the Poacher's Son (2010) (12 page)

The last year my father lived with us--before my mother packed me up for good to live with her sister in Portland--he kept a trapping shed behind the trailer we had rented near the town of Dead River. Steel traps hung from my mom's clotheslines. Other traps were piled high inside the rickety shed. Also back there was a fifty-gallon barrel filled to the brim with a foul-smelling liquid he used to dye the traps to better conceal them in the brush. My mother forbade me from entering the shed or touching any of his equipment, but I spent many hours watching him while he waxed his traps outside with paraffin.

One December morning my mom drove into Farmington to take her Dale Carnegie course. Normally, she was reluctant to leave my dad to babysit me. She knew he was likely to go out suddenly, abandoning me alone in the trailer. This morning, however, I was tucked in bed with a pretty bad chest cold, which meant she couldn't pawn me off on the neighbors.

After she'd gone, he came into my darkened bedroom and flicked on the light. He wore a faded flannel shirt stretched tight across his big chest and stained wool pants tucked into rubber hip boots. His long hair was slicked back behind his ears. His beard needed trimming.

"Hey," he said. "How'd you like to go trapping? It'll be our secret from your mom."

"But I'm sick," I told him.

"You've got a cold. It won't kill you to get outside. You said you wanted to go. I'm giving you the chance. So quit whining and get up."

I got up. Over my pajamas I put on a bulky snowmobile suit, the one that made me look like a pint-sized version of the Michelin man. Outside, I could hear the clanging noise of my father loading the back of his Ford pickup. I hurried outside, nearly tripping over my too-big boots.

It was a bitterly cold morning. Little snow had fallen so far that year. What there was of it lay in hard blue patches in the shadows of the pines. But the ground was frozen solid, and the frigid air stung my cheeks and made my eyes water.

The cab of my father's pickup smelled of pungent animal odors: musk and urine. I turned my face to the crack in the window and tried to breathe in the clean, cold air that whistled through.

My father grinned. "You'll get used to it."

Beneath my feet was a wooden crate filled with Mason jars containing glands afloat in murky fluids. Scents and lures. To make some of them he put animal parts in a blender.

My nose began to run. I wiped it with my sleeve, leaving a slimy trail on the fabric.

"How's that cold?"

"OK."

He winked at me. "You're a tough little guy, aren't you?"

I smiled. "How do you know where to trap, Dad?"

"That depends," he said. "For foxes, you want a mix of fields and wood. Maybe some trails coming in. For mink, the best places are the streams that lead from pond to pond. After that, it's trial and error. Here's a place for coons," he said, pulling over beside a thicket of brambles. "I got a coon trap back in there. Come see."

I followed him as best I could through the dense puckerbrush.
Branches scratched at my face, and I had to cover my eyes with my arm to keep from getting switched. A hundred or so yards from the road, I caught up with him. He stood beside a little stream. The water of the stream was black and so quickly moving that it hadn't yet frozen, although there was ice crusted along the edges.

"Look," he said, and pointed.

At the base of a tree on the bank of the stream was a big raccoon. It clung stiffly to the trunk. The steel trap grasped one of its black hind paws firmly, and the chain that held the trap was twisted around the trunk. After having been caught, the raccoon had tried to climb the tree to safety. But the trap had him pinned.

While I watched, my father drew his .22 pistol out of the pocket of his drab army coat and leveled it at the raccoon's head. The sound of the shot made me jump.

I hadn't realized the raccoon was still alive.

It jerked and let go of the tree. My father put away his gun and waited for the quivering to stop. Then he approached the dead animal and released it and set it on the bank. He straightened out the chain and reset the trap, hiding the jaws with dead leaves so they were all but invisible.

"Here," he said, giving me the raccoon to carry by the ringed tail back to the truck.

But the body was too heavy, and even using both hands I didn't get very far with it. My father watched me struggle with my burden for a while before finally taking it away from me. He slung the raccoon over his shoulder, holding it by the tail. It swung back and forth along his back as he walked. Its eyes were open and on a level with my own as I followed behind him.

The cold had frozen the snot inside my nostrils, and I began to cough. When we got back inside the truck, my father reached under his seat and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He held it between his legs while he drove, taking sips when there were no other cars on the road to see.

At the next stop, I followed him down a hill. The grass was brittle from the cold and made a crunching noise beneath our boots, like a person eating potato chips. At the bottom was a frozen pond, filled with standing dead trees like sharpened poles. There was an area of open water at one end of the pond where a stream flowed out. A muskrat was struggling in the water, near a hummock of grass and dead branches where the trap had been set. My dad waded out into the knee-deep water until he stood over the small, writhing animal and shot it with his pistol.

My father tossed the wet little carcass back at me so that I had to jump out of the way. Lying on the reed bank, the muskrat seemed very small. Its teeth were bared yellow, and its fur was slicked like it had been dipped in motor oil. I was wracked suddenly by a fit of coughing.

My father was going on about prices. Muskrats, he said, brought in just a buck apiece, scarcely worth trapping. Raccoons could go as high as twelve dollars, if you skinned them out carefully. While he reset the trap, he rattled off the current prices he got for each of the species of animals he took. Otters, he said, got the best prices--as much as forty-two dollars for an otterskin.

"There's a hole in my boot," I said softly.

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"My sock is wet."

His eyes bored into mine, forcing me to look away. "You want me to take you home?"

"No."

"Then don't be such a baby."

We made more stops along the trap line. Sometimes there were animals in the traps, and sometimes the sets were empty. As the day wore on, I began to cough steadily, bringing up gobs of green phlegm that I spit out into a mitten. My left foot, encased in its leaky boot, became soaked and numb. After a while, it was as if I were sleepwalking through a barren dreamland of skeletal trees, gravel pits, sunken
meadows, and standing water, limping along, trying in vain to keep up with my father, who seemed only intermittently aware of my presence.

He tuned the radio to a country music station, and he tapped his fingers along the steering wheel in time to the songs that were all about heartbreak, booze, and betrayal.

"Dale Carnegie," he said with a snort. "Can you believe that shit? There's probably some guy down there in that class that she likes. We should go down there and check up on her. Wouldn't she be surprised? She doesn't know what I'd do for her. That's her problem."

We forged on, checking more sets, wading through rushing streams and clambering up steep banks. I wanted to stop, wanted to go home, but I didn't dare say so.

"What does she want me to do?" my father said, but I don't think he was talking to me at this point. "Does she want me to cut my fucking heart out and serve it to her on a golden platter? Is that what it's going to take?"

I can scarcely remember crossing the withered cornfield where we found the fox. All I remember is standing at the edge of a field beneath an overcast sky, clouds pressing down overhead and the smell of snow in the air, while my father advanced on the trapped animal with a crowbar.

The fox was a rust-orange blur. It jumped and jerked at the end of its chain, the trap digging deep into its leg as my dad came up. Torn between fight and flight, it growled and snapped at us. Then it bounded away, leaping high into the air, only to be pulled violently to earth by the chain. That was when my father stepped in with the crowbar. He tapped the animal once, sharply, above the muzzle. And the fox flipped onto its side, shaking and foaming at the mouth as if gripped by a seizure. Then, in disbelief, I watched my dad kneel on its spine and grip its nose with one big hand. Firmly, he pulled the head back until there was a loud snap and the fox stopped moving.

As we walked back across the frozen cornfield, I turned my head so I didn't have to see him cradling the beautiful, limp body.

"Dad, why didn't you just shoot it?"

"A bloodstain will ruin a fox fur," he explained. "You have to kill it with your hands. There's no other way."

My eyes were wet, so I squeezed them shut. "I wish you'd shot it."

I could feel him looking hard at me. "You asked to come along," he said. "This is the last time I take you trapping with me."

For the rest of that day I remained in the frigid cab of the pickup while my father ventured down embankments and off into stands of second-growth spruce and tamarack. My body ached, and I was colder than I'd ever been. I curled up into a ball on the cracked vinyl seat.

I was awakened by my dad shaking my shoulder roughly. Darkness had fallen and snow was swirling in the headlights. We were back home, outside the trailer, and my mom was standing in the door-yard in front of the truck. She was lit up by the glow of the headlights. Snow dusted the top of her hair.

I remember my mom gathering me up in her arms. I remember drifting through the long ride to the hospital in Skowhegan. Then the bright lights of the examination room, a nurse taking my temperature. I don't remember anyone ever telling me I had pneumonia, but that's what it was.

My next memory is of waking up in the night to find my father seated beside my hospital bed, watching me in the half-dark. In my memory his bearded face looms over me like a grotesque mask of itself. Tears are streaming down his cheeks--the first tears I've ever seen him shed. I ask him where I am and what has happened to me, but he just turns his head away so I won't see him cry. After a minute he gets up and leaves, and I am alone again in my strange bed.

I
came home to a bunch of messages. There were the usual game warden calls: questions about obscure boating regulations and which fishing spots I'd recommend. And a message from Kathy Frost telling me she checked the culvert trap earlier that evening and it was empty. She'd check it again in the morning unless she heard from me. Bud Thompson called, drunk, wanting to know about the "status of my investigation concerning the bear."

And then there was a message from Sarah. I was startled to hear her voice after weeks of not hearing it at all. "Mike, I heard about your dad--it's so horrible, I still can't believe it. I don't know if you want to talk about it. But I was thinking of you there alone and . . . it's all right to call me, if you want."

I did want to, very much. But what was I going to say? That I missed her more than I'd ever imagined? She'd probably come over, if I asked. But what kind of prick would I be to take advantage of her kindheartedness--or pity or whatever it was--just because I was feeling so damned lonely? If we started up again, she'd just end up heartbroken like before. A month from now, I'd still be the same unresponsive bastard I'd always been and she'd be the one feeling lonesome.

I crawled into my empty bed and was asleep in minutes.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, I caught a glimpse of perfect blue sky--like an antique bottle held up to the sun. For half a minute I had that peaceful amnesia you feel when you first wake up. Then I remembered my father.

Before anything else, I called Kathy Frost.

"I just got off the phone with the lieutenant," she told me. "He said they suspended the search after dark. They'll be starting again soon, but everything's been scaled back. Charley Stevens volunteered to go up again in his Super Cub, but I can't say anyone's feeling hopeful about finding your dad."

"I've got to get back up there."

"Forget about it. The lieutenant wants you back at work. Either that or take a sick day and stay home. The sheriff doesn't want you at the incident scene."