88
CIRQUE
with a good con artist. I don’t use the whole animal either. With marten, I boil the skull, but only so I can put it on a shelf as a bleached reminder of my conquest. I’ve eaten lynx, but unless I smother the meat in barbeque sauce, it tastes too dry for my civilized palate. I use beaver meat as bait for other animals, who love their rank offal. Really, I just want the fur, but I didn’t accept that fact until the lynx died in my trap in that horrible way and I didn’t feel any remorse. I was overjoyed, pleased because I’d finally killed a lynx, and because there is nothing softer than the belly fur of a wildcat adapted to cold. When I had him case skinned, stretched and dried in my cabin, I sat on the couch, running my hands through the plush coat for more than an hour.
I emulated Ryan and rigged a noose, looped it over her head. I pulled tight. But she yanked at the noose with a bloody paw, stretched her body until every sinuous muscle torqued tight like screw. For five minutes, she suffered hard. She gurgled deep in her throat, and at last I thought she was dead. I hung her carcass in a tree to retrieve later, after I’d finished checking the rest of my line. When I returned, she had revived, and though weak, had climbed to an alder branch, where she snarled at me and tore at the snare. I felt bad about that death, and the forest seemed to know I’d screwed up. For the rest of the season, I caught nothing but squirrels.
***
Trappers must learn to read the signs animals leave behind, because if you don’t know the animals on your line, mostly you’re just hiking through the woods. You’re building fantasy forts like when you were a kid. Maybe, at the meat of it, that is all I am doing anyway. You can see where a spruce grouse flew because it smelled the stalking ermine just in time. You can tell whether marten are eating squirrels or hares or grouse. Mostly in Alaska, they avoid squirrels, and if they’re in a heavily trapped area, they get wary faster, and won’t often climb pole sets. I have discovered the curiosity of a fox because I have seen where it climbed up on a stump to survey a wide swath of a forest fire burn. I have smelled the piss posts on the side of a trail where the fox marks its territory. Because I learned to read signs in the snow, I know that an otter will travel through the woods in search of open water. I’ve seen them slide down a steep snowbank four miles from a creek without ever having sighted an otter more than a yard from a riverbank. When five feet of snow cover the ground, it becomes possible to know where squirrels cached their winter food by the trails they blaze. In spring, when I visit the area, I find sometimes a mat of chewed spruce cones extending a dozen feet in all directions. The signs connect me to the landscape. They provide a mystery to unravel, and when I pull on my snowshoes or snap into my skis each week, I imagine I’m embarking on some great quest, and for those hours alone in the woods, I feel connected to a world that isn’t mine. I don’t want to be a part of that world any more than a lynx desires to become a housecat, but different from the lynx, I need to taste that life. Only when I understand
The first time I saw a live animal in a trap, Ryan Ragan had me keep a .22 trained on the lynx, in case it pulled out of the foothold. He rigged a wire noose, and in thirty seconds, the cat twitched and died. It seemed clean, simple, and as humane as it could be. In my second winter, I found a trapline of my own. It wasn’t a very good line, or in a very good location. I made sets along a steep slope not far off a snowmachine trail outside of Fairbanks, and at first I was proud. My line stretched for about three miles, looped off down a ridge of birch where I found a lot of fox tracks. I made more than a dozen sets, but I placed them too close together, and ran the entire line too close to town. Too many people used the trail. Once I came across some friends who were letting their dogs run loose in the area. I pulled any set that could catch a dog after that. When the snow deepened in late February, mushers turned up, and sprung even my pole sets. I quit for the season, and the next year I found an area to trap that lay further from town, where no trail ran, and where no dogs were likely to travel. The first live animal that I caught on my own was a marten. She’d tangled herself into a lynx cubby. A cubby amounts to little more than a jumble of sticks leaned against a tree to direct the animal through a single tunnel to the bait. I’d placed a small foothold trap deep in the cubby, in case an ermine crawled in through the back. The marten’s hind foot had been caught in the rear trap. She was pissed. When I came up on her, she snarled and flung her trap-caught paws at my face, bared fangs that suddenly looked enormous for such a small animal.
***