JED KING KNELT at the edge of the cedar swamp, peered under a blown-down tree, straight into the eyes of the red fox caught in a #2 Victory leg-hold trap.
Foxes had been working the swamp edge pretty good of late. King had discovered this while running his beaver and muskrat trap lines, so had run a string of fox setups. There was good money in fur again. Not as good as in the eighties, before all the bleeding hearts fussed and cried. He’d never see those prices again. But current prices made trapping worth the effort.
He stared at the fox. A male. It was early in the season and the fur was not nearly prime. Still, it was worth a good sixty bucks.
King took an old axe handle from his trapper’s basket.
He tapped the ax handle in his palm, looked at the fox.
The fox hunkered, bared its teeth.
King stepped closer.
The fox tried to pull free of the trap, but couldn’t.
It stared up at King, snapped its jaws, spitting.
King tapped the axe handle in his palm. “Hold still. It’s no use.”
There were many who believed what King did was cruel; even those who wore fur. They didn’t like that the fur came from cute animals. Cute. Anyone who’d ever seen a mink or a beaver close up knew how foul they were. Vermin. Their fur stank of algae and glandular musk. They had teeth as yellow as an old woman’s toenails. They boiled with parasites. Beaver dams flooded farms and ball fields. The red fox was a handsome animal when it was a kit, King gave them that much. But even then the feral beasts crawled with fleas and ticks. Their ears so full of mites they leaked puss from infection. Their haunches caked with shit.
Activists knew squat about wild animals. No shock when they only left their work desk and computer to sit their lazy asses in front of the TV or maybe go hike on a nature trail that had signs posted along the way to identify everything they observed.
What these people did not understand was, for a wild animal, there was no more humane death than the trapper’s club or the hunter’s bullet. Any natural means of death in the wild was long and slow and torturous and painful: gangrene from a cut that never healed; slow starvation and dehydration over foodless months in the winter; drowning; brain tumors and heartworm; cancer with no treatment; slipping on the ice of a frozen pond and being unable to get back up; being dragged down by coyotes by your haunches, then ripped open, intestines fed on while you still kicked and bleated. That was nature. That was the cute world of the wild. Just what the fuck did these people think happened out in the wild?
King often asked folks who railed against trapping what death they would prefer, if they had a choice: The slow, anguishing, humiliating death nature offered or a sudden, skilled, painless blow to the skull, a quick bullet to the heart, and then, nothing? He knew which he’d prefer. What ass-backwards hogwash. Jesus, it infuriated him, the hypocrisy: These bleeding hearts who loved animals so much but wanted them to die cruel and humiliating deaths were the same damned ones who pushed for legal euthanasia and suicide for humans, railed about death with dignity. Shit.
King took no pleasure in killing.
He offered what the market wanted.
He was professional.
Humane.
He did what a man needed to do.
King tapped the axe handle in his palm.
The fox thrashed wildly in a futile attempt to escape.
King brought the axe handle down on the fox’s skull with a single clean, expert blow.
The fox flattened, its back leg jerking, then falling still.
It was over.
Painless.
Just like that.
You should be so lucky.