The Trap (7 page)

It must have been around forty above. Maybe a few degrees colder.

It was on that trip that he knew he wanted to be like his grandfather. It was from that experience that he knew his grandfather was the toughest man in the world.

He turned from the cabin's front window, which had a hairline crack running from one side to the other, and rifled through his clothes drawers for a clean shirt. He didn't own many clothes, so the search didn't take long.

Johnny pulled on a yellow smiley-face T-shirt sporting the caption
HAVE A NICE DAY
! on it, opened the woodstove's door, threw in a couple scoops of sawdust soaked in kerosene, and tossed in a match. When the sawdust was burning evenly, he set two big split logs on top, closed the door, and opened the damper to let the fire breathe.

He was going to work, but he wanted the cabin to be warm when he returned later that afternoon. Johnny closed the door tight, started his snowmobile with one pull after pushing the broken black primer twice, and turned the handlebars and skis toward the village.

*   *   *

There were not many jobs in a village so small. The village centered around a general store with few items on the shelves, where everything cost two or three times what it cost in the larger towns, because the only way to get things this far out from cities in the winter was by the expensive means of small aircraft. Gasoline, diesel, and kerosene, which are mostly barged upriver in summer, cost upward of five dollars a gallon.

The best jobs were usually held by white folks—people working for the state or federal government or who were schoolteachers. Most of the teachers didn't even come from the region. They were often young men and women with a sense of adventure, or they were older folks who'd decided to come out of retirement and go to the far north.

Eventually, though, it didn't matter why they came or where they came from, only that they all left. This harsh land was very different from anything they'd imagined, and the cold and dark and isolation usually got to them in the first six months.

Johnny was a senior with only a few courses left to graduate. He had been taking these classes through a correspondence program ever since the high-school teacher and his wife left the village shortly after the first snowfall. With so much free time, he worked a couple days a week in the general store. It didn't pay much, but it was a job. Besides, the store was an important social place in the community. People came in to buy groceries, gas, and beer. The post office was a little room attached to the store where people could check their mail, too. They always had a coffeepot going, and a CB was hooked up to a car battery so that folks could pass along messages up and down the river valley. Sometimes old people radioed in their grocery orders, and Least-Weasel delivered them on his snowmobile for tips.

When things were slow, Johnny sat at the counter and did his homework. For much of the past year, he had been taking the correspondence courses from the state university. They fulfilled his high-school obligations, but most important, they also earned him college credit. He had never been to the campus, which was far away, but several people he knew had gone there and told him about it. They even showed him photos. Most of them stayed for one semester before the sense of isolation and loneliness brought them back to their village, where everyone was somehow related, where ancestors had lived and died, where the land itself still bore names given to it by Indians.

It was a common story in every village. Grave markers in the many small cemeteries told the stories. It's hard to fit in where you are not wanted and harder still to return to a place that has little future, only a past as old as the land itself. Up and down the great river, in small villages and large villages alike, there were many stories of young people who took their own lives. That's what happens when they stop dreaming; their dreams are washed downriver like ice in the spring.

Johnny had not been to the campus, but he wanted to go there someday—to learn and to get away from the village. His schoolteachers, as transient as they had been, had told him that he was college material. They said he was smart. He went through books the way some people in the village went through beer. He loved great literature and poetry and books about history and art. During the past year, he had used much of the money he earned working at the store to pay for used books and for his correspondence classes. He had finished two courses and was now on his third, a class about American history, including how Columbus sailed to America a long time ago, saw a million Indians already living here, and went back to tell everyone how he had discovered a new world. It was a funny story and all the elders laughed whenever Johnny told it to them.

Sometimes they would come into the store, hang their thick parkas on nails above the stove, pour cups of coffee, and ask Least-Weasel to tell it to them again. It was like hearing a joke everyone knew, including the punch line, but everyone laughed anyhow when they heard it.

“Tell us that story again,” they would ask of him while he walked the narrow isles, placing cans and boxes of food into stiff cardboard boxes.

Several of the chapters in Johnny's textbook amused or puzzled or even bothered them. One was about how black slaves, who were stolen from a faraway land, were made citizens who could vote long before Indians could, even though the Indians had lived here for thousands of years and had helped the first white people survive their first harsh winter. Another chapter talked about how many of the first presidents gained office by killing lots of Indians to make way for the land-hungry, expanding nation, as if candidates received votes for every Indian they killed.

Fred Peters came in around noon and asked about Johnny's grandfather.

“Where you grandaddy?” he asked, picking up a box of .22 shells.

Johnny looked up from his book. “He's up on his trapline. Been there for several days now.”

The old man placed a package of toilet paper on the counter beside the small green box of rifle shells.

“It been gettin' cold past couple days. He usually come back when it so cold. Not good to be out there alone. Pretty tough be all alone like that.”

Least-Weasel was bothered by the old man's words. Fred Peters was only a few years older than his grandfather, and he had quit trapping about ten years earlier. He was a man who knew what trapping was all about, who knew what it meant to be alone and in trouble in the great, unforgiving white.

“I'm sure he'll be home today,” he told the old man, collecting his money and giving him his change. “It's only twenty below. I'm sure he'll decide to come home now before it gets colder.”

The old man looked outside and then shuffled over to his parka, which was warm now from the rising heat of the stove. “He need to come home today. It gonna get colder. Gonna be real cold tomorrow.”

When he closed the door, a little bell jingled, and then it was quiet in the store except for the sound of a log popping in the stove.

During the last half hour before leaving for home, Johnny swept the plywood floor, wondered about his life, about his future, and, most of all, about his grandfather. Although it was only midafternoon, the sun was already heading south.

When he was done for the day, he stopped by to visit his grandmother, hauled in more firewood, emptied her honey bucket down the rough-sawed hole of their outhouse in the backyard, and finally drove home to his own little cabin, which was dark inside and cold again.

Once the cabin was warm, he crawled into his bed, pulled up the blankets and the quilt his grandmother had made for him, and thought about what she had told him.

“You grandaddy should been home today. It gettin' too cold,” she had said without looking up from the pot of soup she was stirring on the stove.

Johnny Least-Weasel, warm in his soft bed, a candle glowing on the small table by the frosted window, dreamed all night of his grandfather. They were bad dreams, and he tossed like the icy river tossing in its silty bed.

 

 

When confronted by the menacing bear, the old man wasted no time. He hit the grizzly across the nose, knocking it over. Then he hit it over the head until it was dead. The old man had killed a great bear with only a stick!

I
T WAS GETTING LATE
, later than the old man usually stayed awake, but he and the night were restless. Several times he rearranged his bed of green boughs, pulled the strings tight on his fur-lined parka hood, turned on his side and tried to sleep. But sleep did not come. His body was restless and tense from sitting under the tree all day with nothing to do but worry and wonder.

It was a perfectly clear night. Frost-sharpened stars filled the sky; a full moon lit the landscape so bright that he could see across the wide valley; and on the horizon above the far white mountains, the northern lights were shimmering and dancing, pulsing across the sky in long shifting ribbons. The only noise was the creaking of the tree in the wind. He watched the dancing sky for a long time. The shimmering waves of green and red light were beautiful. Words were useless. The borealis must be experienced firsthand to be understood by the heart.

It was a beautiful clear night, even though it was so cold now that his boots and gloves barely kept the old man's feet and hands warm. If the temperature dropped much farther, they would be useless. If there was any consolation in the cold, it was that there were no tormenting clouds of mosquitoes.

He carefully dropped a few more pieces of wood onto the fire, and for a few minutes the flames were happy and provided light and warmth. But no matter how good it felt, the old man knew that there was not enough wood to burn such a bright, hot fire all night. He had to ration what firewood he had, so he curled into a tight ball, hugging himself to keep his body heat from being swept out across the field and into the clear, star-raddled night.

But no matter how tightly he curled up his arms and legs, as if to have them vanish entirely so that the cold could not touch them, he still shivered and trembled. When he opened his eyes, he could see the snowmobile and sled, where his sleeping bag lay inside a dark green waterproof bag.

“How different this night would be curled up in that bag,” he thought.

He closed his eyes again and tried to sleep, tried to dream about home and his warm bed in his cabin with its smell of wood smoke and fish-head soup. He tried to dream about his old wife nestled against him in their small, warm bed.

He was close to falling asleep finally when he heard something in the distance. It was getting closer. It sounded like breathing, like panting. Then it was closer, sounding like the panting of sled dogs after a long run. The old man sat up slowly, without turning his eyes from the approaching sound, and reached for his spear leaning beside him.

He could see something coming from the far side of the field, shadows loping and panting and kicking up snow as they crossed.

Wolves.

He could see them now. There were five. Two were in the lead and three more ran about a body length behind the next. They were coming straight for the tree, straight for the man who did not move or utter a sound.

A lone wolf is a timid creature, nervous and unsure of itself. But a pack of hungry wolves is a dangerous thing, quick and cunning and deadly. The old man remembered how a pack of wolves, scavenging along a great lake, once came upon a cabin with a dozen sled dogs chained to their little windproof houses. The wolves killed and ate several dogs before the trapper, hearing the howling ruckus, came out and drove the wolves away with his rifle. He had had to put down his lead dog.

The wolves stopped when they came upon the snowmobile and its hitched sled, sniffed around for only a minute, until they found the moose quarters. All five attacked, though the frozen meat was not alive and did not move. They ripped the meat from the strings securing it to the sled, dragged it onto the snow, and tore at it and growled and fought one another until there was nothing left but the heavy stripped bones.

Then two of the wolves turned their attention to the huddled shadow crouched beneath the tree. Cautiously, they came closer, weaving from side to side, stopping to look and smell. Curious. Wary.

The others followed.

This wasn't the first time the old man had been encircled by wolves. Once, long ago, when he was still a boy, a pack of wolves had followed him as he trudged home on snowshoes, carrying a rucksack full of rabbits he had shot in the wintered hills. He had been all day in the field with his single-shot .22 rifle. For over a mile they followed him, weaving on and off the trail ahead and behind him. At times, they loped along in the scraggly trees left or right of the trail, hiding behind tree trunks or deadfalls, curious and determined.

When he came upon a clearing, the pack circled him, snarling and snapping at the cold air. He had stood his ground with his rifle, even though he knew he would get off only one shot before the pack fell upon him.

But they didn't.

Both sides stood their ground on that white field, yelling or growling, showing their power and menace. Finally, Albert realized that it was the contents of his pack they wanted. They could smell the game. Slowly, without taking his eyes off the wolves, he fumbled with the drawstring, opened the bag, reached in and pulled out each rabbit, and flung it as far away as he could. While the hungry pack devoured their easy meal and fought over bits and pieces, the young boy ran home as fast as his snowshoes could carry him across the deep snow.

The wolves did not follow, and he never saw them again.

But on this day, on this wintered field, five wolves were only steps away. The old man stood up and shouted, holding his spear tight in both hands, his legs apart. He yelled and waved the sharp-pointed spear while the wolves growled and bared their fangs and took quick snapping bites out of the cold air, making terrible clicking sounds with their teeth. Their ears were pulled back flat against their dark shaggy heads, and their eyes seemed to glow in the moonlight.