The Trap

by John Smelcer

  Johnny looked at his uncle and spoke softly. “He’ll be all right. He’s been doing it all his life.”

  Peter drained his glass before replying.

  “Maybe he has, but he’s getting too old for it now. He has no business out there anymore.”

  “He’ll be okay. He’ll be home tomorrow,” Johnny said, his voice lacking conviction.

  His uncle held out out his empty glass and rattled it again. The obedient nephew took it.

  “Remember what happened last winter?” Peter Johns lit a cigarette. “Your old man got up one night and walked out of his cabin. Just plain walked out. Didn’t even take his coat or hat. Nothing. Just walked out in the middle of the night, and we didn’t find him until the next morning, three or four miles downriver, talking about going to the sea.”

  One of the other men sitting at the table joined in the discussion, “That’s right. That old man needs help. You shouldn’t let him go anywhere by himself.”

  “It’s what makes him happy, I guess,” Johnny’s uncle said, looking out the window at the thermometer nailed to a spruce tree, then saying nothing again for a long time.

  Johnny finished mixing the weak drink and handed it to his uncle.

  “He’ll be okay,” he said, finding his coat where he left it. “I just know it.”

  That said, the young man pulled his arms through his heavy parka, zipped it closed, and with his hat and gloves in hand, walked out into the night, where he could see more stars than before. He walked away from the light and noise of the cabin and stood on the trail for a long time, listening to the wind and the soft hoot of a far-off owl, watching stars, and thinking about his grandfather. Light from the moon bathed the world so brightly that the space between trees was sharp and clear in the silvery night.

  It was getting colder. Johnny pulled the fur-lined hood of his parka over his head and walked toward his own cabin with the sound of snow crunching beneath his boots.

  “He should be back tomorrow,” he thought, as a star raced across the sky just below the North Star.

  “He should be back tomorrow for sure.”

  THE SECOND DAY

  When it was close, the big bear charged the old man, who had only a walking stick, so he jumped up and down and yelled at the bear, telling it to go away. He shouted these things in his language, which the bear understood because back then bears understood Indians. That bear didn’t know what to think, so he just stopped and sat down and shook his great shaggy head.

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG NIGHT, and the old man had slept little. Because he fed the fire only thin pieces of wood, the flames never lasted for long. He awoke every hour, added kindling to the shallow bed of faint glowing embers, and gently blew on the base until the fire jumped out of the twigs and eerily shone on the boughs hanging from the great tree just above him. After a while, though, the blaze dropped from the fire and the sphere of light grew smaller until the branches above disappeared.

  Sleeping with one leg chained complicated his attempts to rest, and finding a position that was comfortable for more than a few minutes was impossible.

  As it did everywhere in the world so close to the Arctic Circle, the sun hugged the trembling horizon as it eventually arose in the east and the short winter day began.

  Albert Least-Weasel sat against the tree trunk while he woke up. Too far away, the snowmobile still waited as it had waited all through the darkness, taunting him with its sled of meat and its pack full of the things he needed. This morning, he wanted coffee. Lots of it. Hot and black. He wanted a roaring fire and a pot of coffee sitting on the edge of the fire, boiling away, cheerfully singing its happy little song of percolation.

  He remembered the jerky in his pocket, so he took it out from inside his parka. It was as long and thick as his middle finger. Maybe a little bigger. He bit off small pieces and chewed them slowly while thinking about what he must do.

  After eating, the old man stood up and stretched. His body ached from the long cold night and from the constant tossing and turning. He rubbed his thighs and arms vigorously for a few minutes until they felt warm from the friction. Then he took off his gloves and rubbed his cheeks.

  His visible breath hung in the still air of early morning.

  The fire was dead again, so he broke off small pieces of twigs and set them on the coals and blew upon them. It didn’t take long until there were flames once more. The old man placed a few larger sticks across the pile and squatted close, warming his hands and face and listening to the popping and hissing of the fire as it ate its breakfast.

  Least-Weasel thought of all the campfires he had ever sat around in his life. There must have been thousands. There was always a fire when he spent any time in the forest. Usually, though, he had an ax or a saw or even a chain saw to build much larger fires made from dead timber falls. Around these fires, men would sit and talk all night, telling old hunting stories, myths, family histories, or just talking about the night and the fire. Sometimes, when ice fishing, he built a fire but never stood near it. It was as if having a fire nearby made the wilderness less menacing. It was a powerful thing, something no other animal could make. And it had magic. The shifting colors of the flames and the sound of hissing and popping was mesmerizing. Sometimes, the men just sat quietly for long spells and said absolutely nothing, stared into the flames and listened to its ancient stories.

  Least-Weasel was thirsty, but he knew that it was bad to eat snow for water. When it is so cold outside, the body spends so much energy to melt snow into water that the effort is counterproductive. But the snow closest to the fire was already partially melted into a translucent slush. This would be better, so the old man cupped up several handfuls covered with specks of ash from the fire and a few pine needles, and swallowed it. When he was done, he held his hands over the flames to warm them.

  Finally warm enough, he stood up and studied his situation. It was obvious what he had to do. Either the trap had to come off his foot, or he had to pull the long bolt out of the tree so that the chain would fall free. He had set the bolt with a hammer and a ratchet wrench, so he knew that it was buried at least six inches into the wood. Maybe more. In summer, pulling the bolt out would have been an easy enough task with a wrench. But now, with the temperatures below zero and with nothing more than a small pocketknife, it would be more difficult. In such cold, the frozen moisture in the tree might as well be concrete.

  The old man grabbed the chain about a foot from the bolt and pulled. He pulled with all his strength, even setting one foot against the tree for leverage. But no matter how sharply he yanked the chain, the stubborn bolt did not move.

  Pulling on the chain reminded Least-Weasel of the time his father had caught a great grizzly bear. No one ever actually saw it, but one of the footprints measured about a foot across. The dangerous trap had been attached by a truck-winch cable to a tree, not unlike the great spruce tree above the old man. The cable had a working strength of several thousand pounds. When Albert and his father and uncle returned a few days later, the bear was gone but the earth around the tree looked as if a bulldozer had plowed it, and the bark on the tree trunk was ripped away all around the tree’s base. When they were close, they saw that the bear had actually broken the steel cable. There was blood all around and pieces of light brown, almost blond fur. They never found the grizzly.

  If the great bear could escape, then so could a man.

  Albert Least-Weasel took out his pocketknife. It was an Old Timer, just as he was. He had carried this gift from his father for perhaps forty years. It was thin and had only one blade, which he sharpened and oiled frequently. He pulled open the knife and tried to cut out the bolt. He knew it would be slow and that he had to be careful not to press so hard that he broke the blade, which flexed when he pushed it against the frozen tree.

  It didn’t take long to remove the bark, but the trunk itself was frozen hard and resistant like steel. After he had cut maybe an inch into the wood, it was clear that he would cut no more. No mat
ter how hard he pushed or what the angle he set the blade, he could remove no more wood from around the bolt. Frustrated, he pressed the knife a little harder, saw it bend more than it had before, and saw it snap in two. The tip of the blade fell to the base of the tree and lay shining on the frozen ground.

  The old man leaned against the tree, his head against the trunk and one arm still holding the knife in the hand that hung limply at his side. He was beginning to lose hope.

  When he turned around, he could see the handle of his ax sticking out from the sled, its long shadow reaching halfway across the distance in between. The old man thought about how he could use the sharp-edged ax to free himself. With it, he could hack the hard-set bolt free of the tree. But there was another use. Many years ago, his friend Martin Frank was riding a snowmobile in the far backcountry, checking his trapline. His rifle began to slip off the machine, and he grabbed for it. Somehow he caught his hand in the moving rubber tread, which yanked him from the machine, wedging his hand between the tread and the frame and the wheels. Although he struggled desperately, he couldn’t free it. He was far from the village, and it was already twenty below zero. It was his own trapline, and he knew that no one would be traveling on it—no one would be coming to help. After waiting for much of a day, Martin rolled up his jacket and shirtsleeve to expose his arm, numbing the area around his wrist with snow, and then, when he thought his wrist ready, he reached for the ax strapped on the back of the snowmobile. With one clean stroke he chopped off his hand and then drove an hour to the nearest cabin for help.

  The old man looked at the ax handle. If only he had that, he would have been free yesterday, and today he would be home with his wife inside his warm cabin with the smell of hot coffee and bacon drifting from the stove. He would be wearing his favorite, worn moccasins and shuffling around the small house while his wife knitted or sewed something for the grandchildren. He would be home, and his grandson would come over to help him cut up the two heavy moose quarters and haul more firewood into the house.

  But such thoughts did nothing to remove the chain, so the old man brushed them away from his mind.

  He did not know how long he would be trapped, but he knew that someone would come for him soon—if not today, then the next day, or the next. He had to survive only until they came upriver from the village and up into these hills.

  Least-Weasel was still hungry. The piece of jerky had not been enough. Besides, it was the only thing he had eaten in about eighteen hours. Maybe longer. He had eaten breakfast the day before, some biscuits and fried Spam, but he could not remember having eaten since. If he was to wait until people came to rescue him, he would need food.

  A massive pile of empty pinecones had been lying on the snow all around the tree’s base when he’d first arrived. Clearly, he thought, there were squirrels living in this tree.

  The old man slowly unlaced the heavy strings on the boot caught in the trap. He cut off about six inches, which he used to tie off the top two eyelets to keep his boot closed, so that the warmth of his foot would not escape. The rest he used to tie a loose slip-knot, similar to a rabbit snare, only smaller. He set the noose in the branches as far up as he could reach, in a place where there were many pinecones. He placed it where the bough was thick and green and where a squirrel might not see it. Once he was certain of its position, he turned away, sat down on his pile of spruce boughs, leaned against the tree, and waited. He waited for the sun to warm the day, for someone to pass by on the trail, for the sound of a squirrel scurrying down the tree.

  Having nothing else to do, he set a few pieces of wood onto the fire and waited. But only the wind arrived, tossing the highest boughs back and forth like a shaggy dog shaking off water.

  For the time being, the light from the low sun warmed him and he fell asleep. The old man dreamed of long ago, when as a boy he had gone hunting with his uncle. It was fall, before the heavy snow, when the air carries the first small flurries. They call it termination dust because it spells the end of fall. The two had been checking traps all day when they came to the last one. Seeing nothing from the main trail, they stopped to have a snack before the long push home. Young Albert sat on the ground near a tree and waited for his uncle to dig out food from his pack. While he waited, he loosened the string of one of his boots to remove a pebble lodged between his toes.

  Just then, they heard a sound, the rattling of a chain. Albert, one foot lifted off the ground, his boot in his hand, looked over his shoulder and saw, only a few feet away, a snared wolverine, its lips pulled back, its many sharp yellow teeth in full display, its small ears laid back flat, the way many animals show that they are angry and that the people who have angered them are in danger. The chain was strewn behind him, not taut. He was crouched to spring.

  The fierce animal jumped at the boy with its shiny dark brown claws splayed far apart, when thunder rang out and the terrible flying creature fell from midair and lay crumpled on the leaf-covered ground. It did not move. When Albert and his uncle went to remove the wolverine from the trap, they saw that it had been caught by only a toe. Surely, his uncle told him, the weight of the jump would have torn it loose, and it would have killed the boy had he not been there to shoot it.

  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 studyi
ng 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.