Running the Line

Under the single-lane bridge, the shallow water of Brown's Run slides over the rocks and speeds westward toward Edenborn. On a slope of muddy bank in the still gray morning, I pull black rubber gloves up over the sleeves of my Carhartt coat to my shoulders. No sun lifting yet over the bare trunks and branches of the trees on the eastern horizon. No heat to melt the patina of frost from the wind-tilted broomsage in the field above.

I lift my father's wooden Clint Ishman basket up from the bank and its contents—a jar of fish oil, a one-ounce bottle of peppermint oil, a rusty hatchet, two No. 11/2 Victor long-spring steel traps, and a plastic grocery bag of sectioned, rotting, windfall apples—rustle and clank. As I step into the water, the loose rubber of my chest waders crushes in, gripping my ankles and shins.

A splash of headlights, and the hum of tires on the grate of the bridge overhead. Rust flecks sift down, settling on my shoulders and the bill of my hat as I reach into the chest pocket of my coat and fish out the index card that depicts a crude map of my father's trapline. A single stripe of blue ink curves up the card's length with thin slashes crossing its contours to indicate fallen trees, beaver dams, the trickle of feeder streams, and other landmarks to help me locate his sets. I trace a gloved finger up the line, counting the Xs that indicate set traps. Thirty-one Xs to find before the line gives out on the white space of the card, before the creek passes my grandmother's farm. I shift the basket higher onto my shoulder and begin walking toward the first.

During my week of Thanksgiving vacation from my junior year of college, I spent six days running my father's trapline. My mother called the house I shared in Pittsburgh to tell me that he was in the hospital. The drugs my father took to suppress his immune system, to prevent rejection of his transplanted kidney, had caused him to develop a hacking cough, and the doctors found two spots in his lungs they suspected were tuberculosis. The doctors were right, and my father was confined to a private room in the Union-town hospital, keeping him from home and the work required of a full-time trapper.

Since I was seven years old, I had spent time on weekends with my father on his trapline, riding in the truck, holding his trapping basket on my lap as he drove from farm to farm to check his land sets. We walked treelines and ridges and the edges of harvested cornfields in the fall, my father always stopping and pointing to the locations of his traps if I hadn't been present to see him set them. I fought through the briar patches on the banks as he checked his traps in the streams below. Days when he set the traps were longer. I watched him dig pockets or build shelves with the soft mud of the creek bank to bed his traps, watched him cut trenches that transformed narrow muskrat slides into expressways, watched as he stacked rocks and pushed sticks into the soil to help funnel the animals over his traps. I waited as he snipped 12-gauge steel wire and secured his traps to roots or as he doubled the wire over and tied the traps to heavy rocks pulled from the creek bottom to anchor the animal if it struggled. He explained why he chose each location, pointing to droppings on rocks, toenail scratches and tracks pressed in the earth, holes that led under the banks to dens. He explained the importance of properly bedding the traps so they wouldn't shift, flip, or snap without securing a firm leg hold. I fetched items from the basket as he called for them and listened as he explained why he was using different baits for different animals: rotting fish and fish oil for raccoons; pieces of...