Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  The mercury was at eighteen below when I looked in the morning. I met the question in Veasy’s eyes with a shake of the head, telling him, “Better let them sit today. If it isn’t any warmer tomorrow we’ll go down and pull the traps, and not reset until it does warm up.”

  After breakfast Veasy suddenly suggested, “How about me going out for the mail today and meeting you at the lake tomorrow morning?”

  “That,” I conceded, “is a mighty bright thought.” For we had neither received nor posted any mail these three weeks gone.

  Since January Veasy had been covering the twenty-five miles between us and the post office on skis. That thin line of ski tracks was our only path to the outer world, and the only path we were likely to have until perhaps along in mid-April when the spring runoff commenced. For January’s snows had been prolonged and deep snows, and by the end of the month we abandoned all hope of being able to keep a sleigh road open.

  Those narrow twin indentations in the snow passed within a mile of where our muskrat trapping operations were now underway. Veasy could ski out to the post office today, stay there overnight and meet me at the lake in the morning.

  “You’ll be there for sure with the horses in the morning then?” he asked.

  “Come hell or high water,” I assured him. Which at this season of the year meant no matter how cold it might be.

  I both sensed and heard the polar wind that was born in the black of the night. I came over on one elbow in bed, listening to its growl through the treetops. I could feel its chill seeping in through the logs, and I crawled out of bed, put more wood in the heater and then walked to the window and peered outside. Snow beat in against the glass with a dry rustling sound. I moved over to the door and inched it open a little. As if waiting for just such an opportunity, the wind flowed in through the crack, dusting the kitchen floor with a fine film of snow. I coughed as the cold hit my lungs, then banged the door shut.

  Lillian too was half awake now. “He’ll not start back in weather like that,” she said sleepily.

  “Remember what I told him when he struck out? Come hell or high water I’ll be there. And come hell or high water he’ll be there too.” And in an endeavour to perhaps comfort her in a situation where little comfort was in sight, I added, “Maybe blow itself out by morning.”

  With break of day the wind cleaved sheer from the jaws of the north. Its nip shrivelled my flesh as I headed for the barn. The smooth, well-packed trail of yesterday was now blanked out by the swirling, drifting snow. I wallowed through the drifts, losing all feel of the trail a dozen times before reaching the barn. I watered and fed the horses, stared sourly at the saddles hanging on their pegs and then slung them onto the horses.

  Nothing but sheer force of habit made me check with the thermometer after breakfast; no matter what the thermometer said, I had to go.

  “How cold now?” Lillian wanted to know when I stepped back into the kitchen.

  “Only twenty below,” I managed to grin back at her. And twenty below zero with a wind from the north is colder than forty below with no wind at all.

  “You can’t handle muskrat traps in weather like that,” she said. “No, not if each pelt was worth twenty-five dollars.” Actually, the skins would bring us about a dollar and a half apiece. Recently the price of muskrat pelts had been improving.

  Again I reminded her: “Come hell or high water I’ll be there.” And come hell or high water Veasy would be there too. A rendezvous made in the wilderness is a rendezvous that has to be kept.

  I wrapped the lunches Lillian had made up for us in three layers of canvas and tied them behind my saddle. But despite the wrapping, I knew the bread and the meat would be frozen solid before I got a mile away from the house. Then, hitching the pack horse to the tail of the animal I was leading down for Veasy, I climbed reluctantly up into the saddle and struck out into the snow.

  The cold hauled up to and clawed me before I was a half-mile down the trail. It seeped through my moosehide mittens, pawed at the woollen ones inside them. The wind licked at my overshoes, somehow found entrance and pried at the felts within. Even my heavy sheepskin coat failed to weaken, still less halt, the probe of that wind. My eyelashes became icicles, and a sudden stab at my left cheek warned me I’d best pull my mitts for a quick moment and tie the hood of my parka tighter around my chin.

  I came to a long sliver of open meadow, its stunted Arctic willow just showing above snow line. The dark outlines of a cow and calf moose took on shape a few feet from the brush. I was almost on top of them before they lifted from their beds in the snow. The cow trotted some thirty yards, then stood broadside, eyes flaring ill temper. I could have hit the calf with a stone as I rode by it, so close was the little fellow to the horses.

  I hunched over in the saddle, turning my face from the wind. “Right this very moment,” I gloomily addressed the two moose, “we three are the coldest warm-blooded creatures in all of Canada.” And the moose hadn’t budged an inch when I rode out of their sight at the other end of the meadow.

  Then I came out at the lake. I could see little of it for the clouds of drifting snow that careened across the ice. “It will be hell out there on that ice,” I mumbled, hitching the horses to trees. “And if we have to pull our mitts and go down after any rats—” The possibility of that only added to my gloom. For the rubber gloves we usually wear when rat trapping would be as useless as silk gauntlets today. Somehow or other there’s a little warmth to woollen mitts, even if they are soaking wet. At least they break the wind. But there’s none whatsoever to a thick skin of rubber.

  I peered hopefully at the south end of the lake, to where Veasy should come in. If he was now down there, moving from rat house to rat house, I’d see him despite the drifting snow between us. For all of a minute I stood very still, straining my eyes to the south. But Veasy wasn’t there. I had all of that ice to myself, and it was the loneliest place on earth.

  My snowshoes sank almost to the bottom of the twelve or so inches of new snowfall. Each time I lifted them up the end of my shovel handle played a tattoo on their frame, ridding them of their load of snow. Tap-tap-tap, like a blind man walking the pavement. And so I began the cruel task of pulling up the traps.

  In the large-scale cropping of muskrats, there’s slightly more to the matter than just setting traps. Every house must be staked in fall before heavy snows blot them from sight. Each trap set must somehow be marked when trapping operations begin. If they are not, and if between seventy-five and a hundred traps are set out on a single piece of marsh, in the event of an overnight fall of snow several of the traps are not likely to be found again.

  When muskrat trapping, Veasy and I use a system of cards, numbered from 1 to 100 depending upon the number of traps set out. A foot or fifteen inches is broken from the top of the marker stakes, the remainder used as a toggle to slip through the trap ring. A card is then affixed to the broken piece of stake and placed upright in the snow alongside the house in which the trap is set. So if the last trap looked at was number 4, and we then move on to number 6, we instantly know that the fifth trap has been missed and retrace our steps to find it. Without using such a system, one would of course never know that he had missed a trap until all had been gathered and counted.

  We’ve trapped several thousand muskrats on the beaver marshes of Meldrum Creek since first we came to the watershed, but never in such appalling conditions as confronted us on that unforgettable day in March. The snow had duned the outer fringes of the shoreline in drifts five and six feet high, and with each heave of the wind the drifts became deeper. The wind had carried some of the cards from their sticks, and carried them no one knows where. With these markers missing it was impossible to locate the traps. I thought, “Out of the hundred and ten we’ve got set, we’ll be lucky to retrieve eighty.”

  Above the clamour of the wind I suddenly thought I heard someone whistling. I glanced southward down the ice and discerned the dim outline of someone moving out of the timber and
onto the ice. Come hell or high water, Veasy had kept the rendezvous. And now, for some reason or another, that desolate, frigid lake was not nearly as lonely as it had been a moment or so ago.

  The cards 14 and 15 were gone, as had been 7 and 10. Though I prodded here and there in the snow with the shovel handle for feel of the soft mass of house beneath, I was rewarded with only the jar of wood against ice. At number 17, I had to peel off my right mitt, roll up my sleeve and go down in the water with naked arm and hand for the muskrat. For twenty inches of chain was fastened to the spring of each trap so that immediately upon getting caught the muskrat would go down into deep water with the trap and there quickly drown. No true man of the woods can abide the thought of any fur-bearer suffering long in the traps if means can be found to end its life quickly after it has become trapped.

  But once in a while both rat and trap became firmly entangled in the bulrush stems below the ice, and then we had to roll up our sleeves and go down into the water with bare arm and hand to work the trap loose.

  It took me a couple of minutes to disentangle the trap, and a deadly numbness paralyzed my hand and arm the second they became exposed to the outer air.

  The gunny sack over my shoulder was heavy with soggy rats. I’d lost all track of how many I’d taken from the traps thus far pulled, but figured it at around thirty. And a healthy northern muskrat weighs from two or three pounds. Under my breath I cursed the clumsy snowshoes that weighted me down. A huge temptation was in me to disengage from the harness and flounder on afoot. But the dark saucer of many a treacherous air hole was visible when we set the traps out, holes that the long frame of the snowshoes could safely span. It would be foolish and dangerous to discard the shoes now, for now the air holes were hidden by drifted snow.

  I watched Veasy cut across the lake a quarter of a mile away, awkwardly lifting his skis straight up from the snow with each step. He weaved and staggered and almost went down a dozen times before reaching the timber where the horses were hitched, weighted down as he was by the load of muskrats and mail on his back.

  Sight of Veasy heading for timber reminded me that I was hungry. I thought, “I’ll give him ten of fifteen minutes to get a fire going and then pull off the ice myself.”

  Numbers 33 and 35 were missing, but I made no effort to find the houses in which the traps were set. It was sheer waste of time. My legs were now beginning to buckle each time I brought a shoe up from the snow, and an aching fatigue wracked my every muscle. My body was almost shrieking aloud for respite, so sticking my shovel upright in the snow, I shouldered my load of muskrats and struck out to join Veasy.

  He was down on his knees in front of a tree, still trying to get a fire going. I saw one of his matches flare and then go out. “How are we coming?” I asked meaninglessly, dumping the rats out in the snow.

  He glanced with little interest at the muskrats, struck another match, grumbled a little when it went out before igniting his shavings, then said simply, “I’m getting by. But I can’t get the fire going.”

  Then I glanced at his hands. Red and swollen they were from too much exposure to the water beneath the ice, and intense cold without.

  “Have much trouble in finding the traps?” I asked, knowing full well he’d had plenty.

  “Nothing but.” Another match flared and went out. “I’ll be out ten or a dozen by the time they’re all pulled.” He tossed me the matchbox. “Here, see what you can do. I guess my hands are too clumsy.”

  “They’re too darned cold, you mean,” I said, striking one of the matches against the side of the box and cupping it in my hands.

  But the match only went out before it could do anything with the shavings, as a dozen more did before finally they caught and the fire blazed feebly, and I gently fed it sticks, fearful it would go out on me before it was able to throw any warmth.

  “Helluva way of making a living, isn’t it,” I said, breaking open the lunches and placing the sandwiches on spits in front of the fire to thaw out.

  That fetched a faint smile to Veasy’s face. “It’ll all be forgotten in a day or so.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll never forget today.”

  The three horses stood with hindquarters to the wind, rumps covered with snow, heads hanging dejectedly. Man or beast, the blizzard had mercy on none.

  We bolted down the lunch, piled more wood on the fire and crouched by its heat. It took both mental and physical strength to wrench away from that fire. But there were yet many more traps to retrieve, and the longer we stayed by the fire, the bleaker became the thought of going back to the ice. So, banking the fire with wood so that there would be some flame left when we returned, we resumed the ordeal on the ice.

  By late afternoon, after retrieving all the traps and their catch that could be retrieved, my legs had turned to rubber. For the last six hours my snowshoes had been lifting several pounds of snow at my every stride, and suddenly I thought, “I’m not going to lug them around another foot.” I hauled up in my tracks, unbuckled the heel straps and stepped off the webbing. And I was plowing forward through the snow, shoes, muskrats and traps over my shoulder, when the snow suddenly settled away from my feet, and I was chest deep in water.

  A large occupied beaver house thrust its white bulge up above the bank of the lake twenty-five yards away, and I had gone through the thin ice above the beavers’ winter food cache. That cache is perhaps all that saved me from going out of sight, for the mass of peeled cottonwood and willow around the underwater entrances to the lodge offered tricky support for my feet. But at least it was support. Hurling rats, traps, snowshoes and other gear off onto solid ice, I pawed frantically at the water, half swimming, half wading, like a deer fighting flies at a pond on a hot summer’s day. For a half-dozen yards the ice continued to break as I clawed at it in an effort to drag myself from the water. Finally, at the edge of the cache it strengthened, and I was able to drag my body out. And now there was no doubt about it: I was the wettest, coldest, most miserable piece of humanity in the whole wide world!

  Veasy had seen me go through the ice, and had reached the beaver house by the time I was back on my feet. He steadied me as my toes found the snowshoe harness, and I buckled the heel strap tight.

  “D’you mind toting the gear?” I asked, knowing perfectly well that I couldn’t. And together we moved into the jack pines and kicked the fire ablaze.

  I stood over the flames, swaying a little, hands feverishly searching my pockets for cigarette papers and tobacco. I found both, as wet as the skin of a fish. And Veasy didn’t smoke. “Heck of a life,” I complained through chattering teeth.

  Steam billowed up from the front of my mackinaw britches; their rear was a sheet of ice. I kept turning slowly around before the flames, like a side of barbecuing beef.

  Veasy was separating rats from traps, mentally tallying each. Then, loading both into sacks, he turned and said, “Sixty-eight rats, seventy-five traps.” So thirty-five traps with whatever fur they held were still somewhere out on the lake, buried under the snow. And there they would remain until the ice began to rot and they sank to the bottom of the lake.

  For the next half-hour I pivoted slowly around in front of the fire, trying to get my clothes dry. And when Veasy had loaded all the gear on the pack horse and tied his diamond hitch in the lash rope, I wrenched away from the fire and moved stiffly over to my saddle horse.

  “Think you can make it home?” asked Veasy, more from sheer formality than for any other reason.

  “Think I’m going to stick out here in these cursed jack pines all night?” I retorted sarcastically. Then with a feeble grin: “Sure I can make it home. Let’s get going.”

  Plod-plod-plod. You cannot trot or gallop a horse when his chest is breasting snow. And on the poorly broken trail leading back to home, their hoofs could only go down into the print of their previous steps. If they missed that print and their knees struck the snow bridge between it and the next, they stumbled and went down on their noses. Plod-plod. Out
of the lengthening shadows ahead I could hear Veasy mildly cursing his own horse, which was stumbling now and then. From between teeth that were chattering with the cold I was also cursing my own. But the horses weren’t to blame; there was but the one gait at which they could travel, and a very rough one it was.

  The cow and calf moose were still there on the meadow, and both lurched away toward thicker timber when our three horses loomed in sight. The calf bogged down in a snowdrift at the edge of the meadow, staggered to its feet, made a few faltering steps and then went down again. The calf was very weak and emaciated; the winter had not been too kind to wildlife, especially the young ones. It was still lying in the drift when I last looked back on it. I thought, “Wonder whether the little beggar will live to see cottonwood leafing time in the spring?” Then: “Wonder whether I’ll live to see that house again?”

  To me those last couple of miles were a nightmare of physical and mental torture. Mechanically I kept kicking my horse’s flanks with feet that lacked any feeling. My bridle lines were looped over the saddle horn, the horse plodding slowly but faithfully along without any guidance from me. With folded arms braced against the pommel, I slumped forward over the horse’s withers, my face touching its mane.

  I’d lost all sense of direction, and couldn’t even see the pack horse a few yards ahead of me. But now and then Veasy’s query of “You all right?” told me that I was in the land of the living.

  A faint pane of light loomed up from out of the night. I half straightened in the saddle and tried to fix my eyes on it. Soon I could smell the smoke from our stovepipes, but the light seemed miles away. Finally the house was reached, and Lillian stood at the door, fervently greeting us, “Thank God you’re back!” Then, as I slumped down off the horse, she asked anxiously, “Eric, what’s the matter with you?” Trying to gather my wits I solemnly assured her, “Apart from the fact that I’m both frozen and drowned, nothing at all.” I stumbled down from the saddle, picked myself up from the snow and clutched at Lillian for support. “Let’s dance,” I suggested.