I WAS IN MY canoe, scouting for muskrat and beaver sign in a swampy backwater that drained through a narrow channel into a creek about six miles from my house. As I paddled along, I heard what sounded almost like a dog splashing and barking behind a curtain of cattails. I nosed the canoe ahead and there was a river otter, the first I ever saw in my life. It was eating a bluegill with so much vigor that I could hear the fish’s bones crunching from forty yards out. It hissed at me when it noticed me, the sound coming through a mouthful of fish as though the animal were playing a harmonica. Then it crunched the rest of the bluegill down, tail last, and slipped beneath the water’s surface so smoothly that it could have been a chunk of black ice dissolving instantaneously into the water. I followed the otter’s wake as it swam toward the mouth of the marsh. It passed through the body-wide channel with a splash and disappeared into the creek, heading downstream.
It had been almost eight years since my brothers and I caught our first muskrats on North Lake. Matt and Danny had stayed in the trapping business only a few years, calling it quits when the 1987 stock market crash put an end to the decade-long fur boom. After that it got harder and harder to sell fur, though I remained committed to the trapper’s way of life. I continued to plug along under the delusional conviction that fur prices would suddenly and inexplicably come bouncing back—regardless of the fact that America’s appetite for fur had begun to vanish in ways that could not be explained strictly through economics. In many parts of the country, it had become a moral issue as well. Still, I was positive that this coming fall was going to be my best season yet; I planned to catch enough fur to demonstrate to myself and others that trapping was a legitimate way to make a living and not just some anachronistic daydreamer’s pastime. To do that would take luck, and in some weird way it seemed as though the otter was symbolic of luck’s arrival.
After all, the animals had been nearly eradicated from this region through habitat destruction from logging, overharvest by trappers, and wanton slaughter by fishermen who resented the competition over a limited resource. In recent decades, though, the animals had been making a miraculous comeback and were slowly spreading their way southward into areas that hadn’t seen otters in many years. Now, apparently, they’d expanded their range into my own territory. As someone who loved wilderness and water, I could hardly help but admire this creature that combined those two elements with such perfect grace. Even though the animals were still off-limits to trappers in this area, I felt as though the otter’s presence on my trapline could help bring back the frontier that I had been born too late to experience. Maybe, along with that, it had brought back the ability for a man to make his living in the wilderness.
When I graduated from high school, earlier that summer, I was relieved that school would no longer interfere with my time in the woods. The only problem was that my old man had a rule that you couldn’t live at his house unless you were actively in school and getting good grades. So I was faced with the annoyance of having to move out unless I enrolled in college. And since moving out took a lot of time and a good job, I opted for school. I signed up at a local community college that was only twenty minutes from my home. Friends from high school jokingly referred to it as the thirteenth grade. There I could take a semester’s worth of classes for six hundred dollars, which was way cheaper than paying my own rent. I went through the course catalog and picked out a bunch of night classes that included an aerobics course. This schedule had me in class only Monday through Thursday, 6 P.M. to 9 P.M. Life was looking good.
I busted my ass all summer. I had a job six nights a week, from midnight to 3 A.M., cleaning a green bean processing plant with high-pressure hoses. We used duct tape to seal the ankles and sleeves of our rain gear to keep out some of the water. I’d come home and sleep until mid-morning, and then I’d go into the woods to cut firewood. I sold green firewood for sixty-five dollars a cord, or 128 cubic feet. I saved as much wood as I could for later, because a cord of dry wood fetched ninety dollars in January.*
All along, my plan was to save up enough money through the summer to finance my entire four-month trapping season. That way I’d be able to stretch and dry all my pelts and hold them until late January, when I’d sell them at the annual Michigan Trappers Association fur auction in Ravenna. The auction drew in fur buyers from around the Midwest and Canada, and the competitive bidding process usually jacked the prices up significantly from what you’d get by making a private visit to one of these fur buyers’ homes.
But despite my best efforts, I just couldn’t put away the kind of money that I needed. All summer I was faced with the expenses of empty gas tanks, truck breakdowns, and chain saw repairs. Plus, there were a lot of costs associated with the coming trapping season. I needed to buy new traps, update old equipment, get a new canoe, and tune my vehicle for the rigors of off-road driving. That fall, after paying college tuition and buying books, I went into the October 15 fox and coyote opener with only a few hundred dollars saved up.
The season got off to a slow start. Two weeks of hard trapping yielded only seven red foxes, two gray foxes, two coyotes, and a dozen or so raccoons. By the time mink and muskrat season opened, on Sunday, November 1, I’d already had to take a small loan from my dad to keep me afloat. I set well over sixty traps that day, working from way before sunrise to way after sunset. The next day I had what I knew would be the best haul of the season: twenty-seven muskrats, six raccoons, and a mink. Before driving to school, I dropped by my house and grabbed my stretched fox and coyote pelts and put them on the front seat of my truck. That night I paid a visit to an area fur buyer named Abe. This guy bought a lot of raw, unfinished pelts and made some of his money on the markup that he’d get by fleshing and stretching them. He was a touch overweight, and wore old sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off at the wrists. His hair was pretty long for an old man and he combed it straight back. In the winter, he heated his workshop with gobs of raccoon fat that he’d scrape off the hides and toss into a barrel stove to burn.
My dad never trusted Abe because of something that had happened one time when I’d killed a mink with a rifle when I was hunting deer. I’d been watching a chipmunk scurrying in and out of the labyrinth of exposed roots created by a beech tree that had tipped over. All of a sudden, the mink ran over and chased the chipmunk into a hole. The chipmunk must have given it the slip, though, because the mink came back up empty-mouthed and started scouring the root structure with a vengeance. When the animal saw me, it looked right at me and hissed like a snake. Mink were worth forty dollars then, so I took aim. The bullet took off its head and removed an inch-wide strip of fur that ran about six inches down the mink’s back. My dad and I spent over an hour carefully skinning what was left of the mink and getting it tacked out nicely on a wooden stretcher. My father came away from the project with the attitude that the partial animal should be worth more than a regular mink, just because of the work he put into it. Abe disagreed. The mink was missing a significant portion of the most valuable part of its fur, he explained. The center strip from the mink’s back goes into the nicest coats. He offered only twenty dollars. I now realize that Abe was actually being quite generous, but my father never forgave the slight. He contended that Abe’s crookedness was linked to his ethnicity—which was okay for my dad to say, because he was Italian, too—and so I maintained my own cautious approach in my business dealings with Abe.
Me with a load of fur after a long day of trapping. About thirty muskrats on the tailgate, a pair of raccoons in hand.
However cautious I was, nothing could have prepared me for Abe’s offer. When he got done looking at my pelts, he told me that the best he could do was $350 for the entire haul. Of course, I had known that fur prices were down, but I didn’t realize they were that down. Back in 1984, when I’d started trapping, that haul of furs would have been worth thousands of dollars. Now here I was, and the furs didn’t even have enough value to keep me flush with cash for another week. What’s more, it didn’t come close to covering the investments I’d made in equipment. Abe must have registered my desperation, because he pulled out a plastic package containing coils of cable that I immediately recognized as snares.
Even though the technology of a snare is ancient and extremely simple—an animal walks through a loop and the loop closes around its body and holds it—it remains one of the most efficient tools for catching furbearing animals today. The problem with snares, at least in the eyes of their critics, is that this efficacy is somewhat indiscriminate. While a trapper sets his snares to catch his targeted species around the neck, it’s easy for larger species such as deer (or livestock) to get their feet caught up in snares. What’s more, should the trapper forget where he set them or neglect to collect them, snares are much more likely than regular traps to stay in working order for a long period of time and through all kinds of bad weather. Even a snare that’s been knocked over and covered in snow can still snag a deer’s hoof or the paw of someone’s pet dog. And since a snare doesn’t kill such large animals outright, it’s possible for them to suffer a long time before they either die from exhaustion or starvation or a predator gets hold of them. And while all of these problems can be alleviated and even eliminated through caution and diligence on the part of those using snares, the law doesn’t always trust people to do what’s right. So snares are heavily regulated in much of the country and outright prohibited in the rest—including the state that I happened to be in.
Still, Abe told me to go ahead and try them out. “If you don’t like ’em, give the ones you don’t use back. If you do like ’em, you can pay me in fur on your next visit.” He set them down on his workbench and started to count out my money. When he was done, I grabbed the cash and left with the snares in my pocket.
The snares were on my mind more or less constantly over the next month. I kept them tucked between the springs and the foam on the underside of my pickup’s bench seat, and I could almost hear them calling to me as I drove around. But I didn’t actually pull them out until a week or so after Thanksgiving. By then the general deer season was over and the woods were quiet and empty of people, and the lakes and ponds were beginning to freeze up. I was setting muskrat traps along a stream, where the moving water would keep the ice off for another month or so. While taking breaks to warm my fingers, I studied the banks of the stream to see what sorts of tracks might have collected in the snow. In one place, where the stream made a sharp curve to the left, I noticed a single set of tracks that came down to the bank and crossed a snow-covered log that had fallen like a bridge across a smaller tributary stream. From a distance I could tell that they were made by a fox, because the animals tend to place their feet in a straight line when they walk. That is, if a fox took ten steps you’d be able to pull a string tight and lay it across nine of them.† I walked over to the tracks to have a more careful look. Not many people know this, but a fox will often use the same trail again and again in the snow without leaving more than one set of prints. Each time the animal passes through, it’ll put its feet back into the holes that it used the last time. Examining the tracks, I could tell that was happening here. The bottom of the track was not just a clean imprint of a single paw; instead, it was an oval of packed snow made from several footfalls.
Normally I wouldn’t have paid much attention to these tracks, because the weather conditions at that time of year—snow and fluctuating temperatures—make foothold traps very difficult to work with. During the day, whenever the air temperature rose up above freezing, the dirt or snow that I used to conceal my fox traps would become saturated with water. Then, at night, when the temperature dropped back down, the covering would freeze so hard that you couldn’t trigger the trap with a hammer let alone with the delicate touch of a fox’s paw.
But the snares I’d gotten were fairly indifferent to snow. I stood there for a while and thought about this, then walked all the way back to my truck and pulled a couple of the snares out from beneath the seat. I used my lineman’s pliers to snip off a length of eight-gauge wire. I fastened that to the swivel end of the snare and then wrapped the remaining end around the base of a tree. I then cut a dead limb with my hatchet and jabbed it into the ground so that it stood up like a flagpole right next to the log. To this limb I attached a small tab of fourteen-gauge wire. After opening the loop of the snare into a circle with a nine-inch diameter, I used the tab of wire to support it in a position that was eight inches directly over the log. If the fox came back, his head would pass through the loop.
That’s exactly what happened. When I came back two days later, the nicest fox that I’d caught all year was waiting for me. It had wrapped itself around the anchor tree like a tetherball, and it was stone dead and half frozen. The only thing that surprised me more than the fox’s presence was my reaction to it. Normally, catching a fox gave me a rush of pride. They are known for their wiliness, and catching them was a validation of my woodsmanship. But seeing this fox in the snare bothered me in a deep way.
It wasn’t as though I’d never broken a game law. One time, not long before this happened, my brother Matt and I sold forty gallons of smelt for forty dollars. That’s illegal.‡ Another time, while hunting squirrels near the White River, I killed a salmon with a shotgun. That’s also illegal. However, those were semi-spontaneous instances that seemed to pit my juvenile rationality against the letter of the law. When the guy offered to buy the smelt from us, we sold them under the justification that the smelt were already dead anyway, so what was the difference? Besides, we could have legally given the fish away, so what was wrong with taking a little gas money in exchange? As for the salmon, that fish had taken so many wrong turns on its upstream migratory journey that it was lolling around in a dead-end cattail marsh. Never in a hundred years would she find a mate or a suitable bed of gravel on which to deposit her eggs. Wasn’t it just as good for the salmon to end up in my dad’s fish smoker as it was to rot on the bottom of the marsh?
As much as I tried to use similar logic to justify the act of setting the snare, I really couldn’t make it work. I knew it was wrong, plain and simple. Not only was it a premeditated and explicit violation of the game laws, it was a violation of the spirit of the game laws. Not only do hunters abide by regulations in order to even the playing field between us and our quarry, we abide by game laws in order to even the playing field between one another. By agreeing to operate under the same sets of rules and conditions, hunters divide available resources according to skill and determination rather than a free-for-all system of lawless opportunism. To violate the pact is as much a sin against other hunters as it is a sin against nature.
I wish I could say that I considered all of this and then tossed the snares into Mosquito Creek, but I can’t. Rather, the guilt that I felt served only to egg me on. One half of me despised the other half for feeling bad, and that first half wanted to attack the second half. I was like a guy who wishes he could punch a concrete wall without getting hurt, and so he does it over and over again until he develops the necessary level of tolerance. My version of wall punching was to begin setting snares just about anywhere that I felt like it, regardless of safety. I set them along game trails leading to road-killed deer that had obviously been visited by domestic dogs. I set them near popular hiking trails on national forest lands. I set them in the rows of pine tree plantations frequented by rabbit hunters and their beagles.
I recognized the outlaw nature of what I was doing, and I managed to draw the usual parallels between myself and my bygone heroes. Popular mythology aside, Daniel Boone was not just some prince of the wilderness out looking to rescue distressed settlers from savage Indians. He was a professional market hunter, through and through. He killed animals in order to sell their hides and meat. And like any enterprising businessman, he wanted to procure his product line in the cheapest, most efficient way possible. Often that meant breaking the law. The western lands that Boone regarded as free and open were anything but. Fearing that Euro-American intrusion onto Indian lands beyond the Appalachians would upset the tribes and disturb the lucrative fur trade, the British crown passed law after law meant to prevent colonial hunters such as Boone from operating there. To do so was a clear violation of the law. But many of Boone’s western explorations occurred during the years leading up to and including the American Revolution, a time when there was a lot of animosity toward the British. The Americans resented their meddling, and to violate British rule was hardly considered a moral infraction. What’s more, the violation of Indian claims to the land had long ago been established as the American way of doing business; Boone certainly did not toss and turn at night over the thought of screwing some Indians out of their livelihoods.
While Boone had the British crown to rebel against, I had PETA. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had come onto the scene in 1980 and had gained steady traction throughout the decade. While they’ve become something of a self-parody in recent times, they were a powerful force back then. They did an effective job of portraying trapping as a brutish and unnecessarily cruel throwback to man’s darker and more exploitative past. They discussed trapping through a lexicon of suffering—“barbaric,” “inhumane,” “excruciating”—and they supplied a never-ending litany of images showing panic-stricken household pets and stoic wild animals gripped heartlessly in the jaws of traps. While I had seen things that would make PETA posters look like ads for Disney movies, I was deeply insulted by the message they were putting forth. As far as I could see, trappers had built this country and made it what it was, and now these softies were questioning the very foundation of our history.
Also, they were having a serious impact on the public perception of fur and, by extension, fur prices. A lot of people didn’t give a hoot what PETA said, obviously, but the organization’s activities meant that any discussion of fur products would inevitably turn to a discussion about red paint getting thrown on fur garments. And while economic realities were certainly the primary source of the global fur market collapse—after all, Russian, Italian, and Chinese women had yet to even hear of PETA—I had a hard time focusing my anger in that direction. Instead I regarded PETA as an evil and un-American force that was assaulting me in both personal and financial ways.
My paranoia only increased one day when a game warden pulled in behind me while I was parked where a gas pipeline intersected Cedar Creek in Manistee National Forest. My first impulse was to wonder how he knew I was there. Had he followed me in from the main road? But then it occurred to me that the answer was as simple as the fresh snow on the ground. He saw a set of tracks going into the woods and none coming back out, and did the math.
I watched in my side-view mirror as he pulled up to my tailgate in such a way that I was prevented from backing out. Reflexively, I grabbed the snow camo jacket off the seat next to me and tossed it over the snares. I had been eating a pocketful of jerky and warming my toes in the truck’s heater when the warden pulled up, so I stepped out of the truck and kept right on chewing in order to convey a sense of nonchalance and innocence. The warden stepped from his own truck with his hand rested casually on his sidearm, in a manner suggesting that he’d been trained to do it that way. He took a couple of steps toward me and jumped right into the matter at hand: “How’s trapping?” he asked.
“Going all right. Prices are down bad, you know.”
“Mind if I have a look in the back of your truck?” he asked.
“Go ahead.”
I opened up the gate on the topper. Inside, I had my traps and equipment organized in wooden crates that were lined with straw and pine boughs in order to ward off unnatural odors. I never handled my traps with bare hands, because animals would smell my scent and avoid them, but that didn’t stop the warden from reaching in barehanded to check my traps for the mandatory identification tags. Usually, a warden might just check one or two traps to make sure you’re in compliance, but this guy went through every single trap I had with me—probably about four dozen. Then he started snooping around in some of the other crates. I knew from his thoroughness that he was trying to make some kind of a point or other. He didn’t keep me wondering for long.
“You been setting any snares?” he asked.
I looked him right in the eye. “No, sir.”
“You know anyone who’s been setting them?”
“No, sir.”
With that he climbed back into his truck and drove off.
I was still stinging from that encounter a few days later when I headed down into the swamp where I’d seen the river otter earlier that summer. My goal was to make some under-ice sets for muskrats. It was the perfect time of year for that, because there was plenty of ice. You could walk into swampy areas that were otherwise difficult to reach without a boat. Also, the ice made it easy to find animals. Muskrats exhale as they swim underwater, and the ice collects the bubbles in a telltale line that marks perfectly their line of travel. In a place where a lot of animals are traveling through, the bubbles collect so densely that it looks like a solid white line. You can find these even under a layer of snow, just by sweeping likely areas clean with a broom. Then all you do is chop through the ice with an ax and position a trap in the path.
I made a few sets near some muskrat lodges in the back of the marsh, and eventually I worked my way out toward where the swamp drained through the narrow channel into the creek. The ice ended at the mouth of the channel, and the stream flowed by as open water. On the lip of ice at the creek’s edge I could see some slimy black pellets that were about the size of walnuts. I inched forward on the thin ice to have a better look. I’d read that otters will regurgitate the bones and scales of their prey, and that seemed to be what I was looking at on the ice. The greasy black pellets were full of crayfish shells and fish scales and bones. The otter was probably still in the area and was likely using the channel to access its fishing grounds beneath the ice of the swamp. He was climbing up here to rest and, presumably, to catch his breath before diving beneath the ice to fish.
I sat there for a long time thinking about what I should do. I thought about the otter, how happy I’d been to see it that summer. I thought of how it had promised me a good year. But I also thought about how I could probably sell that thing for a lot of money. Otters were a rarity in this area. If I didn’t get a good offer from a fur buyer, I knew that I’d make decent money by selling it to a taxidermist who would mount it and then sell it as a decoration. The risks were pretty small, really. You were allowed to catch one otter per year just ten miles north of where I was. All I had to do was lie about where this happened.
Today it’s difficult for me to explain all of this in a way that makes sense, perhaps because there’s no good explanation. All I can really say is what I did, which is pull a trap from my pack and use it to block the entrance to the channel. I then poked a few sticks in the mud to guide the animal where I wanted it to go. I argued to myself that I’d probably just catch a muskrat. But I knew that the trap I was setting, a 220 Conibear, was better for catching an otter. And that’s just what happened. When I came back, two days later, the otter that had once brought me so much happiness was dead in the trap. I made about fifty bucks so that some lady that I’d never meet in a country that I’d probably never visit could have a nice coat.
Thinking back on that now, I’m reminded of an acquaintance who loves to give the testimony about when he became a born-again Christian. In his telling, he keeps his narrative very tightly focused on his pre-Christian exploits. There were rough-and-tumble bar fights, drugs, women, good times, crazy music, fast motorcycles, and plenty of long hair blowing in the breeze. Eventually, of course, the story becomes true to its own purpose and he gets around to the logical conclusion of finding God and settling down. But every time he tells this story, you can see him getting carried away all over again by the fun and excitement of those days, and by how much he loves his former self.
I admit that there’s an element of that at play here, in that I loved my days as a trapper. I learned and saw many things. I chased a dream that I believed in. I sacrificed for something that was elusive and difficult. But on the day that I killed the otter, I’d accomplished something else, as well: I’d become an asshole.
*Selling firewood could be great money or it could really suck, depending on the circumstances. A cord of wood is 128 cubic feet and can weigh anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 pounds. I had a rack for my 1984 Chevy three-quarter-ton 4×4 pickup that could accommodate such a load, and I’d beefed up the leaf springs to keep the truck’s bed from scraping the rear axle. Still, with a full load the truck was almost impossible to handle because the front tires seemed to float off the ground and the steering wheel had only a touch of resistance when you turned it.
†Place a string along the trail of a domestic dog and you’ll only hit four or five of its tracks. Coyotes walk straighter than a domestic dog, but not as straight as a fox.
‡It is illegal for individuals to sell wild-caught fish and wild game. There are some exceptions with fish, but none with birds and animals. When you buy such things as deer or elk or pheasant in a restaurant, you are buying farm-raised captive animals.