The Trap

by John Smelcer

  Although most of the dogs in the village were malamutes—gaunt, powerful runners—the dog weaving in and out of the forest before the boy was a black Lab, a natural bird dog, named Tikaani. It was the Indian word for wolf. The word for dog wasn’t smooth-sounding and beautiful like the word for wolf. Everyone called the dog Tik for short.

  All of the other boys, and even many of the elders, made fun of his dog.

  “What kind of dog is that?” they’d ask, smiling as they walked around Tik, his tail up and proud.

  “Look at him. He’s no runner. No good for nothing, just petting. Waste of salmon on him,” they’d say.

  But Johnny didn’t care. He loved the black dog, alone among a village of sleek sled dogs, who were always barking or howling and straining against their ropes or chains.

  On the way up to the tree line, Johnny shot a grouse at the edge of a shallow gravel-bottomed creek. The bird had been searching for small stones when the boy and the dog emerged noiselessly from the forest. Tik stood motionless, although his tail twitched in anticipation as Johnny raised the barrel, centered the silver bead sight on the bird, and fired. Within seconds, the dog had jumped across the stream and had the flapping bird cradled in his mouth as he proudly trotted back to the boy, who kneeled and smiled and softly patted the dog’s thigh. When the dog dropped the bird at his feet, Johnny rubbed his head and ears, his square head cupped in Johnny’s brown hands, and then he reached into a pocket and gave the dog a piece of dried salmon. People called it Indian candy.

  Under a bright fall sky Tik followed along with Johnny as he picked blueberries for them to eat. Occasionally, the dog carefully plucked a berry of its own. It was early September and berries at the edge of the timberline were ripe and sweet. Some were as big around as a thumbnail and yet still firm, not soft the way they turn after a freeze. The sun was high, and there was a slight breeze sliding down off the glaciers in the far mountains. It had not rained in a week and few mosquitoes bothered the twelve-year-old and his dog.

  The bright hills were orange and yellow and gold and green, and the sky was deep blue with only a hint of thin white clouds strewn in the distance. It was a perfect fall day.

  An old army rucksack with the grouse inside sat beneath a tree, while the shotgun leaned against the trunk.

  Over the next hour, longer perhaps, they wandered from patch to patch, sometimes simply lying and resting, the sun warm on their skin. Once a rabbit burst from behind a small bush, but the shotgun was too far away.

  The two must have fallen asleep, for the boy was awakened by the sound of growling and barking. Startled, Johnny sat up and saw Tikaani growling at a grizzly bear, baring his teeth, the hair on the back of his neck raised like a porcupine. The bear, too, had been eating berries in the hills above the tree line and had stumbled upon the two sleeping friends.

  The bear was large, perhaps five or six hundred pounds, his blond head almost two feet across, his dark black eyes set far apart on a flat face. His ears were back, a sure sign of trouble, and he was flashing his yellow teeth, popping his gums, grunting, and shaking his head from side to side.

  The young Indian was afraid. He could feel his heart beginning to race, and he had to remind himself to breathe. Slowly, he turned his head toward the direction of the tree where his shotgun rested, but he and Tik had wandered too far away from it. Now the gun was out of sight, forty or fifty yards downhill where they had begun their early afternoon feast.

  There’s a myth that a bear can outrun a man uphill, but that a man is faster running downhill. They say it is because the bear’s short front legs trip it up. Some books actually advise that you run downhill in such an event. But no matter where you run, up or down or slantwise, you would lose every time. In the hundred-yard dash, a bear can outrun even a horse and take down a moose or caribou or elk. Running is always a last resort, and only when there is some form of safety within a very short distance.

  Some books recommend that you jump into a lake or river or stream—suggesting that bears won’t follow, that they somehow detest water. Bad advice again. You’ll simply end up a wet supper like salmon. Bears are fantastic swimmers.

  Some advise that you curl up in a ball and play dead. Do it too soon and you will surely be eaten. Do it only after a foul-breathed bear has knocked you to the ground and begun to claw and bite and rip your scalp away from your head. But if the hungry bear is bent on eating you, fight back with all of your desperate strength, for if you don’t, you will surely be killed, partially eaten, and buried for a later meal. Knowing just when to do these things is like playing poker—you have to know when to hold pat and when to call a bluff.

  Johnny Least-Weasel knew all these things. He had spent his young life learning the unwritten rules of this untamed land from his uncle and grandfather, and he knew what danger he was in.

  He stood up slowly, his eyes on the bear at all times, and he spoke to it, letting it know he wasn’t a moose or caribou calf.

  The bear saw Johnny as if for the first time. Now it felt outnumbered. Two against one. He charged at the black barking dog between itself and the boy. Outweighing Tikaani many times over, the bear smashed into him like a furry locomotive, rolling him like a ball tossed into the brush. But the dog jumped to his steady paws and lunged at the bear, barking and snapping, his long tail held high like a flag.

  While they battled, their terrible racket echoing in the fall-colored hills, Johnny screamed at the bear, shouting at it, sometimes in English, sometimes in his Indian language. But the bear did not hear or care. It raked its mighty paw at the dog, its dark brown claws almost five inches long. With the grizzly preoccupied, Johnny ran to his shotgun, opened its breech to check that it was loaded, and then ran back to his dog.

  The bear was straddled over the Lab, trying to bite his head and neck. But Tikaani was still alive, kicking with his back legs into the belly of the great bear and trying to wriggle free. Johnny took aim and fired one shot just above the bear’s massive head. The sharp report echoed in the valley, and the bear bolted toward the tree line.

  The boy nervously slid another shell into the breech and walked over to where his dog lay whining and licking his wounds.

  Tikaani was breathing fast in short breaths, almost panting. A large section of flesh and muscle was exposed where the bear had torn a length of skin from the dog’s back. Small leaves, pine needles, and dirt stuck to the wound. One of his eyes and most of an ear were missing and the side of his head that had taken the mauling was wet and sticky. The end of his long nose was split down the middle and bleeding due to the rake of a huge paw. It was hard to see the red blood against his short, black hair, but it pooled brightly on yellow and orange leaves rotting on the forest floor.

  Johnny dropped the shotgun, knelt, put his arms around his dog’s head, and began to cry. He held him that way for a long time, and when he let go, Tikaani licked his face.

  Still crying, he ran his hand along the length of the dog’s body, feeling for what he could not easily see. He found several deep punctures between ribs and scratches that bled when he touched them.

  Johnny knew that he had to get help for his dog, but it was many miles back to the small village. Besides, the dog weighed about eighty pounds, maybe more, far too heavy for the boy to carry. But if he left to go for help, surely the bear would return for Tikaani.

  So he stayed with his friend throughout the long night. He gathered a great pile of dry branches and built a fire close enough to the dog to warm him. As darkness fell and stars and constellations came out, he cleaned the grouse and roasted it on a stout green stick over the flames. Johnny offered his dog bits of the meal, but in such pain as he suffered, Tikaani would not eat. Johnny ate the grouse, and when he was done, he collected pitch from a nearby spruce tree, which he chewed until it was warm and soft, then rubbed it into the many wounds and cuts. It was old Indian medicine his grandmother had taught him.

  As the night grew cold, Johnny laid the empty rucksack, like a canvas b
lanket, over the dog. Occasionally, through the blackness beyond the edge of the campfire’s glow, came the sound of snapping branches, as if something was moving through the night, circling, kept at bay by the fire.

  The boy passed the long night with his shotgun on his lap, tending to the fire and caressing his dog. But somewhere before light’s first breaking, he fell asleep with one arm wrapped across his friend.

  Johnny was awakened by the voice of his grandfather, calling his name and shaking the cold from his bones. But his dog never woke again.

  On a crisp fall morning, Johnny Least-Weasel, then but a twelve-year-old boy, buried his best friend just above the timberline and marked the shallow, knife-hewn grave with a pile of stones.

  The stone pile lay somewhere ahead on the trail, like a milepost.

  * * *

  Although it had not snowed in the village for some time, it had recently snowed in the hills as it almost always does when low winter clouds become tangled in the mountains.

  Johnny drove his yellow machine up the trail, snow sometimes billowing over the engine cowling, and it bothered him that there were no tracks of any kind on the virgin snow. It meant that his grandfather had not come down, that he was still up there somewhere, alone. Although the snow was fairly deep, the machine pressed on, riding lightly on its wide tracks and skis.

  The sun was about as high as it would get at this time of the year. There would be only a few good hours of useful light before dusk.

  Rounding a bend, two white rabbits quickly hopped across the trail and vanished in a thick tangle of spindly spruce. They wouldn’t usually come out from their burrows when it was so cold, but the noise of the machine winding its way through the stunted forest startled them.

  Johnny’s cheeks were cold and his nose was running. He stopped, took off his gloves, and stood on the idling machine’s runner while he cleared his nose, pressing his index finger against each nostril and blowing hard onto the snow. He checked that his gear was securely strapped, then sat and rubbed his cheeks until they felt warm again. After sliding his hands back into the sealskin gloves, he gunned the throttle, and the machine resumed its uphill trek into the white hills.

  Less than a mile farther on, he came to a fork in the trail. He knew this place well, where his grandfather’s trapline took two different routes, one winding far back into a remote valley, the other equally far into another. A small log cabin, some twenty miles distant, marked the end of each trail. Each cabin was only twelve feet by twelve feet, with one window in the front by a heavy door. Inside each cabin was a bunk bed, one small table with two mismatched chairs, an oil lamp, and a woodstove made from an old fifty-five-gallon fuel drum with a hole cut in the back for the insertion of stovepipe. There were no pictures, but one cabin had an old faded calendar that had been tacked to the wall in 1963. It had a sketched picture of a new Chevrolet parked before a new brick house, with a beautiful woman wearing a red dress and a shiny black belt standing beside the car.

  The blank surface of snow gave no hint about which way Johnny should go. Both trails lay equally white and undisturbed. It reminded him of a poem he had read. One trail would take him to his grandfather, the other would not. It was that simple. It would take almost two hours to drive back to the end of either of the two trails, and it would take only a little less coming back, to return to this fork, by which time it would certainly be dark. If the old man was waiting warm and safe in either of the cabins, it would not matter which trail he took at this moment. But if his grandfather was in trouble …

  With worry tight as a fist in the pit of his stomach, Johnny Least-Weasel said a small prayer, to whom or what he did not know, leaned forward behind the windshield, and took the left trail. At every turn, he hoped that he’d find his grandfather rounding a bend on his way down. But every turn was the same—white, unbroken, silent, and lonely—so he kept going, kept hoping that he would find the old man at his cabin with a plume of gray smoke rising from the chimney.

  After several miles of winding up into the tortured landscape, Johnny came upon an opening in the forest of spruce and snow. It was a small lake, really more marsh than lake, perhaps only several hundred yards across. It was fed by a warm underground spring, and its surface was only partially frozen in the middle. There, the water was deep, and heated bubbles rose from the pressured depths of the earth. A layer of snow lay upon the surface, and the young man was unaware of the danger beneath it.

  Johnny aimed his machine for the far side and raced across the marsh as fast as the snowmobile could go, its high-pitched engine screaming and kicking up slush and water and ice. Less than halfway across, Johnny realized his mistake, but it was too late to turn back or slow down. All he could do was lean back on the machine to keep the heavy engine and skis from diving in, hold the throttle down as far as it would go, and pray that it would not stall or run out of gas before he reached the other side. If he fell into the water, he would surely die within an hour.

  The snowmobile slowed and rocked sluggishly as the rear sank into the darkness, but the wide track kept turning and turning, swimming its way toward the far bank. Then, close to shore, where the lake was shallow and weedy and where snow turned to ice, the straining machine and its nervous cargo rose out of the water and slid on its metal belly into the scraggly trees of the white, frozen forest.

  A raven sitting atop a small tree watched, then flew away cawing loudly.

  Sometime after noon, Johnny reached his grandfather’s trapping cabin. There were no tracks in the snow, no snowmobile, no gray smoke billowing from the rusted chimney stack, and no grandfather.

  He had taken the wrong trail.

  Now, there would be only enough light to return to the fork. It would be dusk, even dark, by the time he’d set off up the other trail. Perhaps by then, he hoped, he’d find snowmobile tracks on it and he’d know that the old man had come down out of the hills and was on his way home.

  Johnny made a tight circle in the small clearing around the cabin and saw that his gas-tank gauge was already below the halfway mark. The deep snow had slowed his ascent, caused him to burn more fuel than he’d expected. But going back would be faster. There would be his freshly broken trail, and it was downhill all the way. Anxiously making a quick calculation, Johnny determined that he had enough gas left in the tank to return to the fork and explore only the first few miles of the other trail. After that, he would have to use the extra fuel in the gas can strapped to the back of his snowmobile to return home.

  As gravity pulled him down the mountain, ten miles an hour faster than he had come up, Johnny could only hope that his grandfather was safe inside the other cabin with a warm blazing fire and plenty of firewood stacked on the small covered porch. He was angry with his uncle for convincing him to wait so long and mad at himself for not being strong enough to go anyhow. He loved his uncle, but sometimes he did not understand him.

  Burning daylight is a common northland phrase that refers to the shortness of days, and that’s just what Johnny was doing now as he gripped the handlebars tightly, leaned into sharp turns, and raced against the sun. He braked only twice the whole way down to the fork, leaned close behind the windshield, and raced against time.

  The other men were amazed and impressed. They had never seen such courage and strength in a man. When they returned to the village, Blackskin was made chief. He used his power only for good. He was truly a great man.

  THE NIGHT WAS SO LONG it seemed as though the sun might never rise again. After so many hours, the old man began to think it was too cold even for the sun. He imagined it huddled somewhere, waiting for the white world to warm up before it would return from its sleeping place somewhere far, far below the earth’s easy curve.

  For the most part, the dark had been silent and uneventful. Because of his pile of wood, he had been able to keep his fire burning, and because he had tossed the extra boughs onto his bed, the frozen ground was unable to steal the warmth from his trembling body. The freezing air, though,
took as much as it wanted.

  And it wanted everything.

  In order to pass the night, the old man clung to his routine. He’d toss a few pieces of wood onto the fire, make sure it caught, and then sleep uncomfortably for maybe half an hour. He’d awaken, toss more wood onto the glowing bed of embers, watch and listen to the shadowy hills, and then he’d sleep again, his whole body trembling, his teeth chattering. Sometime during the night, the curious wolves came down but left without event. And sometime toward the end of the night, it became clear that his supply of firewood would not last. Keeping the flames warm and bright throughout the never-ending dark came at a price, and the old man found himself at a crossroads.

  On the one hand, the small pile of firewood was running low and would be consumed, no doubt, in the next hour or two. To conserve his precious fuel, he further rationed it, but by doing so, the fire gave off too little heat, not enough to warm him even if he crowded it with his hands. On the other hand, he had his thick bed of spruce boughs. The pile kept him off the ground when he slept, but if he slept now, he knew that he might never awake.

  Finally, the flame of dawn lifted over the mountaintops, and morning came into the huddled valley.

  The old man’s pile of wood was gone. He had survived the night, but to what end? Now he would have to face the day. The temperature had plummeted to around forty-five below. At such temperatures, the day is little warmer than the night. He had been in colder. Once, when he was a young man, the temperature was seventy degrees below zero. In such tremendous cold, the moisture in breath freezes instantly and falls to the ground like salt.

  His one real choice was to burn his bed, keep a big fire so that the freezing would not go too deep into his old bones. Looking at the bed of boughs, most branches at least six feet long, he figured that he’d make it until noon. After that, nothing would save him. He would freeze and die, and someone would find him chained and frozen to this tree. Perhaps the lack of branches on the tree and the sturdy spear would tell them that he had made a good stand, that he had fought as long as any man could have fought, that he had missed nothing, forgotten nothing, that he had used everything, every resource and lesson, but that in the end, even the greatest grizzly bear cannot defeat winter.