by Annie Proulx
Unaccountably the thought leaped into his mind that Jack was not Starr’s first husband. She’d been married to a dairy farmer in Wisconsin, had grown-up children in the Land of Lakes who never came to visit. That much Loyal knew. Why think of it now? It was Jack he liked.
How long did it take to travel five hundred feet in a sixty-mile-an-hour head wind? The wagon was so small. It would be like finding a bushel basket in the ocean. The dog hung on his snowshoes. He didn’t dare turn and shout at her for fear of drifting off the line. He went forward, head down, one hand over his mouth to get air. His face was numb. He pawed at his snow-plastered eyes. There was a catch in the wind as though the beast was drawing a short breath, and through the slackening snow he saw the wagon forty feet ahead and on his left. He had already curved fatally away from it.
He turned toward it, but before he had taken three strides the whiteout closed in again, hurled and shook him. Ten steps. Elbows floundered. He ought to be there but he wasn’t. Another. Another. Arms out. And grazed the side of the wagon. Christ, how did the plains Indians live through these blizzards in skin cones?
Inside, the wagon rocked in the shrieking wind. He hung the snowshoes on the back of the door and let them drip, threw a chunk in the stove. He poured water into the coffeepot and began to grind the beans, stepping over the dog. She pulled ice balls from her forelegs with her teeth and flapped her tail at him as he bent to stroke her narrow head.
‘Close call, girlie. We come close to missing the damn wagon and walking all the way to Santa Fe. We didn’t get that little break we’d still be out there. By now probably making a teepee out of two snowshoes and a prayer.’
His pelts brought an average price of seventy dollars at the auction that spring – top money. The snowy, supple hides were prime, the hair long, fluffy and lustrous. Pierre Faure, the Hudson Bay buyer, bought Loyal a drink.
‘Top dollar, Loyal. I don’t know what you old-timers do but your goddamn furs are beautiful. Peyo’s got some beautiful fox and bobcat too. You seen his furs? Cherry-red fox, just nice, clean furs. Beautiful. Well, eagles don’t catch flies, right? I seen fur here from the young guys wasn’t worth bothering the damn animal to take. Stretched all out of shape. I seen a bobcat looked like a Canada goose way the guy had its neck stretched out and the head bunched up. Waste. Them’s the sons a bitches make it hard for trappers. And let me tell you, hard days for trappers is coming.’
‘What do you mean? Prices going down again?’
‘More than that, my friend. You maybe don’t hear the rumbles out there with your basket of traps and the wind, but on the dealer end we are getting it good. And it’s not going away. I’m talking animal rights people, the ones against the trapping and the fur coats. Give you example. Couple weeks ago in Chicago a bunch of these bastards stood outside one a the good stores and squirted white paint on every woman come out wearing a fur coat. In New York they march up and down outside the furrier with signs saying “Killer” and “Only Animal Looks Good in a Fur Coat Is One that Grows It.” Then you got the others, against leg-hold traps, against all trapping. These people are getting strong.’
Loyal laughed, ‘It’s just a few people making noise. I heard the Trappers’ Association put out a press release that shows them up.’
‘Something to think about, Loyal; if you have to prove you’re right, you’re probably wrong. I think there’s gonna be trouble. I’d get in another line if I could.’
At first he took them half a dozen different ways. Sometimes as he ran the line he’d give an injured rabbit call on a bone whistle and shoot the occasional young coyote that trotted in to see what it was all about, but his main standby was a number-three double-spring steel trap. In November everything was ready – the traps cleaned, dyed and stored in the terrain where they’d work. The treated sets of waxed gloves, the sidecutters, the kneeling tarp, the sets of boots, the lure bottles and wire and string and sticks and sifted manure and dirt and sand and grass and twigs all stored in the big outside box on the wagon.
The fourth year on the Sagines’ place Starr said she’d like to ride out and watch when he made his sets. He was slow to answer.
‘Well, what the hell, Loyal, see how many more of them cheese souffles you’re gonna get.’ She and Jack both laughed. Loyal laughed, late and sour.
‘No, no, it’s just the less scent that’s around the better. If I could figure a way to place my traps without gettin’ near ’em, I would’. Yet he let her come after she promised to stay in the truck and watch through the glasses. He didn’t show she was the first woman to ride next to him in thirty-two years.
‘Now, this here is going to be a scent-post set. There’s a rock that sticks up at a runny angle over by the bushes – you can see it from here and see every dimple through the glasses – and every coyote for a mile around seems to piss on it when he passes by. I’m going to set two traps there.’
She watched him draw on a pair of waxed gloves, slip on the prepared pack and, a hundred feet out from the truck, step out of his boots and into another pair he had taken from the bag containing a little scraped soil and sagebrush and rabbitbrush. He tied a gauze mask over his mouth.
Near the rock he cautiously set down the ash pack basket and withdrew his kneeling tarp, spreading it out with the blue, unscented side down. With a trowel he dug two holes near the base of the rock, each large enough to take a trap, carefully piling the loose soil to one side. He drove a notched wooden trap stake into the bottom of each hole, then positioned the trap over the stake and set it. The pan covers went over the set traps and he sifted a little of the soil onto the covers to hold them in place. Gently but deftly he adjusted the covers with a brittle twig, then sifted more soil over the traps, covering the springs first, then the pan covers.
When the sifted soil was level with the surrounding ground he swept gently over the places with a tuft of sagebrush. He changed his waxed gloves for another pair stored in a canvas bag that hung on the outside of the pack, took the scent bottle and dipped the brittle twig into it. He put the twig in a crevice of the jutting rock near the ground, then sprayed coyote urine on the rock above the scent twig. He changed back to the other gloves. Finally he gathered up everything, stepped to the back of the tarp, folded it up and backed away from the set. With the sagebrush tuft he smoothed out the shallow imprints from his knees where the tarp had been and carefully retreated. When he came to the place where his boots stood he removed the scentless boots and stowed them again in the bag of soil and brush.
‘My god, ain’t that a lot of trouble.’
‘Just basic set, but it takes coyote. That’s some of what you have to do if you hope to fool them. I’ve had them dig out my traps, push the trap out of the hole with their nose and turn it over, then piss on it and leave it for me. But generally I make a blind set.’
‘What’s the mask for? Looked like you was on your way to a holdup.’
‘Breath. Human breath stinks. Leaves scent, especially if you had bacon and onions for breakfast the way I did. Your best trappers don’t eat until after the work’s done.’ He liked telling her about it. She seemed to follow what he meant.
‘There used to be a dozen ways to take them, some better than others. The dirt hole set’s a damn good way and so’s a blind set. Dirt hole set you use an old badger hole or dig a hole that looks like an animal dug it – bait it with fresh rabbit or rotten chunk bait. I like a blind set because for it to work you got to know your coyote. There’s no bait, no lure, no scent, just a trap in a place you know the coyote is going to step. For instance, there’s a little dip in one place along your fence at the foot of that mesa where all the rocks slid down and I see a little bit of hair in the low strand of barbwire. The ground there looks the littlest bit tired. That’s where at least one coyote has the habit of ducking under the fence. Good place for a blind set. Bait set, especially around a carcass the coyotes are feeding on, works good, works too good. Takes the least skill. And after the way the government tra
ppers and sheepmen been using poisoned baits like kings throwing dimes, the coyotes won’t touch bait. I taken coyote with deadfalls, too, takes time to build them and the trouble is a deadfall will kill whatever walks under it, not just coyote, but anything, including a dog or a little kid. I lost a dog in a deadfall I set myself couple of years back. Little Girl. You remember Little Girl – when I first started trappin’ on your place?’ She nodded. ‘So I won’t use a deadfall no more. Same thing with a snare – once the animal gets in it, it’s a slow struggle.’
‘Hate the idea of the animal trapped there, waiting for you to come kill it. Kind of a terrible way to make a living, Loyal.’
‘I’m used to it. Done it most of my life. Don’t even think about it. Anyway, a trapper’s an angel compared to most sheep ranchers. Sons a bitches’ll shoot or trap anything that moves. I seen coyotes with their jaws wired together, their eyes put out by sheepmen then turned loose to die slow. You think it’s better for the coyotes to be poisoned by the government guy? Poison is a dirty, wasteful end. That stinking 1080 – the animals is no use to anyone or anything – kills other animals because it gets in the food chain, the fur’s no good. It’s a rotten way. Even mice shouldn’t be poisoned. Get your traps out, but don’t use that goddamn poison bait.’
‘We use traps. We had a cat once, big stripedey Buster, used to run a trapline. We’d set the traps and go to bed. Buster’d lie around, dozing, keeping one ear perked up. Hear a trap go off he’d be there. He’d pick up the trap in his mouth and come in the bedroom, jump up on Jack and meow at him in this muffled voice – he had the trap in his mouth – swish the mouse’s tail over Jack’s face a few times to get him woke up good.’ Loyal roared at the picture.
‘He was just asking Jack to take the catch out of the trap and reset it.’
‘He do it?’
‘Oh yeah. Jack’s not a man to interfere with anybody’s trapline, and he’s a helpful feller, always give a friend a hand.’ She laughed a little. ‘Yeah, old stripedey Buster, if he’d had some little stretchers he could’ve made a fortune at the fur auction.’
‘I don’t know. Last I heard the prices for mouse pelts was way down.’
The Sagines were the first couple he’d ever had as friends, and Starr the first woman friend. It crossed his mind a hundred times to wonder if Starr had grandchildren. There were no photographs that he could see in their house, but he’d never been in any rooms but the kitchen and living room. Still, there was a piano and a fireplace mantel in the living room, and that was the place the pictures ought to go, he thought. He would have liked to hear about the grandchildren, could pretend to be some kind of adopted uncle when they came to visit.
‘And this is Uncle Loyal, Elly, go say hello.’ And the little girl, scrawny, with crinkly red hair, would sidle up bashfully and whisper hello and he would give her the tiny skin doll two inches high he had bought from a Lakota trapper whose wife made them. It was a cunning little thing, made of fine rabbit skin, dressed in a white leather dress sewn with the tiniest beads. A necklace of mole claws hung around its neck. He kept it in its little leather bag in his shirt pocket and when he took it out and looked at it sometimes, it was as warm in his hand as though it lived. Old daydreams. He didn’t know why the hell he carried it around.
Trapping on Frank Cloves’s place was different.
Cloves inherited the Hi-Lo ranch, eighteen thousand acres of well-watered valley in the bowl of mountains. His grandfather had come into the country as a railroad worker, but the youngest son got a job as a dude wrangler on the Hiawatha Lodge Ranch and married the daughter of an eastern meat-packer. Growing up, Cloves had the best, turned out the worst. He thought of himself as a rancher. What else could he be?
The snowy Big Horns, where Cloves had additional grazing rights, floated in the sky to the west. Sweetheart Creek and Snowpools converged in the tender bottomland. On the higher ground there was timber. Cloves had a need as strong as disease to make a show of power. He married five times, and the sounds of shouting and battle from the twenty-five-room house earned the ranch the local name of ‘Whoop-Up.’ Nothing went well in his life and he attracted strange and dangerous people.
Irritated at the sight of a gravel deposit that filled a bend of the Snowpool one spring, and caused a hayfield on the opposite bank to flood, he had the idea of cutting off the oxbow so the stream would run straighter. After a morning with the bulldozer the stream velocity picked up and in one week tore a new straight route that cut off five old oxbows, dumped tons of gravel on Cloves’s bottomland hayfields, undercut and washed out two big widow groves. The stream below jammed and flooded out the town of Queasy. After the state paid a call he began forced restoration work that went on for years and several hundred thousand dollars.
His cattle suffered heel flies, warble grubs, bloat, blackleg, lump-jaw, scab disease and rattlesnake bites. When he hired a ranch veterinary to exclusively tend the diseased herd, the man worked two months, then declared himself a cowboy poet and moved up to Montana to versify.
His third wife was rumored to be a transvestite.
A modest vein of coal was discovered on the property but efforts to mine it failed as oil flooded the coal and gas filled the shafts. An unlucky lightning strike started a fire which blew up the gas, burned off the oil and smoldered underground in the coal for ten years.
When the cattle failed he switched over to sheep. Because there wasn’t a herder to be hired for love nor money he let the sheep take care of themselves. With the sheep he bought a ready-made hatred of coyotes and believed his land was infested with them in unprecedented numbers, that they came from as far away as the Dakotas and Montana to plague his animals.
But Loyal never thought Cloves the comic figure of his reputation.
Saw him in a bar for the first time. Cloves walked into Bite the Dust. He drank a red beer, asked for another. Loyal looked out of the side of his eye. Took in the big, oversized head, thought he looked a little like Mussolini. Brown crinkled hair moving back from a bald front. Meaty nose. The chin a stubbled pillow. Head hunching forward, muscular torso, everything thick and short as if weights sat on the man at night. He kept looking up as if his neck was permanently crimped that way.
‘Anybody interested in trapping coyote I got a stock of the finest that ever lifted a leg.’ Snakeskin boots. The voice was low and harsh. He didn’t wait for an answer but turned and went out.
‘Who was that masked man,’ Loyal asked the jaw-wagging bartender.
‘Oh that’s old Whoop-Up Cloves, millionaire ten times over when he started, but got it down to about two or three million now. Spreads happiness wherever he goes. He just switched to sheep and to hear him say it the biggest assortment of coyotes in the US of A is on his place.’
Cloves had had the government trappers in all summer with traps, snares, shooting from planes, cyanide guns and poison baits. The carcasses, mostly young animals, had been dumped to rot in an old gravel pit near the creek. The survivors, Loyal thought, would know every trick in the book – older, smarter, bait-wise, trap-wise. What the hell, he’d give it a try. Just for the hell of it. He’d get in touch with Cloves.
‘O.k.,’ said Cloves. ‘You’re on. Just one thing – stay out of the northwest end there goes up into the mountains. I got a project going on up there I don’t want any trapping around it.’ He winked at Loyal who guessed there were plots of wacky weed up there somewhere. Hell, coyotes would eat that, too.
But he had not even finished scouting the land before he knew something was going on. Pickups grinding up the steep mountain road in the night hours. Distant ride shots. Hounds baying.
Saturday night in Bite the Dust was Saturday night. Around four in the afternoon the parking lot started filling with mufflerless pickups. Dogs in the passenger seats, in the bed. When the aqua pickup, painted with leftover swimming pool paint, pulled in, every dog in the parking lot began to bark and strain forward. He’d seen it working up and down the mountain road on Cloves’s
ranch.
‘What the hell you carry in that rig make ’em start up like that every time you drive up,’ asked Bubby sitting next to the runty rider. They rode their bar stools down at the end with practiced grace. The man coming through the door was a pyramid with sparkling yellow eyes and a brown beard parted in the middle and knotted to each side with a twist of annealed wire. Necklace of badger claws dripping over his chest. Loyal smelled musk, rotten bait, green hide and something else and knew he was a trapper. Out of season. Not coyote, not fox or bobcat.
‘Meow,’ said the hulk.
‘Lion? By god, I believe it. That’d set ’em going.’
‘Didn’t say that was it,’ said the trapper and asked for whiskey and beer. When he had them he walked over to Loyal and sat down across from him. Runty rider was quiet.
‘I seen you scouting around. Cloves says you’re going for coyote, huh!’
‘Price holds up. Prime brought seventy per, end of the season.’ Hell, he didn’t want to sit with this outlaw.
‘Get a hundred you’re doing excellent. Price drops, you’re in a world of shit, workin’ for twenty cents an hour.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Government trappers been working over that land all summer, you know.’
‘I know. It was sort of a challenge, see how good I can do in a troubled situation.’
‘Troubled is right. Know why the government guys left?’
‘No. Figured they were all done.’
‘Hell no. Cloves drives out one day all hopped up on something and starts shooting at them. Says, “I’d teach you to kill my sheep. I’m gonna wipe every motherfucker coyote off the face of the earth.” Thought they were the coyotes. They did look kind of mangy, but hell, I could always tell they had two legs. So you want to watch out. Got a crazy streak. Usually he ain’t around in the winter, or so I hear. I only been here three months myself so I ain’t seen his winter habits yet. Say he goes to Mexico to stay warm. What the hell, wish I had a nice cush of money to do that, don’t you?’ He winked. At the bar the runty rider was watching them in the mirror. Loyal had an absurd thought about him. The dogs barked their brains out.