Last Hunter: An American Family Album

Chapter Fifteen

124 will weaver My father often used the phrase “the fat of the land.” It meant anything that could be gleaned, picked, fished, or hunted—and put to good use for the family. In the spring we speared suckers in a creek and had them smoked (neither my mother nor Carl would eat them). In summer we picked wild blueberries, chokecherries, pincherries, plums, and cranberries ; blueberry bogs in July, when the mosquitoes and wood ticks and deerflies were at their peak, made for the worst kind of stoop labor—but my mother transformed the dusky blue berries into wine-­ dark pies and sauces better than any other kind. Some years, when they were worth good money, we picked pinecones. I climbed high up into the crowns of big white pines, up where the breeze soughed, and eased out as far as I dared on the pitchy, thinning limbs; with a stick I whacked loose the rust-­ colored cones. They tumbled down intact, and we gathered and sold them by the bushel basket to the local, state-­ run tree nursery. My father gave us kids all the money we made picking cones—a lesson not lost on us. He also helped me build a frog box, a small, wood-­ framed rectangle with wire mesh on three sides and a strip of inner-­ tube rubber tacked across the top with a slit in it. He waited on a pond bank, smoking, while I waded and pounced, waded and pounced along the edge of a slough as I filled the box with small-­to medium-­ sized leopard frogs. We took the frogs to town and sold them to bait shops, which in turn sold them to out-­ of-­ town bass fishermen too lazy to catch their own. We fished for bluegills, sunfish, crappies, bass, northern pike, and walleye on the water or through the ice. And of course we hunted partridge, duck, geese, and deer in the fall. Whenever I came from the university back to the farm for a weekend or on spring break, my father always had jobs the last hunter 125 waiting for me. In the space of a few hours I went from a class on James Joyce or a poetry reading by John Berryman to the close, low-­ ceilinged dairy barn. From books to a fork and shovel. Sometimes my task was to clean a calf pen—pitch the sodden straw through a small window and into the manure spreader just outside, my eyes stinging from the ammoniac smell of calf piss—while other Saturdays I climbed the cold chute of the silo and threw down several days’ worth of pungent, fermented silage. In March he had a firewood permit waiting, and for several days we cut down standing dead timber and sawed it up. But on the coldest weekends of winter, I helped my father with his trapline. He had always trapped, so this work was nothing new to me, and there was a practical reason for the trapline: income from my father’s fur trapping paid for much of my university studies. A half-­ dozen red fox for sixteen credits of literature. One prime, buck mink for The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. There is a photo of my father and me on snowshoes beside his black Chevy pickup with our catch of the day. I have carried the three frozen coyotes and one fox over my shoulder out of the woods (I look slightly warm and out of breath). The temperature is below zero. We are posed for my mother’s Kodak, and the stiff carcasses are outstretched as if running or leaping—but caught, freeze-­ frame, in midair. There are other trapping photos. These I took myself. One is of my father crouched in snow beside a dead black Angus. We have dumped the steer, which died by natural causes, perhaps a twisted gut, in the edge of the woods, and my father is setting traps around it. He is sprinkling—carefully !—brown cattail fuzz inside the open, black, iron jaws of a number-­ three jump trap. The cattail fiber, beneath a fine sifting of snow, will keep the trap mechanism (springs, pan, 126 will weaver and trigger) from freezing open. His arm is outstretched as if making an offer to the dead animal, though it was making an offering to us. There is another photograph, taken by me, of a red...