by Pete Fromm
My grandmothers, the ladies, would have been picked up and driven to our home, and the table would be laden with all that food. Everyone would be telling stories, cutting each other off, listening, anxious to get their chance to speak. The thermostat would be twisted up high for the ladies. I sat alone in my tent, wearing my usual union suit and wool pants and two wool shirts, sewing a piece of sheepskin into a mukluk.
Suddenly I knew I had to keep up the tradition, even if just for myself. I threw the mukluk aside and started into the trees, for the first time actually needing to find a grouse, needing to have its golden roasted breast as the centerpiece of my feast.
I went up the south side of Indian Creek, where the trees and brush were thick, giving good cover to ruffed grouse. I hiked a long way without finding anything. During a breather I turned, seeing my tent far below me, snuggled into the juncture of the Selway and Indian Creek, the neatly stacked wood like a fortress wall beside it, a small twist of smoke still curling from the stove pipe. The big river threw off splinters of sun, and as I looked up I saw the clouds racing by low, splitting around the peaks and ridges that closed off the river. I turned to Boone and said, “That’s my home, Boone.” I couldn’t believe how perfect it looked, and I wished there was some way to tell stories about it right now to the gathering in Milwaukee.
It wasn’t until the return hike, getting desperate now for a grouse, that I crossed tracks—perfectly formed bird footprints in the soft snow. I glanced up from the trail just in time to see the grouse at the end of his tracks, looking over his shoulder at me, trying to keep a tree between us. I lifted my rifle and had him, but with the brush between us I hesitated and suddenly he flushed, breaking wildly through the branches, arcing downhill, where I caught quick, short flashes of his flight through the trees.
I swore, angry at not having taken the shot when I had the chance, too anxious to have this grouse for dinner tonight. I couldn’t believe I’d screwed it up even after having the luck to find one. I searched for nearly an hour, finally getting him sneaking along a branch. Another head shot. I gutted him and plucked him as I walked, but I was already beginning to realize that this poor old bird was not going to take me to Milwaukee tonight.
I prepared the grouse as best I could, adding carrots and onions and potatoes, but I had the stove too hot and the bird came out pretty dry. Cooking on such short notice, I didn’t have the time to make any bread, or coffee cake, or rice pudding—newly discovered recipes I’d already begun to savor as the spice of special occasions.
I thought again of my family, and everyone else’s, all sitting down to well-planned get-togethers, and I wound up leaving my dry little dinner and walking around in the silent trees until long after it was fully dark. After that it was comforting just to get back to my tent and light the lantern. To be able to see again.
7
To recover from the low I’d made for myself over the holiday I threw myself into trapping. Gathering all my traps, I set them everywhere. I had no idea how to do it, or even many thoughts on what it was I was actually doing. I saw marten sign all over, and set traps for them. I learned fairly quickly that the marten tracks were really squirrel tracks. In the next few days I caught a squirrel in one of those traps and it was frozen solid by the time I found it. I didn’t feel very good about that, and I pulled the rest of the marten sets. I told myself that I’d reset them once I knew where the marten were, but if I’d been forced to, I would have admitted that I couldn’t really justify killing something that way—not just for money.
In another set I caught a snowshoe hare and it wasn’t frozen solid. It was very much alive, bleating in terror at my approach. I never knew rabbits could make any sound, let alone one as chilling as that.
I killed the hare as quickly as I could, and I ate it that night. It was delicious, a welcome change from my diet of rice or potatoes with the occasional squirrels or grouse thrown in, but it was getting hard to keep up the excitement for any of the trapping.
I still left most of my traps out though, unable to face the loss of another major occupier of time. I left out all the coyote traps. They didn’t hurt anything. Coyotes are smart and I never came close to catching one. Now and then I’d see their tracks approach my bait, wander cautiously around and then leave. I hadn’t done everything right about smell.
I also left the traps around the channel. I could tell by tracks that something was getting into the channel at night, eating my salmon. My boss, the warden, had told me to have at whatever messed with the fish, even to the point of blasting the ouzels that would walk the bottom of the channel, picking off whatever they could. I liked watching the little slate-gray birds bobbing nervously at the stream edges, their eyes flashing white as they blinked with every dip. Occasionally I’d see them walking along the bottom, strolling as casually as if they had not yet realized they were under water.
I never looked at one through rifle sights.
But unseen things that moved at night were different from screaming hares or small dipping birds. I could not watch the night animals, could never even see them. Without the snow giving them away, I would not have even known they were there. Curiosity played no small part in my willingness to set traps for them. And once the traps were out, every morning held an anticipation it hadn’t had before, a wondering what would be out there, what would I find, not unlike what Christmas morning had been as a kid. Maybe something would be in one of the traps, maybe today I’d find what else lurked out here, what shared the river with me.
On the first day of December I went, like every other morning, to chop the ice out of the channel and check the traps. After clearing the ice I leaped the headgate, Boone now clearing it easily behind me, and I began to check the traps on the island, which appeared to be a thoroughfare for most of the tracks that led to the channel.
The first trap was empty, same as always, but when I turned the corner at the next set, there was a raccoon straining at the end of the trap chain, his right rear foot in the trap. He lay down when he saw me, the chain stretched taut in the opposite direction. A circle, the radius of the chain length, was cleared through the snow around the trap anchor, down to bare earth.
The raccoon did not bleat like the hare had. It did not give up either. Through the long hair I could see every muscle tight, steadily straining in one last try to pull free. When I moved he glanced back at me, as if wondering what was going to happen now, his eyes bright in the dull black stripe masking his face.
I was wondering the same thing. I saw again the churned up ring of dirt and needles, saw what it told about the raccoon’s last hours, and I wanted to end everything as quickly as I could. Passages from my how-to books flashed through my mind, advice from hardened old trappers about pelt value and preparation and animal habits. Furbearers were only shot as a last resort. Clubbing was messy. The preferred method of dispatch, when possible, was stepping on the animal’s torso, pushing from back to front, folding the rib cage, crushing the lungs and heart between the sternum and spine. CPR worked on the same principle, only differing in degree of force. I’d read that paragraph twice, fascinated by the simple mechanics of it, the ease with which something so brutally effective could be spelled out.
But, with this raccoon pulling at the chain and staring at me, my thoughts had nothing of this kind of cool order. I jumped forward, my heavy boot pinning the raccoon to the circle of earth he’d cleared, and I shifted my weight. Even through the rubber sole and felt liner of my boot I could feel the ribs collapse, accordion-like, following the downward lean of all mammal ribs. The raccoon’s eyes bulged slightly, in surprise perhaps. I turned my face away, studying the fork in a twisted little cottonwood. Through there was no struggle beneath my foot I stood there a long time. Each morning, when I wondered what I would find in the traps, I’d managed not to actually picture what a success would mean.
When I stepped off of the raccoon I watched for a trace of movement, some slight sign of struggle for breath, but there was no
thing like that, nothing at all. As Boone moved in for a sniff I noticed the raccoon’s toes, only held in the trap by the last knuckle or so. He’d almost gotten away.
I stepped on the trap’s spring, opening the jaws and releasing the foot. I took off my mitten and felt the bones. None were broken. I sat in the cleared circle and pulled the raccoon into my lap, surprised by how heavy he was. I petted his fur smooth, erasing the mark of my boot.
This was my first real success trapping. I’d caught a furbearer. I was trying to be a mountain man but instead I touched the circle of frozen dirt in the snow and pictured the raccoon running around and around and around.
He had been decimating the fish, I reminded myself. But I still had not seen one of those salmon and, for crying out loud, there were two and a half million of them. They were meant to take losses. And I could see this raccoon, and I could touch him and I could picture what had happened to him. His hands were shaped a lot like mine.
I pulled most of my traps after that.
I spent the rest of that day carefully skinning the raccoon and pouring over my Foxfire books, comparing recipes for raccoon and studying the techniques for tanning the skin. For the next few days I worked on the hide, scraping away fat and flesh, soaking it in an alum solution. I’d decided I was going to make a coonskin cap.
But the skin had to soak for days, and that wouldn’t occupy me much. I walked outside and sat on a stump, scratching at Boone’s ears, again wondering what I would do all winter. It hadn’t been snowing much recently and I began to wonder if I could still drive to Magruder, the summer ranger station.
Eventually I crawled into the cab of the truck. The wardens had said I should pull the battery when the snow grounded it for the winter. The snow was pretty close to that deep, but suddenly I wanted to chance a final trip. I hadn’t driven for quite a while, and I decided to let the truck make the decision for me. I pumped the gas and turned the key. The engine fired and caught hold and began to idle. I was on my way to Magruder.
The old ranger station, which had walls of wood, not canvas, also had a propane stove, and a propane water heater, and a bathtub. With the stove’s slow steady heat I could make a huge batch of baked beans, something I couldn’t do with my wood stove, which was made for heating, not cooking. Baked beans was the only recipe I had for beans, though I had a fifty-pound sack of them.
As the truck warmed up I scurried through my tent, packing beans, onions, and everything else I thought I might need, excited again to have a project.
When I started the drive everything seemed all right. Sometimes, looking in the mirror, I could see that the muffler or something like that was cutting its own rut in snow, but I drove slowly, knowing I had all the time in the world, and that I didn’t need to worry about meeting anyone coming the other way.
Somehow the snow got deeper the farther I went. Five or six miles away from my tent I was plowing snow with the front bumper and, even chugging along in first gear, the truck would occasionally begin to decide its own course, the tires riding a drift instead of crushing through to road. I’d let off the gas then, once forgetting to depress the clutch, stalling the truck in nothing flat. I sat behind the wheel, breathing hard, covered instantly in sticky, stupid sweat, wondering what the wardens would think when they snowmobiled past the dead, half-buried truck on their first mail run.
I would have turned around if I could have seen the edge of the road. But the snow pillowed everything, blurring what were once sharp lines, and though I could imagine the wardens squeezing to one side of the road to snowmobile past the buried truck, I didn’t want to picture them standing at the side of the road, off their snowmobiles, staring down into the river at their old green pickup, the black water of the Selway lapping all around it.
So I plowed on, never exceeding five, or at the most ten, miles an hour, the whole time wishing I’d never left, hoping the snow would hold off so I could get back with the truck, while at the same time wishing it would snow monumentally, burying deeply my foolish tracks. Boone sat quietly, tall enough now to look out the window at the snow and the river.
When I finally reached Magruder I remembered the hill. I knew I’d never make it up that, so I stopped the truck above the ranger station and slid down the slope, glad to feel my feet under me again. I unlocked the door and opened the water lines, a procedure the wardens had gone over with me. I stoked the wood furnace and started making a quadruple batch of baked beans. Once the propane had heated the water tank I started my bath, getting into the cold iron tub and running the water around me, so I could get used to it as it filled, keeping the water as hot as I could stand.
Then I lay back, eyes closed. It was my first bath in weeks, and the last one I could imagine having for months.
I relaxed as much as possible, but I couldn’t shut out the return ride. I’d half planned on spending the night, but now I crawled out of the tub and drained all the water lines, let the fire die out in the furnace, and when the beans were done I shut off the propane and shuffled back through the snow to the truck. I couldn’t risk a night storm closing the road for good. I had to get out of here.
The pot of beans snuggled into the snow filling the bed of the truck and Boone hopping into the cab, spraying snow everywhere. I started up the engine and lurched out, not knowing when I’d see Magruder again.
The ride home was easier, letting the truck follow its own ruts. Before I reached the tent it began to snow again, big, heavy flakes, and I was glad I’d returned when I could. Back at Indian Creek I pulled the battery from the truck and stuck it into the corner of my tent. I was on foot from now on.
Sitting in my gloomy tent that night, I couldn’t put my trip out of my mind. I’d pulled it off, but I knew it had been a mistake, an enormous risk to take for a pot of baked beans and a bath. If I’d had a moment of bad luck the truck would have sat all winter, like the old man’s at Paradise, a solid reminder of a moment of fear, of a day I’d inched close to the panic of having nothing to do, inched so close I’d driven my truck into the Selway for a pot of beans.
But at the same time I realized the advantage of isolation. No one would ever know about it. The snow was an ally now, burying every sign of whatever I might do. I could understand and forgive my own foolish decisions. It was the fear of having other people scrutinize my actions that I could not bear—people who only visited this place and could not understand what it was like to stay here.
I turned out the lantern and climbed into my flimsy bed in the dark, the layers of blankets and sleeping bags a reassuring weight over me. I thought of isolation, but I drifted off simply listening to the voices of the river moving along its rocky path, sometimes almost discerning words, or long stretches of distant classical music, like I’d heard as a kid in bed, the symphonies my father listened to coming straight through the walls.
It did not snow much that night, not as much as I would’ve guessed, not nearly enough to cover my tracks, and the next morning the outfitter from Paradise and one of his guides, Brian, pulled up to my tent on their snowmobiles. They were the first snowmobiles I’d ever seen in action, and I was stunned by their loudness.
They shut off their machines—I would quickly learn they were not called mobiles, but machines—and the outfitter, a crusty, taciturn man in his fifties, asked if I’d just driven to Magruder. The tracks led right to my truck, and I wondered who else he might think would be driving around back here. I laughed a little, feeling the blood coming into my cheeks, and I said, “Yes.”
“Musta been a ride,” he said.
I agreed and he asked, “You about done driving?”
I said I was and he said, “Good. Your tracks screw up the road. Hard to keep the machines from sliding into them.”
My blood was full into my cheeks by then. They said something about pulling out some stuff from Paradise that they’d forgotten before, but I barely heard them. I’d never guessed I’d messed up the road. They roared off then, saying again that they’d be back in
January for the lion season.
For the first time since I’d moved in I regretted that my isolation wasn’t complete. Maybe I was always going to have to look over my shoulder, never sure who might pop over the pass, who might catch me doing something stupid, something only a greenhorn would pull.
On their way out they stopped for another second. The outfitter wanted to buy a six-point elk rack I’d found and carried back to my tent. The antlers were still attached to the skull and he said he could use it. I didn’t know what for; I’d just thought it was neat. He said he’d give me fifty bucks for it and I said fine, hoping it would atone for the damage I’d done to the road.
The two of them stood quiet as ever, while the outfitter pulled out his checkbook. He said something about not having expected to need any money this trip. He passed the checkbook to his guide and had him write out the check for him, then the outfitter signed it.
They were back on the snow machines, roaring away, the elk skull lashed to their trailer, before I realized that the outfitter didn’t know how to write.
8
Once the outfitters were gone, not to return until January, I knew I had some time to myself. The wardens were scheduled to appear with my mail in ten days, on the thirteenth. During those ten days I continued to hunt, but the trapping was already over. That big time-killer had lasted nearly two weeks.
And hunting had already become little more than carrying a rifle while I walked in the hills, filling out the days. I still knocked off the occasional grouse—ruffeds down low, blues up high—and snowshoe hares now and then, but my staple continued to be the little red tree squirrels. I needed three, at the very least two, to make any sort of meal, and it was slow eating, picking through the little bones, but they really were pretty good. Like eating a chicken about an eighth normal size. Small bones. I had plenty of time to pick through them.