Nine Lies of B.G. Davies

The Trapper

The trapper puts his cheek to the ground and feels the frozen mud against his skin. He sniffs three short inhalations then moves his nose to the base of the thin maple. Nothing.

The old joints don't make it easy any more. He pushes himself up with a grunt, stumbles to the left, and using his rifle like a cane, stands straight. He looks down the game trail then back the way he came. A dusting of snow coats the fallen leaves. There are no tracks but he knows the wolf has been here. He must look harder.

Snow has collected on the trapper's parka, on the top of his mitts. His small pack, the old canvas sack he has had for as long as he remembers, feels heavy. He knows he should have left it at the cabin; it's only slowing his progress, weighing him down. He must work fast, before the snow covers the remaining signs.

Yesterday, he carefully erected a tiny tee-pee of twigs between two spruce saplings. Today, the sticks lie in a pile on the ground. A hare flying down the trail could have knocked it over, but he knows it wasn't that. He can sense it was the wolf. He can feel its presence.

The old man clenches his rifle and slouching underneath the bent alder bows, moves to the patch of moss. He squints at the depression in the green sponge and sees how an alder leaf is sticking out, higher on one side. Something has pressed down here. Something big. He looks to the left and sees another snowless depression in the moss. It has come this way.

The trapper began hunting the wolf his first summer in the bush, not long after the Great War. He was a young man, a boy really, when he stepped off the train at the station in Oba, squinting into the sun of hot summer afternoon. His gear was thrown onto the siding beside the tracks and the conductor, saying something in English, pointed to the two-story building. The hotel, he guessed.

He tried to learn English on the voyage from Finland. He bought a dictionary, one with pictures, to help him learn the words, but in the end, found the tattered Lutheran Bible to be the best teacher. Since he knew the Old Testament off by heart, he would read the English words and would understand in Finnish. He couldn't pronounce the words, only study the tracks they left on the page. But from that, he would learn.

The trapper joined a few of his school chums and his older brother as they set out for Canada in 1925. They were going to look for work in the mines and the lumber mills. Lots of jobs in Canada for a hardworking lad, they were told, and lots of folk from northern Finland ended up in lumber mills of Cochrane and Smooth Rock Falls, or the mines of Timmins, Sudbury and Kirkland Lake. But not him. He knew the kind of life these boys would have in the mines, then after work, they would live for the saloons and bars of the frontier towns. He wanted to do more than make money, only to spend it on sin. He wanted to do good in this world.

Soon after he arrived in Canada, the trapper hooked up with another young man, a Swede he met in Sudbury who had been issued a trapline permit for an area north of the Grand Trunk Railway. The Swede already had a bit of experience in the bush so the trapper would learn what he could from the man. And trapping was good back then. The fur prices were so high in the Twenties, they could buy everything they needed on credit at the Oba trading post, to be paid back the following spring, once they sold the pelts. He didn't know the Canadian North, but he could afford to figure it out. How hard could it be? Snaring hare back in Finland was easy enough, plus he had a gift for understanding animals. He could put himself in the animal's head, see through its eyes. Even the creatures in Canada, he was certain, would soon become his eyes, ears and nose. He had no doubt.

He and the Swede agreed to split the costs of equipment and supplies and the two of them took the train to Oba station, where they loaded a log raft the Swede had built, and poled their teepee of gear deep into the wilderness. By the first snow, they had built two rough cabins of logs and mud, one at Fire Lake and one a day's snowshoe trek away on Puskuta Lake. Each was furnished with a table and a wood stove, a window made from a pane of glass they found by the railway tracks, and a bed of spruce boughs.