Sundance 17, page 8
“Once,” Sundance said.
“That’s more than most men. How did you do it?”
“I was trapping with an old Cree named Broken Jaw. A Carcajou moved in on our line. He said there was no way to catch it in a trap. He said, ‘Remember, you’re a man. And a man is smarter and stronger than even a wolverine. Now, go after it and don’t come back without it.’ ”
“And?”
Sundance sprang the third trap. It made a great clash of metal in the stillness of the cabin. “There was good snow. I picked up its trail. And followed it, everywhere it went. Wolverines travel at night, men in daytime. But I cut fat pine torches and kept after it at night. When it tried to hole up during the day, I flushed it out. I gave it no time to rest. I didn’t rest myself. I figured I ought to be stronger than a wolverine. I followed it maybe a hundred miles on snowshoes. It didn’t have snowshoes and the snow was getting deep. I wore it out. Finally it holed up in a kind of cave, not much bigger than my shoulders are wide. I tried to smoke it out, but it wouldn’t come, so I went in after it. crawling on my belly. It came for me, trying to tear my face off. I stuck my gun barrel in its mouth—it was that close—and pulled the trigger. Then I skinned it and built a lean-to and a big fire and slept for about two days and after that I took the hide back to Broken Jaw.”
“And what did he say?”
Sundance grinned. “He said, ‘You’ve been off enjoying yourself and left me to do all the work alone, and I am an old man. It’s not fair.’ ”
“The Indian sense of humor.”
“Sure,” Sundance said. “But that was when he arranged for me to be adopted into the Crees.”
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Fifteen,” Sundance said, and he set another trap.
~*~
That night, in the warmth of the cabin, they enjoyed the luxury of a bath. This time, they washed each other, and when they were dried and glowing, the fire crackling in the stove, they made love. “Jim,” she cried, straining against him. Then her cries were stifled by his mouth. Her legs were long and strong encircling him, her body a cylinder hungry for the driving piston. Her breasts were soft, and when he kissed them, it drove her wild. Outside, wolves howled, and the dogs answered, but those were normal sounds of the North, and they paid them no attention, as they sank off to sleep in the warmth beneath the blanket.
The next morning, they went to work.
“If anybody’s watching,” Sundance said, “we’ve got to look like we’re stringing a normal trapline. For that matter, we might as well. You could use the money.”
“Yes,” she said. “I certainly could. I need to go back outside and finish my training as a nurse. And I have family. Because of the Carcajou, they won’t trap this year, and I must care for them. The more fur we can catch, the better. And Jim?”
“Yeah?”
“There are two silver fox, at least, on this line. If we could catch just one of them, that alone would pay for all the rest of my training down in Vancouver. I know about where they run, and Hank and I tried all one season, but we didn’t have any luck.”
“Show me where they ‘use’,” Sundance said. Before they left the cabin, he warily surveyed the surrounding terrain. Then he handed Laughing Woman one of the double barreled shotguns he’d had included in the gear. “You keep this with you,” he said. “And a pocketful of buckshot shells. A man might tackle a woman with a pistol or a rifle, figuring she’ll miss, but nobody’ll go up against A shotgun, the way it sprays. Anybody comes at you, just point and pull the trigger. Now, I have got some other work to do and then we’ll make a day’s run from the cabin and set some traps.”
She watched as he took another shotgun, lashed it with a rope to the table, its muzzles pointing squarely at the door, at the level of a man’s chest. He clove hitched cord around its triggers, ran the cord behind an up-bent nail hammered in the wall, attached its end to the door’s inner latch. It took some experimentation to get the tension on the cord just right. Presently, though, he had it perfect: when the door was swung wide open, both cocked hammers of the shotgun clicked down dryly. Satisfied, Sundance untied the weapon, motioned Laughing Woman outside. Then he rammed buckshot shells into the breech, cocked the hammers. Gingerly, he cracked the door. There was slack. He eased through the crack, closed the door. “That’s the first trap on our line,” he said.
Laughing Woman’s face was taut. “A set-gun. And how do we get back in?”
Sundance said, “We crack the door a little, cut the cord. But anybody comin’ in while we’re gone, if he’s a Carcajou man, he’ll fling the door wide, bust in without knockin’, likely sprayin’ lead. He’ll get a surprise if he tries it.”
“God,” Laughing Woman said. “You are a mean sonofabitch, aren’t you?”
Sundance said, “In this business, niceness can get you killed. Somebody’s out to get you, you get him first.” The sled was loaded, the dogs harnessed. Sundance cracked a rawhide dog whip. “Mush!” he yelled. Then he turned the team over to Laughing Woman, while he snowshoed alongside, rifle at the ready, completely on the alert.
No wonder, he thought, she had come back to this valley alone. She had explained its layout to him, and he had seen some of the passes in and out, but what he had not expected was the abundance of fur bearing animals. Everywhere tracks criss-crossed the snow, and instinctively he read them as another man might read a book. Pine marten, fisher, which was the sable of high society, fox and lynx; they were all abroad in astounding profusion here. This line was inhabited by a small fortune in fur, and if the others of the Storm River territory were as rich, the Carcajou was playing for high stakes indeed.
But this was only the beginning. Presently, working their way northwestward, they came to a chain of beaver lakes. Here the animals had dammed the streams with mud and sticks, flooding vast stretches of terrain. Visible above the frozen surface of the ponds were the dome-shaped houses beavers built, of the same materials as their dams, with underwater entrances and large, dry chambers above the waterline, where the animals lived.
The beavers shared their domain with their smaller cousin, muskrats, who had also built similar but smaller houses. In the spring, Sundance thought, when the fur was at its best, the ice thinner than now, and trapping easier, another small fortune in beaver pelts could be taken from these lakes, along with plenty of muskrat skins. And, of course, mink, the sleek, dark creatures of the water, prowled the area continually, hoping to catch unwary muskrats, which they would kill, sucking the blood and eating the brains. Betweenwhiles, wherever they could find an opening, they swam beneath the ice, searching for fish.
He and Laughing Woman began to set traps for all these animals except the beaver and the musquash, the muskrat. Raw meat was what pine martens and fishers liked, and they used that for bait at the bases of trees or on low hanging limbs. They built small wooden pens and baited those with snowshoe hares Sundance shot: these were traps for lynx and wildcat. Wolves and foxes, mink and otter, were far cleverer, harder to catch. Their noses, extremely acute, could detect any smell of steel or human scent, and they had an inbuilt wariness that made them shy away from such warning taints. For those, one often did not use bait, but simply learned the paths they traveled, for they were creatures of habit, and set traps in likely places, using gloves to mute the human scent. It took patience: it was a game of skill, and the odds were by no means always in favor of the man.
Working in the snow to set a fox trap, using every ounce of skill and knowledge, Sundance remembered wryly a man he had met once in Washington, D.C., who had come there to plead his cause, hoping to get Congress to abolish not only the use of steel traps, but to draw up laws against hunting. It had amused Sundance to get to know this fellow—he was the idle son of a wealthy father in New York, with nothing else to do but pursue this obsession of his—and to take him out to dinner. The man, Phillips, had ordered a steak, blood rare. Over it, he expounded his case to Jim Sundance. “The steel trap is cruel and inhumane. And so is shooting helpless animals.”
“Maybe so,” Sundance said. Then he reached across the table, took Philipps’ plate out from under his very nose, and called the waiter. “Here. Take this away.”
“Wait a minute! I’ve hardly started eating!”
“You wouldn’t want to eat that,’’ Sundance said. “That cow rode a thousand miles jammed up in a cattle car from the west, and maybe every tenth animal in the car went down from strain or weariness or lack of food or water and died before it hit Chicago. If it didn’t, it got shoved into a slaughterhouse where a big guy hits it between the eyes to stun it and another rams a knife in its throat to bleed it, and a third one hooks it through the hind legs and hoists it, and a fourth cuts it up before it’s even dead. A nice, humane man like you wouldn’t want to eat steak from a critter that died like that.”
“You’re joking,” Philipps said.
“Ever see a slaughterhouse?” Then Sundance’s voice had roughened. “All right. Trapping’s not always humane, neither is hunting. Neither is starvation, and I’ve seen Indians starving. They live by hunting, live by trapping. It’s the only way a lot of Indians—a lot of white people, too—have any way of making cash money out in the woods.”
He went on, quickly. “A good trapper doesn’t let the animal suffer. He doesn’t leave it in the trap, either. It might tear itself up, or some other animal ruin its fur. A good trapper knows how to make a set so an animal dies just as quickly as one of those cows in a slaughterhouse and a lot more humanely. If it’s a land animal, it freezes to death, and that’s an easy way to go. If it’s a water animal, it drowns itself. Either way, if a man knows his business, it doesn’t suffer long.”
His voice crackled. “And most animals that are trapped for their fur are killers themselves. Mink, otter, fisher, marten, weasel, skunk—they’re not only killers, they are wanton killers that, except for the otter, kill for the fun of it. Foxes, wolves, and wildcats, they live by killing. Ever see wolves eat a moose calf or a buffalo while it’s still alive? Everything hunts, Philipps, everything kills to live, from the bird that eats a worm on up. Nature isn’t kind. It swallows things alive, and they die slow. It eats the young, as well as the old. No animal ever dies of old age, either. When it gets old and weak, something else pulls it down and chews it up while it’s still kicking. Compared to that, death by a trap or bullet’s damned easy. On top of which, out yonder, out in the woods, a man works for everything he eats, or every piece of fur he takes. It isn’t served to him on a steaming platter. And I’ll tell you something else. It’s fine to sit in New York and bemoan the plight of the wolves and coyotes. But it’s another thing to be a settler out yonder, wondering if the wolves will pull down his kid on her way to school.”
“Wolves don’t attack humans. It’s a scientific fact.”
Sundance snorted.
“There has been no authentic reported instance of wolves attacking a human being,” Philipps said sternly.
“A man that’s been pulled down by wolves in the Starvation Moon,” Sundance said, “ain’t in any position to make a scientific report. Listen, Philipps, I hate people who kill what they can’t use. But I hate people, too, who sit on their fat butts at home with no understanding of the people in the wilderness who have to stay alive as best they can. What you need is a year in a Cheyenne camp to learn the facts of life—and death. Everything that lives, dies. And everything that dies is eaten by something else. And that’s the way the world goes. Woodsmen don’t waste anything, they can’t afford to. They fit in with the world they live in, just like wolves and deer. They harvest the animals in the woods the way a rancher harvests his beef crop. You want to serve animals, make their lot easier, you concentrate on the starvin’ overworked horses in New York, and the stray dogs and cats turned loose to breed and starve. The children, human children, who’re treated the same way in the cities. Worse than animals, because you can sell an animal ... You do that, and leave the hunters and trappers to find their own way.”
The New Yorker had stared at him. “I never thought of it quite that way, Mr. Sundance.”
“You come west sometime. I’ll show you how it works—at least with the Indians. Of course, white men are like mink and weasels. They kill, too, for the sheer joy of killing.”
~*~
Anyhow, Sundance thought, completing the fox set after a half hour of painstaking labor, he would have liked to have had Philipps with him now, out here in the freezing cold, with maybe whether he lived well or starved dependent on his skill as a hunter and a trapper. He stood up, carefully erased all human sign around the trap he’d set, told Laughing Woman, “Let’s move on. I think we ought to work our way up to that pass you told me about.”
“You mean what Hank called the Slot?”
“That’s the place,” Sundance said.
“But it’s awfully barren. There’s no game up there.”
“Yeah,” Sundance said. “There is. The kind of game I want.”
The Slot was a notch in a sheer rock wall on the north side of the long valley, barely wide enough to admit a dog team, or a pair of men abreast. But it was an entrance into the valley, and men sometimes used it, Laughing Woman said.
Men were what he hunted now. Laughing Woman and the dog team remained a good distance down the slope as Sundance rigged another shotgun pointing through the slot. He worked the cord from its triggers on an intricate route, stretched across the Slot, the narrow passage between high walls of rock, at exactly the height of a man’s chest, too high for dogs or sled to trip. He came away satisfied, having rigged a bark shelter over the shotgun hammers, to keep snow and ice from fouling them.
“God help any innocent man who comes into this valley,” Laughing Woman said.'
“No innocent man has got business in this valley this winter,” Sundance said. His face was grim. “Before I’m through, I’ll have this whole line set with guns and man traps. And you’d better be Indian enough to remember where they all are and not blunder into ’em.”
“I’m Indian enough,” she said.
They returned to the cabin, and Sundance carefully cracked the door and cut the cord leading to the shotgun triggers before they entered.
The next day, they went out again, along a different route. Sundance set more legitimate animal traps, and he set two of the big bear traps at entrances to the valley, placing them far enough below the snow so that no dog team would trip them, or any sled, or a man on snowshoes. But sometimes, without snowshoes, men ran ahead of dogs, breaking trail ...
At the same time, they strung a regular trapline. Within a week, Sundance had traversed the entire valley that was the Murchison trapline, had put out two hundred regular animal traps, four set-guns, and all six bear traps. It snowed again, more heavily now, and frequently the traps, for men and animals alike, had to be re-adjusted or reset. As their lines of steel were extended, it was not possible to look at every trap every day, but the cold was grim enough to kill anything caught and held immobile almost immediately.
Ten days passed, and they had reaped a harvest of fur, but there had been no sign of the Carcajou or his men. Marten, mink, red fox, even a pair of big gray wolves, a couple of lynx, and a sable were taken, skinned, and their hides stretched on shaped boards and left to cure in the stable behind the cabin. Only Sundance was allowed to go there, because it had been gun-trapped, too, with one of the extra rifles, and he did not want Laughing Woman to get careless and maybe fall victim to it. But neither it nor any other of his man traps took any game.
~*~
Then came the day of the silver fox.
Laughing Woman had showed Sundance where they ran, those two freakish, immensely valuable furbearers. All foxes were fiendishly clever, capable of making a fool out of a trapper, but these two black ones, their guard hairs frosted with gray, were, as often the case, more diabolical in the ability to avoid capture than their normal relatives. These seemed to have a supernatural ability not only to sniff out buried steel, but, incredibly, to dig beneath the traps, turn them over, and spring them harmlessly. It was an uncanny knack some members of the fox and wolf families developed, and no matter how much care Sundance took to eliminate, he thought, all trace of steel or human scent, the silver foxes —at least the dog fox—seemed to take a positive delight in seeking out his sets and springing them without ever coming to harm.
Challenged, Sundance gave the matter some thought. He examined carefully the way the foxes had dug beneath the traps, then flipped them over. One morning, Laughing Woman watched dubiously as, for the third time, he built a campfire on the snow, let it burn down to ashes, after having charred a bit of bacon in the flames, and some bread. A dead campfire was something few foxes could resist, especially if the ashes smelled of food. Inevitably they would dig into it.
Now, as Sundance prepared to set traps beneath the ashes, Laughing Woman said, “You’ve done that before and got nowhere.”
“Well, we’ll see what happens this time,” Sundance said. He had made some adjustments to the traps, bending their frames slightly. The girl made a sound in her throat as she saw what he was doing. “Jim, it might work.”
“If it doesn’t, they win and we lose.” Sundance took few pains with the set this time, not even bothering to brush out his tracks.
When, the next day, they checked the trap, Laughing Woman let out an excited cry. The trap was sprung, the ashes scattered, the trail of the buried drag plain to see in the snow. They followed it, and, half a mile away, found the silver fox, its black fur glistening, caught by its forepaw. It turned and snarled at them as they came up, a creature so beautiful that even Sundance caught his breath. Then, quickly, painlessly, he dispatched it by an Indian method, holding it down, jerking its foreleg in a way that killed it instantly, rupturing the heart. Holding it aloft, he turned to Laughing Woman. “Okay. That pays for you finishing nursing school.”
