And as growth patterns, or anythingformed in the physical world gradually turn or collapse into stone, the earth’s skeleton, the energy that made them is freed, traveling rapidly through and away as in a huge explosion, in which we are some small part
CICATRIX: the scar or seam
remaining after a wound is healed
the scar left by the fall of a leaf
The eye is a cicatrix
or umbilicus remaining
after the separation of
the umbilical cord from
the pericarp
4
Gary
“THE ONLY THING that’s ever gonna hurt you, sweetheart, is people,” Gary Lynch used to say. “An animal sees ya, they run.”
In back of his house on the lake down our cottage row, Gary kept four or five foxes in plywood cages. I remember the shock of seeing them there, my first close view of foxes—their fur dimmed behind the crushed chicken wire, their strangely intelligent faces and lithe bodies gathered back like gnarled, badly knotted yarn in rage and fear, the quality of wildness almost fermented in them. Gary kept them in order to collect their urine for the lure he used to bait his traps. There was always some undercurrent wisp of animal smell on his clothes and body; I noticed it even the day that we first met, fishing for pike in the rain when I was sixteen.
It was an Elephant Lake day, as we used to say of gray, mist-laden mornings, like the mornings in Canada on Elephant Lake when we went out to troll in the weeds, and sometimes my grandparents came, my large authoritarian grandfather bringing white paper bags of walnut fudge from Haliburton, my grandmother reading to us from a French children’s book as we sat for long hours in the rocking boat.
In the rocking boat on the empty lake in the mist my brother David, with a concentration he never broke to speak, stood casting in the bow over the rain-pocked surface of the water. I was in the stern, drenched, in my father’s loose gray fishing trousers cinched with David’s scout belt. David’s new fishing companion was midboat, laughing in his soft Irish voice, his round face ruddy and smudged, his flannel shirt worn through at the elbows. He had an atmosphere of toughness and solid competence all about him, even on the stormy lake. In that soaking chill there was the sudden miracle of pulling up out of the water the slippery green pike, a tense shard of pure muscle gasping on the metal floor.
Northern pike were large unwieldy fish, with tiny sharp needle-like teeth. They were hard to hold in your hands and we often didn’t bother to bring them in, for we rarely ate the fish. The flesh was too viscous and slippery and never cooked well, unlike the flesh of trout. But trout went out into the cool deep water in summer and could only be caught by the dull method of thermocline—letting out a hundred or more feet of heavy line tacked with silver spoons like thorned minnows. You couldn’t feel the fish take the bait. There was only the laborious process of reeling in the line once in a while to see if there was anything on it.
The trout often came up with silver-blue sea lampreys stuck to their sides. All around the lamprey’s mouth, a sharp, perfect circle of razors, the dappled skin of the trout was pale and flaking away. The lampreys came into the Great Lakes in the water holds of cargo ships nearly a hundred years ago and destroyed the trout fishing industry. I was thrilled when I saw what was then a rare migrant, the famous cormorant—the sea crow, an antique symbol of greed—for the first time, right off our dock. When a cormorant colony was smashed to pieces in the night on an island in Alexandria Bay north of us on the St. Lawrence in 1992 there was a national outcry—why would anyone destroy a colony of nesting birds? But we guessed what the cormorant had done to the bass fishermen who made their living there.
I sometimes slept on the dock and woke before dawn when David was already out on the lake. He would come in with bass we would clean on the shore and cook for breakfast with butter and walnuts and lemon grass.
When David died, Gary brought us fish. He brought hand-churned butter and venison and bear meat from Pennsylvania, and the black-tipped tail of a red fox. He said that one day he would bring me a little ermine and a baby crow. “Do not despair. Angels are nearer than you think.” I sometimes thought of Gary.
It was not unusual to see a rabid bat fluttering around the house in the middle of the day, like a scrap of black cloth in the wind. We were taught to be afraid of rabies as young children, for it was the line between the domestic and the wild, the thing that brought wild animals close. Once, out in Johnny Curry’s green rowboat, I watched a bat, oddly mustard yellow with fine leathery wings like large webbed hands, flopping on the thin waves. Its soaked furry head peered up humanlike as Johnny beat it under with the flat blond blade of an oar. But for Gary dealing with rabies was routine. He would come over and with one shot shoot the mothlike little bat out of the sky.
When I ran up from the dock where nesting swallows dove at my head, Gary, sitting on the porch with my father, would laugh, “Just go down there with a tennis racquet, sweetheart, and they won’t bother you.”
Our fishing expeditions became a running joke.
“Rainwinds through the night. In the morning there is a stiff wind and clouds. The light is still strong on the water as I take my first swim.”
“What are we liable to hook?”
“Oh—browns, rainbows, landlocked salmon.”
“Landlocked salmon? What do they look like?”
“Torpedoes. Watch out for sharks.”
“Are there landlocked sharks?”
“That was a joke.”
“No, I mean, are there landlocked sharks?”
“Oh. Not here. Lake Nicaragua.”
“Do you know that for sure?”
“Robin knows all about sharks . . . Run right the way you’re running.”
I am at the wheel.
“Jesus Christ! Did you see that! A big rainbow just come out of the water—see that swirl over there?”
There are vertical smudges on the graph. Gary says they are suspended fish. “Rainbows.”
“Why do they hang that way?”
“Temperature.”
Waves knock the boat. The boat rattles.
“I gotta hoe these beer cans out of the boat someday,” Gary says.
It begins to rain. We are drinking black, bitter coffee.
“Yeah, I’m about the first one to use a downrigger on this lake,” Gary says. “Everybody’s still pulling copper. That’s hell. If you’re gonna fish it might as well be fun, right? The trick is, see, you keep the ball right off the bottom.”
He holds up a round iron weight, painted orange. A knob on top forms the loop for the fishline.
“The ball pulls the lines, all the lines, down. Fish takes the line. The clip releases—clothespin effect.”
“Wait a minute. If a fish takes the line, then the line goes free . . . ?”
“Free from the downrigger line. Then you haul ’em in.”
There are four fishing poles stuck in plastic tube stands in the stern. Gary moves to the back of the boat to adjust the lines as we go shallow or deep, winding them up or down on spools attached to either side.
“If I spit in the water I can see how fast we’re going,” he says.
There are flecks on the graph right under the fuzzy line of the surface—trout. The bottom is almost smooth at ninety feet, with an occasional pucker down or up. A strong wind abruptly knocks the boat off course, to the west, and, as abruptly, the bottom line on the graph drops to a hundred twenty feet.
As we pass other boats the radio crackles.
“Lynchy, how deep you running your rig?”
“Ninety feet—running right on the bottom.”
The radio again: “Keep it at ninety feet, right on the bottom. Lynchy got four on the downrigger.”
Gary laughs, his face red. “See that! Every time you go to the back, they think you got a fish on.”
He begins reeling up the line. I watch it on the graph. There begins a sudden drop that goes off the graph altogether, a deep drop
in the floor of the lake. Then the line begins to rise again and is the outline of a hill ending in a small shelf. Near the edge of the shelf are small marks where the fish are.
“Hey come here! Hurry!” Gary calls.
He hands me a rod from one of the plastic tubes. The rod tip dances and wobbles and I begin to reel in what I can feel is a small trout.
“Laker. Dead weight,” says Gary. “A rainbow’d give you a good fight.”
The fish rises to the surface, then languidly spits out the spoon and flops away.
“Oh no!”
“The ones that hurt, Susan, are the ones that are ten pounds that you lose.”
The rain has stopped. The water is black and the sun on the water has a metal shine. A bright crowd of gulls is floating by. A dense black mark appears on the sonar just beneath them.
“Baitfish, see?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s why the gulls are there. There’s trout underneath ’em. There’s a dead one.”
A bloated fish floats beside us.
“Someone drug that one up. What happens is—fish get the bends, see. Sure—if you drag ’em up from four hundred feet. You heard of divers getting the bends? Same with fish, you drag a fish up a hundred feet, it’s bloated way out. That’s why you take ’em up real slow—otherwise, well, what I do, I take a knife and stick it in the bladder to let some of the air out.”
“Why are there trout right here near the point? Is it warmer, colder?”
“Protection. They can hide, and when the baitfish go by, they grab ’em. There are bigger fish in the lake that eat trout.”
“Like what?”
“Bigger trout. Northerns’ll eat ’em in the spring sometimes. But in the summer the northerns stay in shallow when the trout are out a hundred feet.”
“Do northerns attack people?”
Gary laughs.
…
Gary was in love with the wife of a trucker who had long red hair and green eyes and was putting herself through medical school. I used to see her stringing up laundry along the side of their trailer in the afternoon, beside her garden of foxglove and asparagus and swollen leaves of lettuce that held the light. Across the road was the shack where old Joe lived, a shack made from doors, with a mean shepherd mongrel chained beside it to a tree. They must’ve put it down when he died. Now the place is full of grass and locust suckers, waist high, and musk roses bloom there. In the sumac nearby the foxes live. We hear them bark at night. In the field beyond, the winter wheat is white with gulls.
I saw a large stag in the hidden back field at the edge of the forest here. As I watched it, it watched me. It tilted its head back and tore the leaves from an old oak, its antlers like blunt broken branches. What will be points are still soft knobs covered with silver fur. Gary says the does can bite them now. This is why stags go around in groups in the summer. “The does can get back at ’em for pushing ’em around all fall.” When the antlers get hard they breed. The stags keep their antlers until the last doe is bred. Then the antlers fall like ripe apples and the mice eat them.
Bob Kime said the stag I saw must be the “legend buck.” Said he shot it with his bow three different times, and every time it walked away. “But wouldn’t you know it, my wife hit it with the car—did fifteen hundred dollars worth of damage,” before it dragged itself off the road and was gone.
…
When Gary came down to our woods in Hector, he would draw me in deeper among the trees, which were almost pavilionlike in the loose glacial till, forming a broad canopy above a stream banked with Solomon’s-seal. He would stop and sniff the air and say, see there are minks denning here, in the lip of a gravel rise (their musk slightly sweeter than a skunk’s but similar), or show me a fawn licked neatly apart and the track nearby, almost crumbled into the mud, of the animal that brought it down. Gary had a great love for foxes and the otherworldly redness of their fur. Sometimes in the spring we would walk quietly around a clump of sumac to hear the faint high yapping of their pups.
I didn’t think much then about how a trapper had to notice things—the almost invisible roads pressed into the carpet of fallen leaves, the scratches on trees, the turned-up earth. I did sense that the knowledge Gary had—something between informed observation and instinct—was a rare and precious thing, a remnant of an older world, and that I wanted to have it too.
One day he brought a sable turkey feather he found standing upright in the field beyond our yard. It seemed incredible in the late 1970s that wild turkeys could be coming back. At the time, Gary had begun to see traces of a new animal raiding his traps, and he wanted to find out what it was. He took me out in the fields with a strobe light hooked to the roof of his pickup to see what was out at night. The colors reflected back from the mirror-like eyes in the dark told us at once what animals were there—deer green, raccoons orange, foxes red—before the outline of their forms emerged in the halo of light. But we never saw the animal he was looking for, though we watched and waited. “A coyote is an opportunist, see,” Gary would say, as though to say he knew what it was to be an opportunist, to live on anything, to be subtle enough to utterly disappear.
We heard the farmers say, “I thought I saw a German shepherd in the field last night, but then you could see by the way it moved that it was a wild animal.”
One Christmas morning Gary pulled up at my parents’ house with six coyote skins, stapled through the eyes, in the back of his pickup. He brought them as a gift, proof of the animal, and how near it was. He had trapped five of them behind our cottage on the lake, and the sixth one on the Nielsen Road, a hidden field road where I loved to walk, and killed it with a stone.
We drove to Rochester one night, Gary giddy with laughter and exhaustion, his hands on the steering wheel crusted over with dirt. His eyes were bright behind his gold-rimmed glasses, for he had figured out how to trap this animal that had eluded him for so long. We went to see a friend of his, a furrier named Tom Monroe, who sewed the skins together into a coat. Tom laid the coyote skins out on his metal table, beside a newly acquired pelt of timber wolf from northern Canada, to show us how alike they were, the stiff black guard hairs where the shoulders would have been, the blond underfur streaked with white.
…
Gary used to say that the eastern coyote was really the Algonquin red wolf. He would have been gratified to see an article that ran in Adirondack Life not long ago, which flatly stated, “What we’ve been calling [eastern] coyotes here look an awful lot like the Algonquin red wolf.”
The article went on to say that the wolf of Algonquin Park, long thought to be a smaller version of the gray wolf of North America, was really Canis rufus, the red wolf, placed on the endangered species list in the United States in 1965. The author noted a conclusion that many researchers have reached: that the red wolf is a hybrid that results from the interbreeding of coyotes and gray wolves. Perhaps this is the animal, the article suggested, that was described as a wolf in the Adirondacks in the nineteenth century, when “if the beast howled like a wolf and hunted livestock like a wolf, it was a wolf; taxonomy didn’t much matter when the time came to pay a bounty.”
In George Caleb Bingham’s painting Trappers on the Missouri, a French trapper and his Indian son, their bag of shot ducks at their feet, drift on a misted river. A strange animal is tied in the bow. For years I thought it was a black cat, but one day I looked closely at the picture at the Metropolitan Museum, and saw that it was Canis niger, the black phase of the red wolf.
What is a wolf? Those that Audubon frequently encountered in his travels across North America varied greatly in size and shape and color. The term may be as elusive as the creature. In Greek the name of the animal belongs to the realm of words denoting light, like lukos (a name that comes directly from the word for light itself) and argos, silver (literally, “shining,” used by Homer to describe the movement of canids, “because all swift motion causes a kind of glancing or flickering light,” as the commentators Liddell an
d Scott have written), an image that makes me think of the dioramic wolf display in the American Museum of Natural History, in which wolves run across the snow at night, their backs the silver of the ground and the moon and the frozen lake.
In his 1992 study of the eastern coyote the Canadian biologist Gerry Parker points out that the small-bodied coyote of the American plains is the canid archetype, the compact blueprint that has morphed repeatedly over time into larger, more specialized forms. Parker tells of how plains coyotes followed prospectors north to Alaska a hundred years ago, drawn by the carrion of their dead horses and the garbage they left along the way. These northern-ranging coyotes bred with gray wolves on the edge of the boreal forest as the trees were cut back and the wolf population was dislodged. The new hybrid learned to hunt in packs in the hard winters, to bring down snowbound deer. As they changed from scavengers to predators they grew larger on a diet of fresh meat, and ultimately became the animal we see today. “What it is and how it got here,” Parker concludes, “are the same question.”
…
One snowless day last winter I saw a shred of white on the bare ground outside my window. I thought it was a piece of Styrofoam blown there by the wind. But later I saw the cat shaking it by its throat, and saw that it was a little ermine betrayed by what we used to call an “open winter,” when nothing froze. The ermine turned white, but there was no snow.
The ermine, Armenia mustela, the Armenian rat, is the local weasel that eats the voles and mice around our house. I used to see the southern version in the streets of Cairo and in the open-air teashops on the banks of the Nile, where they would come up from their dens in the riverbank and stand on their hind legs beside the tables to beg for cake. “Ursa,” people called it, saying “it eats blood.” One time I went to see a rare bookseller in a denser, poorer part of the city. When the bookseller rolled up the metal door of his shop a little weasel bounded out.
Wolves & Honey Page 4
