Blood Trails

One cold morning during the fall of 1974 my dad and I left our cabin in northern Michigan to check a leg-hold trap set in a stand of pines near a swamp. My dad hunted or trapped nearly everything over the years: deer, bear, mink, otter, muskrat, my mother. This day he was hoping for coyote.

My dad walked fast in a harried lope of going somewhere, and I half-trotted on my skinny eleven-year-old legs to keep pace. Blue jays squawked warnings of our approach. We soon picked up old trails, the ground matted in spots from repeated boot scars over the years, and my dad began walking even faster. Over a knoll under a large pine tree we found the trap. No coyote. But a large adult male bobcat glowered at us upon our approach, its ears folded back into sharp spikes. The ground beneath the pine tree oozed black wetness where the enraged cat had repeatedly lunged against the trap’s hold and raked the ground raw with the staked chain.

The bobcat hissed and growled at us, its eyes fierce and calculating.

My mother circled the kitchen seething, the blood coloring her temples tomato, her anger rising with each nonretort from my dad. I kept her trapped in the kitchen this night—as best as a ten-year-old could—as she screamed at my dad who sat in the living room watching All in the Family. I don’t remember what triggered this particular outburst, but the fights and lashing out were frequent. Finally with a guttural yell—not like the tinny yipping of a coyote, but more base like something large and wounded —mother grabbed a butcher knife from the block framed by the rows of ceramic roosters and dairy cows she collected and pressed the tip of the knife into her chest. I lunged and grabbed onto her wrists. Dad burst into the kitchen and put his meaty hands over mine and yanked hard against the adrenaline-spiked grip of mom. She let go of the knife and collapsed onto the floor in a last gasp of profanities and screaming, a small trickle of blood on her chest where she had successfully punctured her skin. Had my dad arrived in the kitchen even a half minute later to help me, he would have found my mother crumpled on the floor with the knife buried in her chest.

She awoke the next day in bed and remembered nothing. She asked me how she got a cut on her chest. I told her I didn’t know. She had another splitting headache. Dad called the doctor and got her prescriptions refilled.

I went outside to hunt frogs in the ditch near our house.

Had we arrived even a half day later to the trap, my dad and I would have probably only found a gnawed-off bloody paw and mutilated earth. The bobcat would have been gone, a crippled bolt to the left, right, into trees, belly rubbing along muddied banks, deep into primal places of cedar and swamp. We would have trailed it part of the way, but a foot wound never bleeds long enough to allow tracking into the secret places. The bobcat would quickly disappear into cover where it could hear its own blood and the squeak of angleworms in black earth and the nothingness below that where rocks fissured by fingers of water lay quiet. We would quickly become discouraged and start thinking about hot soup and the wood stove at the cabin.

But this cat hadn’t been in the trap long enough for the steel jaws to work deeply into the leg. My dad took off his cap and scratched his head. The bobcat in kind sat down on its hindquarters, eyeing us, panting. My dad would kill it for the pelt; I knew no other alternative because of the hides scraped clean and stretched taut over wire frames and the sharp smell of curing fur that permeated our garage every fall.

My dad first hunted my mother over a half century ago, trapping her with his wiry...