berries. I hadn’t noticed any more bears when I set the traps up, but who said I had to be on their schedule to see them? Maybe they started out earlier or later than me. Maybe a giant male bear had been watching me from the gloom of some felled tree, waiting for me to not notice so it could creep up and….

  I jumped as Denise poked me. I put my knife in my sheath and bent down to wipe off the blood on my fingers with the leaves and dirt of the soil.

  “You were thinking something creepy, weren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yeah, that I was going to be a chicken nugget if a big bear happened to walk by.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you,” Tonya said, drying her hands in the dirt the same way I just had.

  “Question,” Tracy asked, “won’t you be leaving your scent behind when you do that?”

  “Yeah, yeah I will. I don’t think the animals up here have much human interaction. They probably figure we’re just some hairless bipeds who live near a tiny spot at the lake. We’re really not hunting them and the traps might smell like us for a time, though. I don’t think those rabbit guts have a chance to go to waste, though. Those three bears were opportunists.”

  Boy was I right.

  16

  We found when we returned to the cabin that both smokers had been ransacked. We couldn’t tell which food had been half eaten, and what had fallen into the dirt. The plastic melted up into a charred mess, and we had to reset the stakes and make new su
pports. Our smokers weren’t bear proof and while we had been out trapping, the bear had waltzed in and helped itself to a ton of food, ruining our setup in the process.

  We rebuilt them, using the last of the plastic and a piece of canvas we found in the old trapper’s cabin. I think it was part of a shelter half, but I’d never taken the time to figure it out. A few days later, we were going full steam again, but we agreed that somebody was going to stay at the cabin at all times in the future, and at least shout or rattle pots and pans from inside the window to try to scare them off.

  When our wood pile was almost 7’ tall, 15’ wide across the back of the cabin and almost seven feet deep, we quit splitting wood. Instead, we started dragging chunks close to the cabin, where we could find them easily in the snow. The days were becoming very short, and the nights were long. The first morning that we woke up to a skim of ice on the water had me suddenly worried I’d waited too long to do the tanning. I gathered up all the furs and rinsed them out on the dock. Normally they’d be salted, but we didn’t have salt when we first started out. We’d found a couple bags of salt at the trapping cabin, though, coarse salt, but a lot of it.

  I used a printed out set of instructions in my binder from Mother Earth News to start the process. I didn’t have baking soda, but I had baking powder. Without Google, I didn’t know if that’d be a good idea or not, but I did it anyways. I mixed the salt into a boiling pot of water until it was dissolved. The recipe called for pickling or Kosher salt, that’s fine salt, and I needed the solution more than the fine texture so I dissolved it. I used one of the old steel drums we’d brought back from the last trip and I put everything in to soak.

  Denise had joined me and was smiling.

  “Looking forward to your bearskin coat?” she asked.

  “No, I’d like a bearskin rug, in front of a roaring fire, a glass of wine and— “

  “Don’t go all crazy, little ears,” Tonya interrupted, “it’s my sister.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her and she returned the gesture.

  “How do you know when it’s done?” Denise asked me.

  “We’ll have to experiment, I’ve never done this before. I’m winging it a lot here,” I told her.

  “It looks like it’ll be good for an overcoat material,” she said smiling.

  “I hope so.”

  “So now what?” Jordan asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “We’re almost ready for the winter time. Should we start filling the inside with logs for the fire? Leave them outside…? We’ve got enough fish and meat jerky to last us a bit… What else can we do?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him honestly, “run the trap lines, I guess, and try to stay healthy. One day we’re going to try to open the door and it’s probably going to have snow piled up. We’ll have a lot of downtime.”

  “This has almost been like a dream,” Denise said, running her hand down my arm.

  “It has been. I just wish that radio would have worked.” I told her.

  I had no way of knowing if the battery was just too far gone, or whether the radio had been fried by the EMP. Still, I was having second thoughts about not knowing.

  “Me too,” they both said.

  “You know, we ought to do something fun for once,” I told them.

  “For once?” Denise asked me, an eyebrow arched, “I don’t know, I think we’ve had some fun,” she said with a grin.

  “No, I mean… We kinda missed out on a lot this year. Halloween was last month and it’s got to be closer to thanksgiving than not. We should do a holiday party of some kind.”

  “You, my friend, are loco,” Brian said coming up, “but I like it.”

  “Hey, I found a tree where turkeys have been roosting,” Tracy told me.

  “What?” My head whipped around so hard it cracked.

  “Mashed potatoes and gravy, a deep fried turkey, sweet potato pie, rolls and stuffing and…” Denise was going on and on so I stopped her words by pulling her close and clamping my hand over her mouth.

  “Where is it?” I asked her.

  “Not far from the first snare set.”

  “Why didn’t we hear them?” I wondered aloud.

  “You know what they sound like?” Brian asked me.

  “I’ve never hunted turkeys,” I admitted. “But I know what a tom is supposed to sound like.”

  “A tom is supposed to sound like a tom,” Denise said in a mock voice like mine.

  I was still holding her close so I tickled her ribs, which had become more pronounced, and she twisted and writhed.

  “I know where you sleep,” she hissed more than once.

  “That sounds good then,” I told them. “We’ll go figure out how to find a turkey and get it baked. That is as long as Tracy agrees— “

  “Not to cook it?” she asked, her expression immediately going pouty one hand cocked on her hip.

  “No, help out with cooking it. Your mother had the best turkey ever. Remember? The year we had it at her house?”

  “Is that a compliment?” she asked, her eyebrows almost touching her hairline.

  “No.” Brian whispered into her ear, “That’s him setting you up to get even for throwing him off the boat this summer.”

  “Oh yeah, hey, I forgot about that,” I said, grinning broadly.

  “You can sleep in the outhouse tonight,” she said, pointing at Brian who was cracking up.

  “Ok, so let’s go find these turkeys.”

  That wasn’t meant to be funny, but Brian laughed even louder and soon everyone else but me was rolling.

  * * *

  I wouldn’t let everyone come as a large group to re-con the tree. It would have been too much noise and too much motion and scent. What I knew about turkey hunting, of course, came from reading, but also from talking to my father. He’d always told me that whenever he was hunting deer and didn’t have a tag, turkeys would walk up. When he was turkey hunting, he’d have deer come up and sniff him. As soon as you have that magical license to kill, they knew it somehow.

  I did not, in fact, have a license to kill, so I hoped I’d have one eating out of my hand as I clubbed it and threw it in a baking pot. That didn’t happen.

  “Over there,” she said.

  I followed her hand and saw the tree. Its branches were at least twenty feet off the ground.

  “I was looking for a spot close to the cabin for Brian and me to have some alone time. It was almost dark and I saw them flying up into the tree. Their wings made such a loud noise I’m surprised that it didn’t scare everything out of the woods. It’s startled me, that’s for sure.”

  “So that’s where they go to sleep?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, I checked it out again last night. I don’t know when they fly down, but it looks like they’re digging through the leaves here for something.”

  She was right; the leaf litter was dug up. We walked over and I saw some short, bushier looking trees. It was hard to tell what it was without the leaves, but it wasn’t something I recognized. I kicked some leaf litter out of the way and found four tan colored nuts.

  “Is that a walnut?” Tracy asked me as I knelt and picked them up.

  “No, walnuts have that green shell around them. Also, they put off something in the soil that prevents other things from growing around them. These bushy trees are all around here.”

  Here was a small opening in the trees. It was caused by the taller tree that the turkeys had been roosting in, but smaller brush had been growing nearby and under it.

  “Beechnut!” Tracy said snapping her fingers.

  “No, I don’t think they are that.”

  I used my knife to clean off the outside edge. Was this the nut, or the outer shell? Was it poisonous?

  I used the base of one of the shorter trees to be on one side and I pressed my blade into the shell of the nut, cutting it in half. I smelled it and although it had a familiar scent, I couldn’t place it.

  “What do yo
u think?” I asked, holding a half out to Tracy.

  “I think you’re too scared to try it. It’s not poison.”

  “How would you know?” I asked her.

  “The turkeys are eating them, dummy. Maybe that’s why they are so close?” she said.

  She had a point.

  “We’ll both take a bite.”

  “Together,” she said, “On three.”

  “Fine. One, two, three,” I said and bit into the kernel within the half shell, expecting the worst.

  “Hazelnut!” Tracy said, pumping her fist up in the air, and pushed the whole thing into her mouth.

  “Wow,” I said following suit.

  She was right. Now I had to figure out if I wanted to gather nuts that had fallen sometime in the fall, or hunt turkeys.

  “Want to get everybody else?” she asked.

  “You just want us to figure out how to make a Nutella for you.”

  “You better believe it,” she said, and started walking out of the trail.

  I turned and looked at the tree and the spots beneath it that had been scratched bare. Winter was coming and we desperately needed something, anything, to bridge the gap. The nuts would provide an essential fat and oil that we’d probably been missing, so after the hunt, we’d all come and gather them if there were any left.

  17

  We’d found out that week by trial and error that roasting the nuts gave them a better flavor and made them easier to crack. The bottom two shelves of the smokers we usually reserved for slow cooking meat, but they were full of the filberts, or hazelnuts when the smoker was in use. Tracy had been correct, the birds had moved into the area to collect their bounty. She’d also suggested we watch the rest of the wildlife and see what they were doing.

  She’d found several hickory and walnut trees by watching the squirrels. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it, but to be honest, I was ready for some variety in our diet. When I mentioned that aloud Denise had gone to my binder and pulled out a section on wild foraging. The first frost hadn’t killed everything off, but it had started to come close. She was going to go foraging for greens and onions with her sister. I wanted to go, but there was something they wanted to talk about and I, of course, assumed it was about Jordan and me.

 

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