Tracks of muskrat feet and tail
THE WINTER WAS AN UNUSUALLY HARD ONE in the Pend Oreille Valley, with snow piled so deep that families could not find enough to eat. All over the valley, members of the Kalispel tribe were suffering. One man decided that before he grew any weaker he would try to cross the mountains to the west and look for food. His wife packed up the last of their root cakes, which gave him just enough strength to make it over the crest of the mountains. He was barely conscious when he descended into the swampy Colville Valley. So goes a story told to Salish elder Antoine Andrews by his great-grandfather.
When the Kalispel man reached the small river that drained the valley, he discovered that the bottoms were locked in a tight freeze. All through the frozen marshes, muskrat lodges glistened silver, and the “push-ups” around their breathing holes rose like clear domes glazed with ice. As Andrews described how the weary traveler surveyed the muskrat village, his story bubbled with a Salish term of amazement sometimes translated as “Wow!”
The Kalispel man found a place to build a fire, and knowing that his everyday bone arrowheads were not strong enough to penetrate the tough hide of a muskrat, he hafted special flint points to his arrows. With his weapons prepared, the hunter carried a heavy stick to the closest push-up and shattered the icy dome that covered the muskrat’s breathing hole. Then he crouched down and waited.
A muskrat approached the breathing hole, curious as all muskrats are curious, and stuck its head up to see what was going on. The man shot it with an arrow. He brought the rodent over to his camp, skinned it, and skewered it on a stick of red-osier dogwood. He drove the stick into the ground close to his fire, where the meat could slowly roast. When its fat began to splatter down onto the coals, he returned to the push-up and crouched down again. Another muskrat peeked out of the hole and soon was skewered next to the first one. The man kept hunting until he had a whole ring of muskrats staked around his fire.
As the meat finished roasting, he ate his way around the circle, grease dripping from his mouth and hands. Wow! That was good food for a starving man. When he was finished, he picked up his stick and walked to the next push-up and smashed the ice cap that covered it. Before long he had another ring of muskrats skewered around his fire. He ate all of those, too, and kept on smashing and roasting until he couldn’t eat any more.
Over the next few days, he shot and skinned and dried as many muskrats as he could carry, then took them back over the mountain trail to his home. He divided the meat among all the families in his village, and invited anyone who wished to journey with him to this swampy, food-rich place. Thus a group of Kalispel people came to live in the center of the Colville Valley in the early 1800s, drawn there by little muskrat, the fruit of the wetland.
Viewed from the rim of quartzite cliffs that line the west side of the valley above the town of Chewelah, the Colville River has a primordial look. Depressions marking ancient oxbows wind through a maze of backwater pools; wet deciduous growth loops gracefully around a craggy hill that was clearly once an island in a wetter world. Not so many millennia ago, the southern lobe of the last great glacial advance lay in the valley like an extended digit pointing due south. When the ice withdrew, it left tightly curved rills of cold water from one side to the other, a moist fingerprint that formed the perfect habitat for small channel swimmers.
Muskrats are rooted in such swampy North American habitats; they have been adapting to the whims of frozen seasons from the very beginning of their time on earth, back at the far edge of the Pleistocene. These water rodents live all over North America, and their pointed noses and curious habits appear in tribal stories from Hudson Bay to the mouth of the Columbia. Often Beaver and Otter are characters as well, but it is always the smaller Musk Rat, Beaver’s Little Brother, who keeps diving until he succeeds in bringing up the handful of mud from which all solid land was created. That’s Musk Rat, hero in a watery world. In one tale, he is rewarded with plenty of roots to eat, plus a wife to give him a great many children so that he might become more numerous than any of the other animals. But Musk Rat can also be a jester: Another story describes him distracting an archer from shooting his friend Beaver by pointedly rubbing the scent glands beneath his tail that give him his name. That’s Musk Rat, scratching his ass and playing the clown.
A MID-OCTOBER BREEZE SWEPT THROUGH the cattails as we slid the boat into the Colville River and assumed our places in the bow and stern. At the highway bridge we ducked low, fended off the concrete pillars, and emerged into a solid stand of reed canarygrass backed by rolling pastureland. A cow that had wandered down for a drink chewed her cud and watched us float past without a backward step.
This part of the valley looked very different than the wide marshy bottoms that greeted the Kalispel traveler two centuries before. As white settlers moved into the area in the late 1800s, there was a widespread movement to drain wetlands and create more land for agriculture. Around 1910, a steam-powered dragline channelized this section of the river into straight lines and long sweeping bends. Except for a few weeks during spring runoff, when a thin sheet of placid water sometimes stretches from one side of the valley to the other, anyone coming down from the mountain today would see wide fields of deep black peat bordering the thin crease of the river. And yet, one element of that former world has persisted. Only a few paces beyond the cow’s muddy tracks, Steve Schalock raised his paddle to point out a clear swath cut through the aquatic vegetation.
“When it starts to get chilly in the fall, that’s what I always think about,” he said. “Football and muskrats.”
Although Schalock retains a halfback’s feel for open space, fur pelts were part of his family’s fall routine for much longer than pigskins. His grandfather started trapping weasels in the wheat country west of Spokane just after the turn of the century; he progressed to coyote, then badger, then drifted toward the watercourses to work muskrat and finally mink. He moved to the Colville Valley in 1929, just in time for the Depression, and there his traplines helped him squeak through the hard times.
Like many trappers, the elder Schalock kept records of catches and sales. In the winter of 1934–35, he sold the skins of six badgers, three minks, fourteen weasels, and seventy-three muskrats. He traded mostly with Sears, Roebuck but occasionally dealt with a merchant whose store dated back to the Hudson’s Bay Company era. Those mid-Depression rats fetched an average of fifty cents per pelt—significant money in those days. Fur prices often run against the grain of common logic, and when muskrats more than doubled in value the following fall, Grandpa Schalock knew exactly where to concentrate his sets. His account book for the 1935–36 season tallied 134 rats, which sold for $150.90, dwarfing the minks, badgers, weasels, and single skunk listed below them on the chart.
As pelt prices cycled through the next five decades, two more generations of Schalocks absorbed the craft. Steve was still in elementary school when he made his first muskrat sets inside the Chewelah city limits, and his younger brother and sister in turn also learned how to skin and stretch during the intense November season.
“Our grandpa sawed out a bunch of planks in the shape of ironing boards,” Steve recalled, “and you would pair them together. By sliding the two halves opposite each other, you could stretch out any sized animal with a perfect fit. Dad always liked to finish the mink himself, because he wanted them to be just so. Mink was kind of his specialty. But he was willing to leave some of the muskrats to us kids, and I got pretty good at them.”
The family laid lines north and south of town, checked them assiduously for two weeks, then pulled them so there would be animals left to overwinter. When Steve began socking away money for college, the Schalocks extended their traplines up a few favorable creeks and began to go after beaver as well. For several seasons the family’s catch ranged from twenty to sixty minks, forty to eighty beavers, and two hundred to three hundred muskrats. It was cold, wet, physical work, fueled by a sense of skilled camaraderie.
“After a few days, it became kind of a blur,” Steve remembered. “Going out when it was still black dark, parking at every bridge, one guy taking off downstream, the other up. I’d always run between the sets, and if there was a beaver, I’d tie it to a piece of rope I kept around my waist and just drag it behind me. Hard to run with two or three frozen beavers weighing you down. And when you went into the water, man, it was hard to warm back up.
“I remember some Saturdays we’d get back midmorning and be in a complete stupor. Sit around, eat, maybe turn on the TV, lots of skinning to do, and all day we’d still be glowing just from being out there.”
When the price of rats leaped past five dollars apiece in the late 1970s, other people jumped into the business, but not all of the newcomers were thinking in the long term. It took only a few traps left in the water too long to hurt the beaver population and absolutely ruin the country for mink.
“Muskrats, though, you can’t really bother them,” Steve said, “because they reproduce so fast.”
From the bow of the canoe, he pointed out more open pathways, each one exactly the width of a swimming muskrat. The intrusive reed canarygrass marched along both sides of the river, choking out all native vegetation. Naturally, that was what the muskrats were eating. They had pulled up thick bunches of canarygrass by the roots and arranged them in haphazard piles that served as feeding platforms. By the time we had passed a few of the clumps, grouped like miniature loose haystacks on sunny bends along the shoreline, Steve was beginning to make an estimate of the fall rat population. Some of the ragged masses had broken free to drift downstream, and we caught up to one raft after another. Each mat showed sharply clipped green tops and succulent white root tips, tinged pink where the stem emerged from the ground. Occasionally the licorice-green hair of water milfoil, unsightly with slime, coiled in with the crisp grasses. It was another intrusive alien plant, another unsightly nuisance.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “They’ll eat that junk too. Crayfish, frogs, dead fish—they aren’t too particular.”
Over the summer the animals worked the river, caching silage and roots in tunnels burrowed into the bank. When it turned cold, many moved into mounded winter lodges in the broader wetlands, where they could stay inside during bad weather, coming out to use their feeding platforms when it was warm and fair. These feeding stations were situated for escape from predators, yet exposed enough to afford a pleasant nibbling place in low afternoon sun.
I remembered the first time I really watched a muskrat, perched on a shelf like that, devouring green shoots that dripped with the delicious moisture of a muddy pond. The animal manipulated the food so nimbly that to me, as a child, its paws looked like miniature hands and fingers. I couldn’t believe it when my Uncle John reached for his rifle the moment he saw the animal, and cursed when it dove before he could shoot. There were too many of the rats around, he muttered, and they kept undermining the dams on his fishponds.
Steve agreed with my uncle. If there was nothing to control the rats, he said, they would get overcrowded and start fighting with each other. You would see bite marks and pus pockets spoiling the pelts, and diseases like tularemia could come in. Sometimes when a pestilence struck you would find whole clumps of muskrats dead in their lodges, and sometimes surviving animals ate the dead ones. Studies had shown that the germs could live in the ground like distemper around a barn, so that after an outbreak you might not see any muskrats back in an affected area for years and years.
“Grandpa Schalock always said that they actually do better if someone’s in there trapping on them,” Steve said. “It’s like they need some pruning.”
He steered toward the bank, where a low saddle of mud dropped into a hidden backwater. The rise was slick from muskrat sliding, and Steve was certain there was a tunnel nearby. A rat will burrow into a bank, just beneath the surface of the water, then tunnel upward to excavate a large, dry chamber. Over the course of a summer, a pair will raise as many as four litters of kits in their secure nursery. In the easy-digging black peat beside the river, a tunnel might extend for yards, and after a few years of use, a bank can be riddled with numerous entrances, passageways, and chambers. Cow hooves and tractor wheels can break through from above, and the Swiss cheese banks are much more susceptible to erosion. That was why the Schalocks rarely had trouble getting permission from farmers to trap on their land.
We came around a bend to a dilapidated farm bridge. As we eased beneath the slumping timbers, Steve checked the darkened wedge of shore for sign. A muskrat had been at work in one corner, its distinct long-toed tracks neatly split by the unbroken line of its dragging tail. The prints led directly to a pile of freshwater clam shells. On a bed of rocks the mollusks glowed like gray mussels, empty of any meat.
“Rats like those clams, too. And you’d be amazed at how many of them there are in the river.”
As we floated back into the sunlight, a basking muskrat dove off its feeding platform, the long curl of its tail turning over with a slurpy splash. Musquash—the Iroquois-Algonquian word that radiated from the Great Lakes along with the fur trade—still sounds about right.
After a minute or two the animal reappeared, motoring along as if it were pushing a paddleboard. The animal’s progress seemed measured, almost leisurely, as smooth humps undulated along its back to its rump. A thin wake trailed behind its stiletto tail, the perfect rudder for navigating in slow water. Watching such a lumpy character cruise blatantly in the open on a sunny afternoon made it impossible not to wonder how a trapper might fare along this stretch of river come November.
“Right there,” Steve said, placing his paddle across the gunwales to frame a spot on the bank. “That’d be a good place to make a set.”
He kept his eyes on the place as we drifted past. “No matter how long it’s been since you quit laying traps, you never stop looking.”
PACIFIC STEEL AND RECYCLING occupies a sprawling warehouse surrounded by dirt alleyways in the industrial part of Spokane. The smells of hydraulic oil and stale beer mix in an odd, almost pleasant fashion as sellers unload their recyclables on various conveyor belts and watch them roll toward complex smashers and shredders. One winter day a few years ago, I wandered into a back section of the warehouse where bales of green hides—cow, elk, and deer—waited to be shipped. Tightly baled, they constituted forklift versions of the bundles that moved through the doors of the company when it was founded a hundred years ago as Pacific Hide and Fur.
At the top of a wooden staircase above the warehouse office, Roger Scheurer answered his door after a single knock. Dressed in a white lab coat, he moved in quick darts, like a winter ermine: bright-eyed, aware, focused on the long circle of his steady hunt but ready to be distracted.
“Ah,” Roger said. “It’ll be just a minute. I’m with a customer.”
He ushered me inside and returned to his black telephone. The windowless room was arranged like a dry cleaning shop, with parallel rows of overhead racks from which hung hundreds of beautifully finished pelts, and the smell within was feral but soft. Coyotes glimmered in variations of gray, white, silver, rust, chestnut, and dusky yellow. A single dark Canadian wolf dwarfed them all. Bobcats were running high that year, and Roger had a line of them on special display. Next to the cats he had draped a few red foxes, punctuated by a pair on the end so black I wondered if they might be dyed. Four striped skunks and a single wide badger began the transition from long-haired land dwellers to the slender swimmers with their short, dense coats. Beaver pelts, finished in the round, were stacked like throw rugs on the showroom floor, and minks hung neatly off one side of the grading table. Among a dozen river otters, yellow and disproportionately long, one was set apart, and I caught a whiff of unscraped fat. As if he sniffed it across the room, Roger looked up and put his hand over the receiver.
“Don’t know why I took that one,” he apologized. “Doing the guy a favor, I guess. He’s just starting out.”
When Roger joined Pacific Hide and Fur in the early 1970s, the company’s trade in fine pelts had been on the decline for decades. The Spokane headquarters was shifting into scrap iron and recyclables to stay afloat and considering a name change to reflect their modern ways. Roger started out downstairs with the beer cans, but soon noticed that once in a while some old-timer would drop by, looking for a cash offer on a few furs. Roger purchased a few pelts on his own and found out where to resell them. Gradually, he learned about grading, and finishing, and worldwide markets where different species reigned as favorites. After a while, the company decided to support Roger and, riding the crest of a few high-market years, furs reassumed a small niche in Pacific Steel and Recycling’s annual report.
Roger had overseen the construction of his fur room so that it comfortably met his needs. At the moment, a large sanitary table in the center of the room held a stack of cased muskrat hides. They were turned inside out, dried and flattened into the shape of big red bedroom slippers. Roger’s assistant, also clad in a white coat, methodically picked up each skin and placed it next to a measuring line on the table. With only occasional rejections, he sorted a dozen fair-sized ones into a pile, tied them neatly with a length of leather cord, and set them down on the floor among dozens of identical bundles. The effect of Roger’s room was to collapse time, back to the very beginnings of the fur business and beyond; the warmth and beauty of those pelts blanketed the entire span of human history, with the skin of each species surrounded by its own aura.
When David Thompson crossed the Continental Divide to establish the first commercial trading post in the Columbia District in 1807, beaver pelts were his primary interest, with Beaver’s Little Brother relegated so far down the list of desired furs that it barely registered. Of the twenty fur packs (weighing about ninety pounds each) that Thompson collected that first winter, he recorded only “two measly muskrats” within their contents. But he carried those rats all the way back to Lake Superior, and he kept his eyes open for more. By the spring of 1812, as he walked an ancient trail through rich wetlands in the Idaho panhandle, Thompson noted “Many Rats in the Marshes.”
A clerk from the Spokane House trading post of 1822 did a brisk business in muskrats, often swapping a few skins brought in by tribesmen for small amounts of tobacco and medicine. On the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 1824 table of exchange rates for the Columbia District, the muskrat held the lowest value of any item on the list. Rated at one-tenth the value of a prime beaver pelt, it took 180 muskrat hides to purchase a gun, and ten just to buy a dozen fish hooks. But while muskrats were not valuable, they were abundant; their hides might be small, but they were very comparable to beaver in quality. In 1824, almost seventy-five hundred rat pelts were shipped out of the Colvile District, and in some years during the 1830s and 1840s, almost double that number were collected.
Roger hung up the phone and introduced me to his assistant, Rolf, who had learned the trade in eastern Europe. I happened to be teaching some kids who had recently immigrated from Russia, and I told Rolf about a red fox cap that one of the boys had brought to school; his uncle had made it from scratch, with warm ear flaps and a button on top.
“Yah,” said Rolf enthusiastically. “Those people know their furs. And their foxes, such fine animals to see running through the snow. Not like these devils here.” He held up one of the pelts he was sizing and gave it a playful shake.
Muskrats, I knew, were not native to Europe. In 1905 a Bohemian count brought three pairs of muskrats home from a visit to Alaska, and according to legend the descendants of those six animals populated all of northern Europe. In reality, fur farmers on the continent and in Great Britain imported muskrats for several decades in the early 1900s, and escapees quickly established wild populations.
“If you could see what they have done to us,” Rolf said. “They are everywhere. They burrow, and too many burrows ruin the dikes. The canals go haywire. When we try to trap them or shoot them, it seems even more come back. Many people at home, they hate your muskrat.”
Considering some of the detritus that has drifted across the Atlantic from the Old World to the New—smallpox and measles, starlings and Norway rats, Russian thistle and water milfoil—it’s almost reassuring to realize that the lowly musquash has managed to travel the opposite direction, and it is no surprise that the Old World has not had much better luck controlling muskrats than we have had with milfoil. The only place in Europe where muskrats have been exterminated after introduction is the British Isles, and that was accomplished only by dedicated trapping programs coupled with limited habitat. Places like the Netherlands, with miles of earth-banked canals, have become muskrat havens. In several northern regions, across Scandinavia and Siberia, rat trapping has become a lucrative pastime for many families.
“Ah, yes,” Rolf admitted. “They do have a nice pelt.” He took one of the cased skins he was grading and pulled it over his left hand like a glove, then neatly turned it inside out so that the hair was back on the outside. Now he had a muskrat puppet, with holes where the feet and eyes had been. The long brown guard hairs bristled along its sides, running to black along its back and light gray under its belly.
“Style?” asked Rolf. “You want style? These little rats look good.”
“No domestic market for them, of course,” Roger broke in pragmatically. “But we’ve learned how to adjust. I have to leave myself a little room, you might say. At the beginning of the season I have a feeling for the price of muskrats, maybe three dollars on the high side—that means the real high-quality skins. Then I get a sense of how the season’s going: how the weather is, what kind of shape the animals are in, where the demand is coming from.”
The price ratio of rats to beavers still runs about one to ten; three dollars for a cased muskrat versus thirty for a blanket beaver. Roger dug out a tally sheet of fur prices from 1973 to the present, and showed me that during the winter of 1979–80, rats were fetching an astronomical $6.32. Exactly ten years later, a prime muskrat pelt was worth ninety cents.
“You take last year,” Roger continued. “We paid about three dollars for muskrats, and exported 100 percent of them, the best part of them to Russia, then Poland and Czechoslovakia, places like that. They use them mostly for trim—cuffs and collars on cloth coats, that kind of thing. Now, in Russia they go for hats. I understand muskrat hats are real popular back there right now.”
Rolf ran a thumb backward against the lay of the fur. Beneath his touch, the long coarse guard hairs, colored in shades of earthy brown, parted to reveal dense dove-gray underhairs; on a live animal, the interplay between the two textures trapped air bubbles, boosting both insulation and buoyancy. As a pelt, the texture of the undercoat deepened to a bluish, leaden cast more like a woven carpet of goose down than single follicles.
“That’s the felt,” he said. “Good enough to keep anybody warm. That’s why people where there’s real winter are wearing one of these on their heads.”
Columbia River tribes certainly would have agreed with Rolf. Coastal peoples like the Chinooks fashioned muskrat capes that were waterproof against the interminable winter rains. Several Interior Salish tribes such as the Spokanes and Coeur d’Alenes sewed pelts together with sinew and bark thread; sometimes they cut the skins into strips and wove them on simple looms into robes or blankets that were light but warm. When Rolf ran his thumb along the edge of his puppet, touching the notch where the tail had been neatly removed, he was tracing a seam that joined Salish weavers and Czech furriers. He moved to the opposite end of the pelt, where a patch of nose not much larger than a shiny black peppercorn remained intact. Roger Scheurer, with an eye trained for detail, leaned forward to examine the work around the muskrat’s muzzle.
“That’s a trapper,” he said respectfully. “I like it when they care enough to cut around the nose.”
BY THE END OF FEBRUARY, winter should have been relaxing its hold on the Colville country. But this year, after a messy January thaw, the weather had turned cold again, and ice glazed every wrinkle in the valley floor. Skeins of crusty snow hung along the river’s twisted oxbows. The water that had flooded over the wetland during the thaw had frozen cleanly, leaving large open sheets that looked like perfect places for some boot skating.
Close up, however, I found jagged rifts and shattered edges that were anything but smooth. The freeze-up had dropped the water a foot or more, cracking the perimeter of the marsh into long shards of glass. This was the frozen kingdom that had greeted the Kalispel traveler after he crossed the eastern mountains. As I started across it, I spotted a familiar shape tucked into a line of cattails—the mound of a muskrat’s winter lodge, ragged with yellow cattail stalks and clumps of snow. When I walked toward it, the ice began to crack and sing beneath the balls of my feet. One particularly loud line shot clear across the marsh, changing in pitch as it pinged away into the distance. I stopped to let my heart settle back to its normal speed. Through a clear window of ice, I stared into an expanse of black water.
The Coeur d’Alenes are an Interior Salish tribe whose home range encompasses the huge lake that bears their name. Its shoreline is dappled with wide bays and generous wetlands that provide a rich variety of muskrat habitat, and they have watched the rodents adjust to snow, drought, ice, mud, famine, vigorous trapping, and overpopulation. In 1927, an ethnologist recorded many old stories told by Dorothy Nicodemus. Her daughter-in-law, Julia Antelope Nicodemus, translated the tales into English, among them one called “Muskrat Trespasses” involving muskrats and otters, family and territory.
with muskrat little
with his grandmother
they had a house
she said to him
the little muskrat
that old woman
when in the morning then again she went to dig roots
then little muskrat by his grandmother was said
to this toward here
eat about some grass
not this toward here
this toward here.…
then he thought
the little muskrat
because why
what is it that she forbids me?
When the story is read out loud, an English ear can absorb the Salish syntax to catch a familiar meaning: the more his grandmother told Little Muskrat to eat grass in one area, the more determined he was to eat somewhere else. He wandered onto turf that belonged to Otter, who punched him in the head repeatedly. When Little Muskrat got home, his head was so swollen that his little ears and eyes appeared even smaller than usual. Muskrat was angry, and against his grandmother’s wishes paddled back to Otter’s turf. He saw Otter’s sister alone on the bank, strung his bow, and killed her with one arrow.
When the Otter brothers came to Grandmother Muskrat’s house seeking revenge, she wrapped Little Muskrat’s head in a poultice and put him to bed, then faced the wrathful Otters herself. She asked them why they would beat up such a small, helpless muskrat. All he could do was lie there, wondering who would do such a thing.
When the Otters left, Grandmother and Little Muskrat let out whoops of celebration. One of the departing Otters heard them and paddled back to see if he was being mocked. Grandmother and Little Muskrat quickly slipped down one of their holes and pulled a blanket over it, so that when Otter returned to their house he found
no one
in vain he searched it
no one
again he came out
hither he went around no one.…
there were just holes.…
he crossed to the other side of the water
just holes
When I took my next step forward on the ice, a blunt shape shot below me like a bullet. Through the ice I saw a single flash of limbs reach out and tuck smoothly back against a lean body as a lateral curl of tail steered the musquash on a graceful arc through the black water. The muskrat’s stroke was instantaneous, but in no way hurried or desperate; the animal was simply swimming away. That is muskrat: root-storer; mound-builder; deft adapter to change; colonizer of new places; purveyor of dread diseases; cannibal and murderer; victim and survivor. A stream of bubbles drifted upward to kiss the bottom of the ice in regular, well-spaced intervals. That is muskrat, always slipping down another hole.