I MIGHT NOT HAVE opened the box had I known that its contents would dominate my life for the next decade, but I had no way of seeing that coming. Instead my brothers and I ripped open the package to find six #1 long-spring traps made by Victor. These are muskrat-sized versions of leghold traps, which hold an animal by gripping its foot between two rounded steel jaws. They’d been sent by our mysterious half brother, Frank Rinella II, who was the same age as our mother. Since Frank II maintained only a sporadic relationship with our father, we didn’t know much about him beyond the fact that he had taken an early retirement as a game warden in Colorado in order to become a full-time elk-hunting guide. That he’d already held the two coolest jobs in the world made him a hero in our minds. That he thought enough of us to send a present only added to his stature. To me, he was something like a cross between Daniel Boone and Santa Claus.
Regardless of who they came from, I would have accepted the traps with gratitude because their arrival coincided with a period of extremely high fur prices that is now known to trappers as the fur boom. Beginning around 1975 and lasting through 1986, the boom was driven by strong retail demand for many varieties of fur and fur-trimmed garments. The economy was generally good, people were hungry for outward manifestations of wealth and luxury, and fur provided that.*
Trappers were raking in money in a way they hadn’t done since the Roaring Twenties. A single muskrat pelt could earn a trapper around seven or eight dollars, maybe more.† Raccoon hides brought up to forty dollars.‡ Mink could be worth fifty dollars.§ Coyotes, seventy dollars.‖ Fox, eighty dollars. Beaver, a hundred. a
Suddenly you could make a living as a professional trapper, an occupation that hadn’t been financially feasible in many decades. Prices were so high, in fact, that a lot of guys in my area tried their damnedest to get laid off from their regular jobs because they’d make more money trapping as long as they were able to supplement their fur money by collecting unemployment benefits. I remember a day when I was watching a local trapper and taxidermist skin his catch in his basement while he talked to a buddy over the phone. I couldn’t tell if they were discussing competitors who’d moved in on their trapping territory, or if they were discussing a plan to move in on the territory of their competitors, but whichever it was, the trapper ended the discussion by saying, “Anyone fucks with you, shoot ’em.” He seemed to be only half joking.
My brothers and I weren’t yet looking to escape the drudgery of second-shift factory jobs, though it was easy to see that trapping muskrats could be way more profitable than mowing lawns. And way more romantic. For a kid in love with animals and the out-of-doors, it was possible to view the history of North America through fur-tinted lenses. Basically, the first guy to go just about anywhere on this continent was going there in search of animal pelts: Fur was on the brain of the otherwise gold-crazed Spaniards when they began poking around Florida and the Mississippi Delta and the Southwest and the California coast; Henry Hudson went up the Hudson River with an eye toward finding pelts; when the first load of exports left the Plymouth Colony at Massachusetts Bay in 1621, the bulk of its value was in fur; Samuel de Champlain, the Father of New France (aka Canada) established the cities of Montreal and Quebec in part to facilitate the search for furs.b
In 1803, when Lewis and Clark headed up the Missouri River, they were under orders to investigate the feasibility of trading for furs with the tribes of the Great Plains and the Rockies. Their reports about the abundance of fur in the Rockies inspired some of the greatest feats in American history. Trapper Jed Smith was the first white man to cross the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada and to enter California through an overland route. Trapper Jim Bridger was the first white man to visit the Great Salt Lake. John Colter became the first white man to ever pass through what eventually became Yellowstone National Park; for a long time, people were incredulous of Colter’s reports and they referred to the place as Colter’s Hell.
I felt as though I was reliving an important part of history when my brothers and I began scouting for muskrat sign in preparation for the opening day of muskrat trapping season on the first of November. Muskrats are members of the rodent family. An adult muskrat can weigh up to a few pounds and reach a length of twenty-four inches. Their fur is much more beautiful than anything you might imagine growing on an animal whose name includes the word rat. They have dense, wool-like underfur all over their body, ranging from a pale tannish color on the belly to a deep chocolate brown on the back. When a muskrat’s hide is in prime condition—usually from November to early spring—it sports a lush growth of long, silky guard hairs that make it a perfect material for garment trim and also an affordable stand-in for mink.c
Muskrats live in colonies, or family groups, of usually five or six animals. Their existence is centered on water. They thrive in big bodies of it, like the Mississippi River, yet a colony wouldn’t think twice about living its entire existence in a pond the size of a backyard swimming pool as long as there was plenty of food and the water was deep enough that it didn’t freeze all the way to the bottom in the winter. They sleep and find shelter either in subterranean dens dug into the banks of streams and lakes, or inside lodges that they build from cattails and other vegetation. The lodges range in size from bushel baskets to restaurant-sized garbage cans. There was a shortage of suitable lodge-building plants in the lakes around my house, so the muskrats there generally relied on bank dens. A major obstacle in constructing a bank den is beach sand. It’s hard for a muskrat to tunnel through sand, as it tends to collapse and it’s easy for predators to dig them out and kill them from above. Almost all of the shorelines in my area were sandy to the point that you could dig into them with those cheap plastic beach trowels that they sell in gift shops.
But luckily for the muskrats (and luckily for us), the early eighties had been pretty wet in our area. Water levels in the lakes had risen so high that the water had inundated the reed beds and lawn grass and weeping willow roots along the shorelines. The roots of the vegetation helped stabilize the den entrances of the muskrats and gave them almost unlimited habitat. And since a female can produce a couple dozen offspring in a single year, the population was at a peak just around the time we got our traps.
In fact, muskrats lived just fifty yards from my bedroom window. We had them underfoot, often literally. They liked to dig beneath our seawall and then excavate labyrinthine networks of subterranean tunnels under our yard. You’d be mowing the grass and your foot would bust through a hole in the ground and there’d be a nest down there lined with muskrat food: the roots and stems of milfoil, lily pad, cattail, and reeds; the shattered shells of clams and snails. When I got done mowing, I might jump into the lake for a swim. I liked to swim out to our floating raft very stealthily, so that I didn’t scare away the muskrats that denned inside the raft’s framework of wood and Styrofoam. That way, I could climb up onto the raft and jump on it in order to spook the muskrats out. Then I’d dive in after them and see how far I could chase them underwater before I had to come up for air.
In the weeks leading up to the official muskrat opener, my brothers and I scoured the area’s shorelines in canoes and on bikes and by walking. We scouted on Middle Lake, where we lived, and also to the north, on North Lake; to the west, on West Lake; and to the east, on Twin Lake. Sometimes our mom drove us to look at ponds and lakes that were farther away. We found muskrat tracks in the sand, birdlike but with faint drag marks from the tail running between them; we found muskrat feed beds, dinner-plate-sized mats of vegetation built in sheltered locations where the muskrats felt safe from avian predators; and we found entrances to bank dens, revealed by yellow strips of sand where the passing traffic of muskrats had cleared away the muck so that it looked like a miniature version of a swimming area out in front of a frequently used beach.
We located so many muskrats that we figured we needed to make a capital investment in order to buy six Victor 110 Conibears in order to complement the six #1 legholds that we already owned.d Also known as body-grippers or killer-type traps, Conibears perform in a way that brings to mind a boa constrictor made of thin steel bars. They’re ideally suited for the entrances of muskrat bank dens. The traps cost almost four dollars apiece, which we had to borrow from our old man. We all signed on the loan, the first that any of us had ever taken. By doing so, we became trappers in debt, and thus we joined that rare and adventurous class of men who have given so much rugged flavor to American history. Most of my heroes sprang into the wilderness—and into the history books—by exploring the country’s wildest locations while financed by backers who were willing to gamble on the idea that a man could strike it rich on furs in the American wilderness. During Boone’s trapping adventures in Appalachia he was often indebted (sometimes to an overwhelming degree) to a man named Richard Henderson. For a while, Jim Bridger and Jed Smith both operated on the finances of General William Ashley. John Colter, the veteran of the Lewis and Clark expedition, found financing from a man named Manuel Lisa.
My dad jotted down the details of the loan on a yellow legal pad and explained that the money was due when we sold our first year’s worth of fur. It’s unlikely that my old man found any excitement in joining the ranks of history’s trapping investors; instead, I think he was probably just pleased to offer opportunities to his children. Some dads give their kids new cars or send them to expensive schools as a form of compensation for things that they themselves never had as kids. My dad lent us money for traps.
He was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1924, a place and time when searching for muskrats would have seemed as far-fetched as searching for a Wi-Fi signal. His mother was a Czechoslovakian drinker named Juanita who’d go on benders that usually began with her sipping from liquor bottles customarily offered as an enticement to clients in the local drugstores. His father, Anthony Rinella, worked in the asphalt business and walked with a limp because he’d been shot in the leg during the race riots of 1919.
My dad told me several times that his first memory was of himself standing next to a high chair and holding its leg while his parents screamed at each other. They broke up when he was four. For reasons that I’ve never understood, and that he never attempted to explain, they were unwilling or unable to take care of him. One day his mother dropped him off at his father’s parents’ house on West Twenty-seventh Street and that’s where he spent the rest of his childhood. His grandparents were Italian immigrants and spoke their native language in the home. His grandfather hauled produce in the city using a horse and wagon. It was my dad’s job at night to brush and feed the horse and put him in his stable. His grandfather died when he was ten, and the body spent three days in the living room before going into the ground.
My dad’s grandmother was volatile and would spank him with the bread paddles that she used for baking. After breaking a paddle over his backside, she’d make him go to the barn and fashion a replacement from the quarter-inch-thick wooden slats used in produce crates. My dad never saw her in any kind of clothes except black dresses. When her husband died, she was already in the process of mourning her son Phillip. He’d been shot dead when he was twenty-eight by an Irish American police officer named Toomey. The murder happened on a Monday night when Phillip pulled his ’29 Ford Model A into the path of Toomey’s ’28 Model A. There was an argument, and Toomey pulled a .38 revolver and shot Phillip twice through the back.e My dad’s grandmother retained his bloodied outfit and stored it in a paper box on the top shelf of a hall closet. My dad pulled it down to inspect it often, and liked to put his fingertip through the bullet holes.
The Great Depression hit when my dad was five. Besides dashing what had been a long stretch of high fur prices spurred by the fashion trends of the Roaring Twenties, it dashed his family’s meager finances. My father earned small change hauling contraband liquor from house to house by concealing it beneath a blanket in a wagon. At night he’d go to the freight yard to gather pieces of heating coal that fell off rail-cars. When he couldn’t find any, he might climb onto a train and help some fall. Back then there was a decent market for used cotton materials. He stole shop rags from the maintenance department of a nearby foundry that produced horseshoes by reaching through the windows to grab oiled rags from a steel drum. One time he turned around from the window to find a revolver in his face.
The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor when he was seventeen and he dropped out of school to work on a defense plant assembly line. His job was to cut the grooves into castellated nuts. He enlisted with the army when he turned eighteen. He was assigned to the army’s 87th Infantry Division and was sent to basic training in Grenada County, Mississippi. Before he was sent overseas, a girl he’d been seeing in Chicago showed up in Mississippi. She was carrying a baby in her belly and a wedding ring in her hand. He married her, his first wife, in a courthouse. The army then shipped my dad to Casablanca, Morocco, where he was stationed at what he referred to as a “repo depot” (repo meaning “replacement,” as in fresh troops to be processed). From there men were assigned to divisions that had been stripped of soldiers due to the massive casualties of the North African campaign.
Somehow, through all of that, my father managed to develop a deep love for the outdoors and hunting even though no one in his family had ever done that—at least not since arriving in America. My dad told me stories of hopping railroad cars out into the farm country outside Chicago. He’d sleep beneath a canvas tarp in the brushy strips of woods along the tracks, and he’d catch fish out of stream culverts that ran beneath the tracks. In the city, he’d spend days on the Chicago piers fishing for yellow perch and selling his catch to passersby. When he thought about his early passion for the outdoors, he liked to say it was in his DNA, because where else would it have come from? Considering that modern humans have spent well over 90 percent of their history as hunters and fishermen, there was probably a bit of truth in his assessment. We were built to follow game, capture it, and butcher it. The fact that his kids might make some spending money in such a way seemed to him to be perfectly normal and acceptable.
As the opening day of muskrat season approached, my brothers and I jumped into our new pastime with fanatical intensity. We hung out our traps in the rain so they’d get a light coat of rust on them, and then we boiled them in a galvanized tub set over a fire and filled with water, oak bark, and husks from black walnuts that we collected in the woods and smacked open with sledgehammers. The traps came out brownish black. We then dipped them in melted paraffin wax in order to make them slick and fast. By law, traps must have the owner’s name affixed to them. At night, we cut strips of aluminum from beer cans and etched our names and license numbers into the metal with an awl. We used brass wire to fix the tags to the chains on the traps. On Halloween, the day before opening day, we rode our bikes to the end of Dead Dog Roadf and used machetes to cut a small bundle of four-foot-long poplar poles. Sharpened on one end, these would be used to anchor our traps to the lake bed so that the muskrats didn’t haul them off when they got caught. Our dad took some pop rivets and a roll of canvas webbing and fitted a five-gallon bucket with shoulder straps so we could carry all our gear around. We punched some holes in the bottom so that water would drain out. We then loaded it up: traps, a hatchet and machete, a tube of mint toothpaste, Q-tips, a canvas coin bag full of nails and wire staples.
When a trapper heads out to place his traps, he’s said to be laying out a line. The thinking on this is that the traps are like waypoints along a route—the trapline—that the trapper will follow whenever he visits his traps to remove animals and make necessary adjustments. We left home during the final moments of Halloween day, so that we’d be in position to begin setting traps when the season opened at the turn of midnight.
Our promptness was inspired by general excitement, and also by a fear of competition. For weeks we’d been sweating the idea that some rival trapper would swoop in and snatch our muskrats out from underneath us. To defend against competition, we decided to set our first trapline along North Lake. We figured it was most vulnerable to interlopers because it was less developed than Middle Lake, the one we lived on, and therefore might seem more inviting and accessible to guys who didn’t live around there.
An individual trap and its context on the ground or in the water are known collectively as a set. There are many, many varieties of trapping sets, though they are generally organized into two categories: bait sets and blind sets. Bait sets rely on olfactory attractants or visual stimulants to lure the animal toward the trap.g Blind sets are placed in the path that an animal might naturally use without provocation or enticement—though you can influence the animal’s specific line of travel with small sticks or other obstacles without forfeiting the blind set classification.
On our first night of muskrat trapping, we used what basically amounted to blind sets even though we placed the Q-tips dipped in mint toothpaste near some of the traps because we’d read that muskrats liked the smell. Our six Conibears went into den entrances. Making these sets was so easy you could hardly mess it up. The holes usually have a concave, troughlike runway, called a “run,” leading up to them. These runs are usually about the same width as a 110 Conibear—or, rather, 110 Conibears are made to be about the same width as these runs. Say about six inches. If the run’s not wide enough to accommodate the trap, you can widen it by digging it out with a machete or hatchet. Or else you just stuff the toe of your boot in there and wiggle it around and widen it out until the trap fits. We soon learned to call this “bootin’ out a run.” If the run is too wide, you just funnel it down with some guide sticks shoved into the bottom. We called that “neckin’ down a run.” Once the Conibear was in place, we’d run a stake through the ring on the trap’s chain and shove it into the bottom of the lake.
I’ll always remember the last trap we set that night. It was on a peninsula of land that we called Crazy Mary’s Point, in honor of a mean old lady who had supposedly hanged herself in an old cottage nearby. There was a muskrat den on the eastern edge of the peninsula, but the runway was positioned right beneath a submerged log. There was no room beneath this log for a Conibear trap. The three of us got into a big argument over what to do. Either move the log and make room for the trap, or try to slip a foothold trap beneath the log and see if that worked. While Danny supported the latter idea, Matt and I supported the former. We argued about this for some time, keeping it to whispers because we were on Crazy Mary’s Point and that seemed like the right thing to do. Eventually Danny won out, on the grounds that moving the log would spook the muskrats that lived there. So he lay out on the log, dangling his arm in the water while he felt around in the underwater darkness for the perfect place to set the foothold. I remember being overcome by a great sense of pride in being his brother, because reaching into dark water where you couldn’t see anything was scary business.
A Conibear will kill a muskrat pretty much outright, but a leghold won’t. You need to rig the trap so that the muskrat drowns, or else it might twist off its leg and get away. To do this in shallow water requires various tricks, depending on the circumstances. We took about a body’s length of fourteen-gauge wire and wrapped one end around the ring of the trap’s chain and wrapped the other end around a stake that we drove into the mud in about two feet of water. Next, we pounded in another stake about three feet beyond that, in even deeper water. This was called a tangle stake. The muskrat would swim out and get the trap’s wire all tangled up, and then he wouldn’t be able to come back into the shallows. The concept is sort of similar to when you’re walking a leashed dog and he passes on the opposite side of a tree from you, except there’s no person around to help the muskrat get sorted back out again.h
With our work done, we walked back home.
Looking back on it, I think that that night—the wee hours of November 1, 1984—was the first night of my life that I did not sleep at all. I was way too excited. My head swarmed with thoughts of success and failure, riches and poverty, and my dreams of being a modern-day frontiersman. I was also troubled by a deal that I’d struck with my brothers about the next day. The deal had to do with the fact that Danny and Matt were in seventh and eighth grades, respectively, and that their school was pretty far away. They had a half-mile walk to the bus stop and then a forty-five-minute bus ride, which meant that they had to leave before sunup. This, in turn, meant that they wouldn’t be able to run our trapline until after they got home from school, as we didn’t want to disturb it in the early morning predawn hours while the muskrats were in their peak period of activity. I, on the other hand, was still in fifth grade, and my school was just two miles away and I always rode my bike there unless there was too much snow. So, knowing that I’d have plenty of time to check some of the traps in the morning on my own, Matt and Danny made me promise that I wouldn’t.
I want to clarify here that my two brothers are among the few most important people in my life. I’ve been in the company of at least one of them on about 90 percent of the occasions when something truly memorable has happened to me in the woods, and I love them in a way that would not make sense if I tried to write it out. There are no words for it, no sentences good enough. With that said, I have to confess a secret that I’ve kept from them for the past twenty-eight years. After Matt and Danny left for school on Thursday, November 1, 1984, I crumbled under the great anxiety and excitement that comes with being a fledgling muskrat trapper. I’m not proud of this, but it’s true. If I have any excuse at all, it’s only that one of my most common routes to school roughly paralleled North Lake’s southern bank. The temptation was too much to withstand, so rather than riding down the road on my bike, I walked it down the steep blueberry-covered hill behind the Babcock family’s house and came to the shore of the lake. I kept to dry ground while I pushed my bike along the lakeshore toward the first trap, so that my bike tires didn’t leave any traces in the mud that would betray my betrayal.
As I got close, maybe about twenty yards away, I noticed a strange black shape, like an eight-inch chunk of rope, floating next to the stake. It sat at the top of the lake in the way bull kelp will float near the surface of the ocean when the tide is out. A couple of steps later and I could see that the rope was actually a muskrat tail, and that one end of it was attached to the submerged and furry rump of a muskrat that was clenched in the jaws of the Conibear. I didn’t even touch the muskrat. Instead I ran down the shoreline toward the next stake. The next trap was empty, and I passed by without stopping. I then passed several more empty ones, and my enthusiasm started to fade. But just as I approached the point of land near Crazy Mary’s Point I passed a weeping willow where we’d set a Conibear in a bank den entrance that was burrowed between two tree roots. Again I was greeted by the black snaky tail of a muskrat gripped in the trap.
I ran on past, my eyes now focused on the stake that we’d placed where Danny had reached under the log. I had a sinking feeling when I didn’t see a tail there, but something still looked kind of strange to me. I could see the wire running out toward the depths. I peered into the murky water, trying to decipher what I was seeing. Then it came to me. Out there, under the water and wrapped around the tangle stake, was a drowned muskrat. He was as big as the other two put together. If it wasn’t an eight-dollar muskrat, I figured that nothing was. And while I would later catch more than a thousand furbearing animals in my trapping career, and I would pull as many as twenty-seven muskrats in a single day and as many as 250 muskrats in a single month, catching that big muskrat was for a long time the pinnacle of my happiness and clarity as a trapper. It inspired me to jump and whoop, something that probably hadn’t happened in a long time on Crazy Mary’s Point.
Danny (right) helps me show off our first muskrat. Hundreds more would follow.
As I cut up the hill and hit Duff Road and pedaled toward school, I knew that three things in my life had changed. First, I knew that I wouldn’t lie to my brothers ever again because I was really starting to dread having to recheck the traps with them while pretending to be surprised by the outcome. Second, I would never again attend school on the opening day of trapping season, because I could see that formal education was too much of a distraction from my true calling. Third, I knew that I would make my living as a trapper for the rest of my life, no matter what I had to do.
The fulfillment of the first of those proclamations just came naturally. The second proclamation was easy to accomplish as well, because one of my father’s favorite quotes was Mark Twain’s line about not letting school interfere with your education. The third proclamation would prove to be much more difficult to achieve, and my attempts at its fulfillment would lead me to compromise and endanger just about everything I thought I believed in.
*The popularity of fur had gotten so great that consumer demand defied logic. We’re all familiar with the image of New York pimps wearing full-length furs in not-so-cold weather (which was a phenomenon that coincided with the beginning of the fur boom) and it extended to other demographics as well. During the boom, one of the largest furriers in the country was in Las Vegas, even though that city has average January highs of 58 degrees. Another peculiarity of the fur boom of the 1970s and ’80s was that almost every species of furbearing animal experienced a sharp increase in value. Everything from opossums to wolves were bringing record highs. It’s more common for just one or two species—or even varieties of species—to rise in value at any given time. Take bobcats, for instance. In the latter part of the first decade of the 2000s, bobcats from the western United States with white bellies and clearly defined black spots were bringing up to five or six hundred dollars apiece. At the same time, you could hardly get ten or twenty dollars for a sandy-bellied bobcat from the eastern United States.
†Muskrat furs from the United States were primarily sold domestically and to Western Europeans. They were used as a liner in outerwear, including rainwear. Bomber hats made of muskrat fur were also popular.
‡Raccoon pelts were commonly used for full-length coats. Generally, pelts from northern animals tend to outprice pelts from southern animals, because northern animals have thicker and heavier hides. But raccoons presented an anomaly to this rule because they were popular with Asian women. It is difficult to sell heavy furs to Asian women, because they generally have slighter frames. A nine-pound coat is about the limit. For this reason, thinly furred coats from southern raccoons were bringing higher prices than heavily furred northern raccoons. However, the market for northern raccoons was, at least in part, supported by Italian women—who will buy fur coats weighing eleven pounds.
§Mink was used for stoles, garment trim, and short and full-length coats and jackets.
‖Coyote, along with fox and bobcat, were regarded as “fun” furs by furriers. They were flashy, and particularly popular in places such as Colorado ski towns. Coyote furs were also used widely as trim on parka hoods. The best fur for this is wolverine, as the hollow hairs trap heat and do not collect frost from exhaled breath.
aBeaver pelts are commonly sheared to a velvet-like shortness and used in garments. They are sometimes bleached and dyed as well. You’ll see advertisements for “sheared blonde beaver,” which stretches the limits of double entendre. The most common application for beaver pelts is the production of wool felt from the fur. Wool felt made from beaver is water resistant and was highly prized as a material for men’s top hats. The demand for such hats lasted for many decades, and drove the market for beaver all through the colonial and frontier period of North American history. In the 1830s, the fashion shifted toward silk top hats, which killed the beaver felt market with a thoroughness and rapidity that brings to mind the way cassette tapes were slaughtered by compact disk technology in the early 1990s. Nowadays, cowboy hats made from beaver wool felt are still popular, and the wool is used for pool tables and card tables and such.
bAt a time, particularly during the 1700s and 1800s, Canada was basically owned and operated by a trapping and fur trading outfit called Hudson’s Bay Company. It was commonly known as HBC, leading employees to joke that it stood for “Here Before Christ.” In the late 1700s, the company shipped out enough beaver pelts every year to make a half-million hats. It maintained its own naval force. When the French and Indian War broke out between French colonies and British colonies in 1756, it was largely over access to the country’s beaver hides. This was nothing new—for a hundred years, France and England had been using Native Americans to fight a proxy war over beaver pelts. Russians were prowling the coastlines of Alaska for fur beginning in the 1740s, and they kept at it until we bought the place in 1867. Part of their interest in selling the territory came from the fact that they’d grossly overharvested the fur and felt that the land was degraded in value.
cThe subjects of trapping and fur garments always make me think of a funny story. A year or two after the events described in this chapter, I gave a furrier eight muskrat pelts and a payment of sixty dollars in order to make me a custom fur bomber hat—the kind with fur on the outside and ear flaps that can be tied in a knot at the top of your head. I wanted one of the hats because they looked cool, and also because they were worn by bush pilots and Yukon gold rushers and other people I admired.
I must have been at the beginning of a growing spurt when the furrier measured my head, because by the time I got the hat in the mail it fit very snugly. Within a year, it was so tight that it pressed a deep red line across my forehead and gave me mild headaches whenever I wore it. Within two years, I could only wear it for about ten minutes or so until the pain was such that I had to remove it.
One might think that I would have returned the hat for resizing, or simply quit wearing it, but the former idea never occurred to me and the latter idea was preposterous because the hat had cost me a lot of money and looked really cool. So what I would do was wear it until it hurt, and then put it in my pocket until the pain subsided, and then put it back on again. This, no doubt, led to the hat’s loss. One day I was trapping muskrats through the ice in the middle of the winter and reached into the pocket of my insulated bib overalls in order to remove the hat, but it was gone. I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find it. I was bummed for weeks.
The next spring, long after I’d forgotten about the hat, I happened to be driving along on Blue Lake Road in a station wagon owned by a drifter I knew named Barefoot. As we were passing a marsh where I sometimes did some trapping through the ice, I looked off to the side of the road and saw a muskrat lying near the edge of a melting snowbank right where I usually parked. “Dead muskrat,” I yelled. “Right there!” Barefoot slammed on his brakes and I jumped out to investigate the animal to see if it was in good enough shape to have commercial value. But when I reached my prize, I was surprised to see that it was not a muskrat. It was my hat. It was now tighter than ever, but since it was soaking wet I thought I could maybe stretch it out by wearing it. I withstood the discomfort only so long, and the hat found its way back into my pocket as Barefoot and I set beaver traps near a place called Cisco Bayou. At the end of the day, when I reached into my pocket to retrieve the hat, it was gone again. I haven’t seen it since, but if it ever turns up you can bet that I’m going to have it professionally resized.
dLike doughnuts, eggs, and beer, traps are most commonly sold by the dozen and trappers discuss them in terms of dozens. Beyond tradition, I have no idea why this is the case. But I’d like to know.
eThere was a brief investigation. In a Chicago Evening American article titled “Policeman Faces Writ in Killing,” the journalist describes a moment when my grandfather Anthony personally questioned Toomey during an inquest. He asked, “Why did you shoot when my brother was running away?” Toomey responded, “I thought he was going to shoot me.” As a punishment Toomey was suspended, without pay, for one week. I have the original newspaper clipping about my great-uncle Phillip’s murder/shooting. The clip measures two inches by nine inches, and it’s so old that it’s taken on the color of cardboard. The layout of the newspaper is such that there is a complete article on the back side of the clipping titled “German Dye Trust To Sell Movie Interests.” It explains how I. G. Farben, the giant German chemical and dye conglomerate, was getting out of the movie industry by liquidating its film production company and ceasing to be the distributor of United Artists’ films in Germany. The article cites uncertain conditions in the German movie industry as the reason. This company would later work hand in hand with the Nazis during World War II, which became my father’s war. I. G. Farben advised the Nazis on which chemical plants to seize during the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland. They used slave laborers at Auschwitz to produce synthetic oil and rubber. And they held the patent for—as well as manufactured, labeled, and distributed—the cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon B. This product of theirs was used to exterminate Jews in concentration camps, including, presumably, many of the same eighty-three thousand slave laborers they put to work in their factories. My dad always referred to Germans (the ones who lived in Germany, that is) as “Krauts,” and he had a hard time letting go of his distrust and hatred for them.
fThat wasn’t the real name of the road, but we called it that because there was a spell of time when you could pretty reliably find dead dogs in the ditches and roadside marshes along there. Because we did not recognize the dogs as neighborhood pets, we suspected that they were feral dogs that had been shot for the crime of running deer. (Now, looking back on this, I wonder if the road commission workers weren’t just using this area as a dumping ground for road-killed dogs.) Since the subject of dead dogs has come up a couple of times in this book already, I’m motivated here to explain that I’ve never killed or harmed a dog, though I have eaten dog meat on several occasions in another country. As for feral cats, another great killer of game and songbirds, my relationship to them hasn’t been so passive.
gSuch attractants and stimulants, known as “lures,” might include bird’s wings (for catching bobcat); slightly spoiled meat, or fresh meat (for fox, coyote, skunk, opossum, etc.); fresh, oily varieties of fish (for raccoon, mink, otter); edible plants such as poplar and cattail (for beaver, muskrat); animal urine (for most furbearing animals, depending on the urine used); and homemade or commercially produced lures that are usually made from liquefied or oil-based blends of pulverized glands, skunk essence, beaver castor, and extracts of fish and meat. (As with urine, they make lure blends that are attractive to just about every furbearing animal.) I used to make my own lure blend for fox, raccoon, and coyote. It was a mixture of beaver castor, a touch of molasses, a dash of fish oil, and the hunks of flesh and rendered oil from feral cats that I’d butcher and bury in the ground in Mason jars until they were partially rotten, or as we’d say, “tainted.” I’d then stabilize the concoction with glycerin in order to halt the rot.
hBelieve me, I realize that it would be appropriate to address the brutality of all this. But there’s really nothing I can say that would make it more palatable. As much as I hate the expression, it is what it is.