The winter fur of the northern weasel was once called the purest white in nature, save for the tip of its tail, which is jet black as though dipped in ink. For centuries it was the badge of European royalty. Seeing it exposed and stranded in my own backyard made me think of Dick Wood’s pocket trapper’s manual from the twenties, which began, “Today wilderness conditions in this country and the Indians have about disappeared, but the fur-bearers remain.”
The trapper and the trapped now meet as castoffs of the civilized world. The story of the devolution of the wolf into hostile predator, then into the scruffy eastern coyote, is not unlike that of the American trapper, the primordial hunter of the wild, who allied himself with the Indians, and so learned to survive without the hampering luxuries of settled urban life. The American trapper is something of a Caliban figure now—a chthonic, scruffy character, outmoded and despised. But Caliban is, after all, the native of the place, the one who knows where everything is. As he says:
I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow
and I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts,
Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how
to snare the nimble marmoset. I’ll bring thee
to clustering filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee
young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me?
(Shakespeare, The Tempest)
A man walks up to a woman in line beside me in Penn Station and demands to know, “Is that real fur?” “I’m afraid so.” She blushes, catching her breath. He smiles triumphantly. I look down at his shoes. They are made of leather, a material so pervasive in American society that one forgets it is skin, a word that means to cut, to flay, an animal that has not even been caught in the wild, but raised to be killed. That leather is skin is unimaginable, forgotten, but fur still seems to be the animal itself.
That was the idea. The American Indians were matrilineal and totemic: they derived their identity not from who their father was, but from the animal totem of their mother. Totem is an Algonquin word meaning kin, brother or sister of the same womb, suggesting at once the palpable sense that the womb, the mother, was the origin of life, and that all living things had this origin in common. The difference lay only in the manifestation, the form.
The belief in the common nature of all life arose from the close study of life itself, from the informed eye of the primitive hunter. To capture an animal—to outwit it with a trap of sticks and stones, or come close enough to catch it with one’s hands—one has to know it, and to know an animal is to know that one is an animal oneself.
“As for scalping or even skinning a savage,” says the trapper Hurry Harry to the Deerslayer, “I look upon it pretty much the same as cutting off the ears of wolves.”
The line reveals the odd correspondences of the early North American fur trade: that the European saw the Indian and the animal as one, belonging to the wild; that the European took the practices of the wild—scalping and trapping—from the Indian; and that scalping and taking the fur of animals were similar practices, with similar intent. It was the loss of the intent—the wearing of the vestiges of animals and enemies as a badge, something invested with significance, a form of affiliation—that created the environmental disaster of the commercial fur trade, the impetus for the European settlement of the entire North American continent.
…
The closeness of human and animal life was part of the mystery of North America. In Apologies to the Iroquois Edmund Wilson conveys it even in the late 1950s, when he tells of walking into a modern kitchen on the Tonawanda reservation in western New York, where Seneca men have gathered to perform a sympathetic healing ceremony called the “little water.” The little water is the miraculous ointment that brings the dead back to life. A common element in fairy tales, such an ointment is so precious and rare, so hard to obtain, that it is kept in a tiny hidden vial of crystal or diamond. In the Iroquois version the diamond vial is an acorn, and the ointment is made by the animals of the forest from their own hair, mucus, and blood.
Wilson describes the small group of Senecas wearing western clothes casually assembled in an ordinary American scene of the evening kitchen. A television drones in the next room. The lights go out and the chanting begins, with the men, indistinguishable in the dark, taking the parts of the different animals.
As the animals find a hunter in the forest scalped and dead, a wolf comes first to lick the blood from the exposed flesh of the hunter’s naked head. The animal voices—the birds’ cries, the throaty growls of wolves—were so accurately produced in the room, it was as though, Wilson says, in a description that makes the hair stand up, the actual animals were present in the dark kitchen, and their presence was the medicine itself.
The territory that became New York State was among other things a scene of historical compression and wild instances of mistaken identity, where Stone Age and Iron Age collided like tectonic plates. When John Cabot sailed to the Canadian Maritimes in 1497 he was looking for the coast of China. Cabot had been to Mecca in the spice trade and had come to believe that a way to get around the Arab traders, who acted as middlemen on the Silk Road and took extravagant cuts, could be found in the direction farthest away from them—north and west. When Champlain traveled the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario by canoe in the early seventeenth century, he still thought he was in the outer reaches of Asia. Jean Nicollet, one of Champlain’s forest scouts, set off across Lake Michigan with a gift for the emperor, a robe of damask, thickly embroidered with birds and flowers in gold thread, rolled up in the bow of his birchbark canoe. Sixty years later La Salle’s men, weary and disgruntled, turned back on the same route and settled along the St. Lawrence near Montreal in a place they cynically called “la Chine.”
What the early explorers hoped to find in China was more direct access to the luxuries of the East, for exotic luxuries were the only things their sponsors, the kings of Europe, were interested in. It took a hundred years for the European aristocracy to accept the rich fur from the depths of the uncut American forests as a luxury that rivaled silk.
…
Gary Lynch, like Bob Kime, belonged less to the history of the mass industrialization of the American continent than to the prior topography of New York State, its wetlands and forests. They worked at a lost connection as intermediaries between the settled and the wild, tracing a vertical line, backward in time:
A desperately fluttering bird, tied by its feet to the lower branches of a pine, might draw a lynx into a fiber snare tucked into the dark shadows beneath the tree. A deadfall—a rock propped over soft meat—makes a natural cave for a fox. The unusual brightness of split green sticks, stuck in the ground to form a pen, will occasionally lure in a curious black fisher.
Like the wolf, the beaver was one of the primary totems of the tribes of the Northeast, of the nomadic Algonquin, and of the sedentary agriculturalists of the eastern Great Lakes, the Huron and the Iroquois. Members of a clan claimed their descent from a giant version of their totem animal, like the grizzly-sized beaver that inhabited the early Cenozoic marshes of these parts; the totem animal was normally a familiar one, routinely hunted and killed for its flesh and skin in an intimacy of exploitation and identification and absorption.
Killing a totem animal required rituals of propitiation. A passage in The Golden Bough gives a sense of the elaborate precautions involved:
The Canadian Indians were equally particular not to let their dogs gnaw the bones, or at least certain of the bones, of beavers. They took the greatest pains to collect and preserve these bones, and when the beaver had been caught in a net they threw them into the river. To a Jesuit who argued that the beavers could not possibly know what became of their bones, the Indian replied, “You know nothing about catching beavers and yet you will be prating about it. Before the beaver is stone dead, his soul takes a turn in the hut of the man who is killing him and makes a careful note of what is done with his bones. If the bones are given to the dogs, the other b
eavers would get word of it and would not let themselves be caught. Whereas, if their bones are thrown into the fire or a river, they are quite satisfied, and it is particularly gratifying to the net which caught them.” Before hunting beaver they offered a solemn prayer to the Great Beaver, and presented him with tobacco; and when the chase was over, an orator pronounced a funeral oration over the dead beavers. He praised their spirit and wisdom. “You will hear no more,” said he, “the voice of the chieftains who commanded you and whom you chose from all the warrior beavers to give you laws. Your language, which the medicine-men understand perfectly, will be heard no more at the bottom of the lake. You will fight no more with the otters, your cruel foes. No, beavers! But your skins will serve to buy arms; we will carry your smoked hams to our children; we will keep the dogs from eating your bones, which are so hard.
…
In Europe the beaver was no longer an animal. It was a hat. Beaver fur became felt, sold not by the pelt but by the pound. The hatters of Paris and London found beaver fur to be a felting material superior to wool. The hairs had a toughness that made them at once naturally cohesive and somewhat waterproof. America provided what seemed to be an inexhaustible source of felt. A hatter would painstakingly pull out each guard hair with tweezers, then brush a solution of nitrate of mercury over the plucked fur. The mercury scaled, or roughened, the shafts of hair, helping them to interlock in the felting process. The mercury also poisoned and killed the hatter. “Mad as a hatter” referred to someone who, after long exposure to mercury poisoning, had lost muscle control and the ability to speak. The hatter played a violin over the shaved hairs to create a steady vibration that would gently shake away the dust before the hairs were matted into a dense felt, dyed black, and shaped. The fur of the beaver became the top hat, an essential fashion accessory in Europe and America for over two hundred years. One can hardly imagine the millions of animals killed simply to sustain this fashion.
To harvest the beaver meadows that lined the water routes inland from the Maritimes, it was necessary to travel through densely forested country, and that could be accomplished only on water, by means of tree bark canoe.
Champlain was the first European to master this instrument. Thus an elegantly eccentric polymath began the tradition of the American trapper. Champlain, precursor of the Enlightenment in the American wilds, studied his surroundings—animals, plants, weather—even when he was stranded in the Haliburton Highlands or menaced by the hostile Seneca on Oneida Lake. The Huron and Algonquin loved this quirky alien who studied their unwritten dialects, kept elaborately illustrated journals, grew Mediterranean roses in Canadian permafrost. He companionably set out with them to fight the Iroquois on the shores of Lake Ontario. Fantastic as the Tin Man with his suit of French armor glinting in the sun, Champlain’s very appearance routed the enemy immediately. “The mosquitoes,” he wrote afterward, “were terrific.”
Although Champlain’s interest was primarily in exploration, his funding came from the fur trade, which compelled him to seek the best tribal sources for fur. He sent young Frenchmen to live with the tribes—not to teach, as the Jesuits did, but to learn the tribal languages, knowledge of animals, methods, routes of travel. These young men, often teenage boys who disappeared for years at a time, were the coureurs de bois, the forest scouts, or, as the French dictionary translates the term today, “trappers.”
The Jesuits ultimately failed to win over the tribes and their land, though they secured for themselves the martyrdom of saints, an ordeal of sanctity reverently set down even as the priests’ fingers were severed, one by one, with the shiny pink edges of freshwater clamshells. The coureurs de bois succeeded, silently, in opening up the entire American continent.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thousands of young men, many of them European aristocrats, vanished into the American wilderness to make their way as solitary trappers. The tradition and its attendant mythology became so entrenched that when Audubon, painting in the artistic conventions of Central Asia, was unable to sell his work in America, he went to Europe and presented himself as an American woodsman in a wolfskin coat.
At the time, the figure of the American backwoods trapper from upstate New York, Natty Bumppo, was one of the most popular fictional characters in the world. But by then it was becoming unfashionable to deal in furs. Fenimore Cooper made Bumppo a rifleman. The Susquehanna trapper Hutter is the bad guy in The Deerslayer, scalped like one of his otters or beavers in retribution in the end.
For trapping went out of fashion with the beaver hat when the beaver meadows were exhausted in the nineteenth century. Once numbering in the hundreds of millions across North America, the animal had virtually vanished from the East. In 1907 Theodore Roosevelt’s Department of the Interior released fourteen beavers from Yellowstone in the Adirondacks in an attempt to reestablish the beaver in New York State.
…
When Gary lost his trapper’s license for setting a traditional rope snare instead of using the plastic leg-hold trap the law requires, he spent the summer growing roses, like Champlain.
A summer or two later Gary died. He drowned while working for the telephone company, swimming a fiber-optic cable across the Erie Canal in Lyons. Normally his work crew would have hauled the cable across in a rowboat, or would even have tied a light rope to an arrow and shot the arrow across the canal, then used the rope to pull the cable along. Both methods seemed too complicated and time-consuming to Gary. The weather was hot, good for a swim. He stripped to his underwear, tied the rope around his middle, swam two thirds of the way across—and then, inexplicably, went under. He came up to the surface, shouted, “Hurry! Hurry!” to his men, and went under again.
Other linemen dove into the canal but could not find him. The fire company came an hour later and hauled his body out with a grappling hook. My mother called the Hudson Valley farm where my husband and I now live, and Lan and I drove the long familiar road back to Geneva.
I walked into the field across from Chuck Brust’s and found a red hawk’s feather standing in the wet grass beneath the hickory tree where I once saw a redheaded woodpecker and made a note of it in a pocket notebook for the first time. I used to come here in the evening to watch the deer.
A week before he died, Gary told me on the phone that a fox smells like a skunk, and a coyote sweeter than a fox, and that he would come and stay with us on the way out to a job for the phone company on Long Island. Our freezer was filled with the lake trout he had caught that summer.
We drove out to Lyons. The canal was narrow there, and we could see how Gary thought it would be easy to swim across. The lockmaster, a leathery man with tattooed arms, said he thought Gary could not simply have drowned, but must have had a heart attack.
“We’re trying to make sense out of it,” we said.
“You’ll never make sense out of it,” he said. “It’s a tragedy.”
In the morning, before Gary’s funeral in Seneca Falls, I went down to the dock on Seneca lake, where blue was breaking through the fog in an iridescent haze. There were whitecaps to the south in a silver edge of spray. Wind out of the south-southwest. At the house on Delancey Drive in town, as we prepared to drive over to the funeral, we saw a white-faced hornets’ nest in the Norway maple in the front yard.
“It looks like a heart,” Lan said.
Bob Kime promised he would come that night, when the temperature had dropped and the hornets were asleep. He would take down the nest, hornets and all, put it in a plastic bag in the deep freeze, and sell it to a research lab in Washington State. It was good to hear his voice.
5
An Atmosphere of Sweetness
ANYONE LOOKING at the Finger Lakes region and its strangely dense history must wonder what explains so many powerful phenomena arising in what would otherwise have seemed a backwater. What odd metaphysics brought together Mormonism, spiritualism, women’s rights, abolitionism, the origins of the American fortune in the fur trade, and the scientific advanceme
nt of agriculture?
I once copied out the development of the word “talisman” on three index cards taped together and stuck them on the wall above my desk. They read:
Talisman: an object marked with magical signs and believed to confer on its bearer supernatural powers or protection. 2. Anything having apparently magical powers. French and Spanish talisman from Arabic tilsam from late Greek telesma, completion, consecrated object, from telein, to fulfill, consecrate, from telos, fulfillment, result.
What would be the talisman that one could follow through the layers of Finger Lake soil, through layers of memory and history, from the Iroquois to the Experiment Station? What would signify the indelible native atmosphere? It might be the apple, or its essence, sweetness itself.
…
In the basement of the Warren Smith Library at William Smith College across the street from our house in Geneva not long ago, I asked the archivist for a file of William Smith’s automatic writing. Warren Smith’s great-uncle William had been an avid spiritualist, and initially tried to found William Smith as a spiritualist college. But the open-ended, borderless ambitions of spiritualism ran counter to formal education, or any hierarchical structure at all. William Smith couldn’t figure out how to put the two together.
The archivist had lived around Hydesville. She said the fire department there decided to burn down the Fox sisters’ house ten years ago as an exercise to keep the firefighters in training. She offered to drive me out to the weed-choked field where the house once stood. We might find a trace of the books and papers that must have been inside.
William Smith came to Geneva from rural England in 1840 to work as a farm laborer. He and his brothers bought land around the ruins of Kanadesaga and became pioneers in the American nursery business. They discovered that the rich clay loam, left like sludge around the meltwater of the glacier that formed Seneca Lake, was particularly good for growing apple trees and a plant that is botanically a simpler manifestation of the apple, the rose.
Wolves & Honey Page 5
