The Trap (3 page)

Peering out the large window in the front wall of the cabin, Johnny watched a raven sitting on a tree. It sat on a limb, its keen black eyes searching for food on the ground. Finding nothing, it flew away, low over the treetops, until Johnny could no longer see it. The bird reminded him of the many stories his grandparents had told him about Raven. His favorites were the ones about how Raven made the world and about the time he stole the stars, the moon, and the sun from an old chief so that there would be light in the world.

“Grandma,” the young man said, still looking out the window.

The old woman looked up from her soup, wiped her mouth, gazed at her grandson but said nothing.

There was a commercial for new Cadillacs on the television.

“When will Grandpa be back from his trapline?” he asked.

“Hmm,” she said in more of a grunt than a word. “I don't know for sure. When we were young and I was skinny and pretty, he stayed for only a few days. But after so many years, he stays longer sometimes. If the hunting is good and he catches lots of wolves and fox or shoots a moose or caribou, he stays longer. If the weather is good, he maybe stay for a few more days. It depends on the weather, I guess.”

When the old woman was first married, she had accompanied her husband and his friends on a moose hunt. It was late fall and the forest was leafless and gray. The crisp air smelled of rotting leaves and berries. One morning, after an early breakfast, the men left to search upriver for moose. Morrie stayed behind in the warm cabin.

“Hunting,” her husband had told her as he shoved the long green boat from the sandy shore, “is the work of men.”

But shortly after they left—the faraway sound of the outboard still echoing in the hills—a large bull moose stepped out from the naked forest surrounding the cabin and stood beside the woodpile. Morrie took her rifle, left for her protection in the event of bears, and killed it with her first shot. She spent the rest of the day cleaning the old cabin, sweeping the floor, splitting firewood and kindling, and slow-cooking a pot of stew made with fresh meat from a hindquarter of the moose.

When the men returned after dark—hungry, tired, cold, and empty-handed—they were surprised to see that the woman had done what they had not. They were shamed. At first they were silent, but they couldn't hold back their tongues. Halfway through their supper of moose stew, each man in turn began to praise the woman hunter. Morrie was embarrassed and said nothing for a while. But as the men continued to praise her, she eventually began to laugh. Soon, everyone was laughing and joking about the day. Someone even said she would make a “good man.”

They still talked about it.

She looked out the window, saw the sun already going to the other side of the world for the night, and then she turned her attention back to her bowl of soup.

“I wish I had gone with him this time,” Johnny said, reaching for a piece of bread to dip in his soup.

“Hmm,” the old woman said again. “He happy by himself.”

Johnny thought about her words for a moment before he spoke again.

“But I worry about him. Sometimes I dream he gets hurt, or that his snowmobile won't start or runs out of gas and that he's stuck way out there alone,” he said, nodding toward the window as he uttered the last words of his sentence.

Morrie Least-Weasel spoke slowly, the way all elders did. She was born before there were many white people in their country, back when all Indians still spoke Indian.

“He been going out there to that trapline since before you daddy born. He don't need you or nobody when he go out there. Someday you learn that, Johnny.”

The old woman smiled, and finished her last spoonful, but there was something in her voice and the way she looked at the outside thermometer and the clearing sky that bothered him. It was as if she, too, was concerned, but respected her husband's pride enough not to send the boy after him when he was not yet gone too long. While vision and hearing fades, old bones turn thin and brittle, and once-strong muscles grow weak, pride endures to the very end—resisting change like the great land itself.

People say that wild animals—bears and wolves—held in captivity die not from a lack of food or water or from disease, but from a loss of pride.

Now the television show they had been watching was on again. It was about a group of teenagers who lived in Beverly Hills. The characters were sitting and talking over espresso in a huge mall with more stores in it than salmon in a river in July. The young people in the villages watched the show and talked about it. They wanted fast cars; swimming pools; bright, crowded shopping malls; and cell phones buzzing in their ears like mosquitoes.

But they could have none of that here. Not one part. Most of the teens had never even been beyond the next few villages up or down the great river. They knew, vaguely, that a whole other world existed far beyond the white mountains in the direction where the sun arose each morning. But they watched the TV show every week just like they went to church on Sunday, where they learned that Raven was really a skinny white man with long hair, blue eyes, and a beard, a man whom no one had loved enough to save when he was nailed to a totem pole.

The old woman didn't care for it—the television show. She stood up, took her bowl and spoon over to the sink, and poured some coffee into a white cup with “
INDIAN PRIDE
” printed in bright red letters on it.

“Want some, Johnny?” she asked, lifting the old-style percolator pot.

“Yes,
tsin'aen,
” he said, and brought over a cup with the symbol of their tribe on the side.
Tsin'aen
was their word for “thank you,” and he pronounced it “chennen.” He knew some words that his grandparents had taught him, mostly the names of animals and how to count to ten, but only the elders still spoke the language. Apparently it was a secret you could not know until you had lived for a very long time.

When he finished his coffee, Johnny placed his cup and bowl and spoon in the sink and turned off the television. He opened the latch to the woodstove, saw that there was only a glowing bed of red embers, and stuffed two fat pieces of wood into it before closing its door and spinning the damper open until he could hear the glowing embers bite into the bottom log, find its secret place, and drag its flames screaming and hissing into the world.

He watched the fire for a few minutes, turned down the damper, and put on his parka, hat, and gloves. He stopped at the door and turned to the old woman sitting on the couch with her moccasins and needle.

“Good night, Grandma. I'll stop in and see you tomorrow.”

“You a good boy, Johnny,” she replied, looking up only briefly.

With that, he opened the door and stepped into the thick, swallowing darkness. It was so dark that it seemed as though some of the light went out of the cabin and was replaced by grayness. He closed the door, pulling hard until he heard the lock catch, and then he walked out into the frozen world, pulled the starter rope of his snowmobile twice, and drove back toward the village set along the great river's edge. His dim yellowish headlight bounced off trees and snow-banks and the occasional rabbit as he made his way below bright and luminous stars.

 

 

When they were far up in the hills, the hunters saw a grizzly bear coming slowly toward them. It was the biggest bear they had ever seen. The young men started yelling and throwing rocks and shooting arrows at the bear, which only made it angry. All the young men ran away, leaving the old man to face the giant bear alone.

T
HE TINY SHREW
that had made the faint, scurrying tracks in the new snow darted from its hole and disappeared around the back side of the tree. A slight breeze brought the scent of spruce down through the swaying dark green boughs, settling on the old man at its base.

Albert Least-Weasel knelt on one knee on the hard frozen earth he had uncovered and studied the trap. The metal was very cold, and it burned his fingers when he touched it. A few degrees colder and his skin would have stuck to the trap.

But Albert knew better than to touch the metal in a situation like that, so he pulled his gloves back over his freezing hands.

All traps such as this one work in the same way. The hunter steps on both sides until his weight opens the snarling teeth. Then, still standing, he reaches down between the straining jaws and sets a small, thin latch that holds the teeth wide open. The bigger the trap, the more weight it takes to pull open the hungry teeth.

A grizzly trap took two men to set. Even then, it was a scary thing to do.

Albert Least-Weasel remembered what happened to a man from a village downriver, about thirty years before. Maybe longer. The man and his cousin were setting grizzly traps in a cluster all around a tree. There must have been about six or seven traps, maybe more, and they hung a whole moose front-quarter from a strong branch about eight feet off the ground. When he was done hoisting the heavy bait, the man accidentally backed up and stepped into one of the monstrous contraptions. When the steel jaws closed, they shattered his leg bone about a foot above his ankle, and the man from downriver fell backward into the waiting jaws of another grizzly trap, which killed him instantly.

The old man hadn't set such a dangerous trap since the death of his own father many years ago. Many bears used to roam these hills, especially in late summer when they'd comb the hillsides for ripe berries before descending to the river to eat spawned salmon rotting on the banks and shores.

There weren't as many bears anymore. There weren't as many of a lot of things nowadays. Villagers had to travel farther and farther from home to find big game.

With his one foot inside the trap, even though it didn't hurt, Albert could not press down on the two sides evenly with enough weight or pressure to open the persistent jaws. He tried pushing down on each side with all his weight on his gloved hands, feeling the strain through his arms and shoulders, but the trap would not open. Not even a little. It just glared up at him as the sun shone off the snow. It knew nothing except that it was closed as it had been a hundred times, and that it was happy to be closed, to be relieved of the tension of the springs.

The old man slowly stood up, stretched, and placed both hands on the small of his back while he looked around and listened.

It was quiet, except for the wind, but he could hear the voice of the land talking to him. It always talked to him, telling him when to put on a jacket or take his boat out of the water. It told him when to push his fish trap into the silty river and when to put his snowmobile away for the winter.

It spoke to him now.

But he did not like what it had to say. It said something about old age and forgetfulness. It said something about endings, the way it must have talked to every animal ever caught in a trap.

This time, the man placed his free foot on the trap and put all his weight on the one side, but again it didn't open. It was a good trap, a sharp-toothed trap with a good strong spring. He had picked it just because of this, because he wanted his trap to be strong, and now it would not open even though he wanted it to.

Albert tried opening the trap several times, but with each attempt it only stared back at him. The trap was a stupid thing. It didn't care what it caught, just so that it caught something. It just sat there, grinning without lips. Only teeth.

For the first time, the old man began to worry.

He was far from home, and there would be no one around for many miles. This was his trapline, as it had been for most of his life. The villagers respected this knowledge and stayed away so as not to frighten game. It was one of the unwritten rules among the people of the north. His cabins had been broken into only once in the past twenty years, and the break-in had been the doing of white hunters who'd flown in on a small aircraft during a winter caribou hunt.

Looking west, he saw that the sun was already so low on the edge of the world that it would be dark soon. With the darkness would come the cold.

It had been fairly warm for several days, close to zero, maybe a few degrees above or below. But the clouds, which usually bring warmth, like a pillowy layer of white and gray insulation, had been thinning, moving out. Soon, it would get colder.

Albert Least-Weasel knew it meant trouble if he couldn't free himself soon. But he wasn't afraid. It was true that he was named for a clever and ferocious small animal that eats nearly half its own body weight daily, but it was also true that he was named after a great chief from the Gulkana River region: Chief Least-Weasel Cuuy. There is a saying in Indian about that old chief. They say,
“Cuuy yen su xona c'aa delyaagen su'adelniinen,”
which means, “It is said that remarkable things happened to Chief Cuuy.”

As Albert stood there thinking about his predicament, he saw the handle of his shovel sticking upright in the snow where it had landed. It came to him then that he could use the flat metal blade to pry open the trap.

He shuffled around the tree as far as the bolted chain allowed, and reached for the handle. But it was too far away from his hand by more than a body length. The old man was not distracted and did not pause. Instead, he found a branch lying on the ground, broke off the smaller limbs, and used the long stick to try to pull the handle back toward him. He thought that if he could hook the handle near the top and pull slowly, the shovel would fall backward, toward him, bringing it closer by a few feet. Then, he'd simply use the stick to drag it closer.

But when he reached out as far as his hand could extend with the stick, he accidentally pushed the top of the gray wooden handle, and the shovel fell forward, away from the tree. When it landed, much of it was buried under the soft new snow. Albert Least-Weasel spent the next half hour, well into darkness, trying to hook the metal blade to drag the shovel closer, but it never hooked, and it never moved. It just lay there taunting him as if it did not exist at all, as if it were still strapped on the back of the sled.