They were curious, and they couldn’t help themselves.
I couldn’t fault them. It was human nature.
12
As a kid, I probably ate more deer meat than I did hamburger.
For the first part of my life, I lived with my mom and sometimes my dad in a series of house trailers and backwoods shacks in the hardscrabble farmland of western Maine. We moved a lot, every year or so. Sometimes more often than that. My father would get fired from a job at a sawmill or a well-drilling company, and then we would have to move again. We lived under power lines that hummed in the night and beside stinking landfills of old automobile tires. Each trailer seemed a little shabbier than the one we rented before. My mother used to say we were “downwardly mobile.”
She was a reckless, dark-eyed beauty, the youngest of five kids, who’d grown up as the center of attention in her household and lived life without ever taking precautions against possible misfortune.
Six months after my dad got her pregnant, they were married in a big Catholic wedding down in Madison, where she insisted on wearing white. The wedding pictures only showed her from the chest up. She looked happy enough, though.
I don’t know whether she ever loved him. God knows he didn’t make it easy for her. My impression of my father during that time is of a fatalistic young guy, wounded in body and soul, who couldn’t believe the good luck that had come his way in the form of this gorgeous girl, who knew from having been to war that good luck never lasts, and so went about sort of preemptively destroying his luck before it could go bad on him.
Somehow their marriage lasted nine whole years. It survived a couple of miscarriages and lots of 2 a.m. visits by the police. By the end, which is when my memories are sharpest, they were fighting constantly. My mom knew she wanted a better life-she was educating herself, taking adult ed classes at the high school and reading constantly-and she was sick of being broke all the time. They argued about not having money to buy groceries or heating oil, about my dad’s binge drinking, about how he disappeared for days without telling her where he was going or where he’d been.
He never struck her, no matter how much she screamed or spat or slapped at him, but this only seemed to make her all the madder. As it was, his face during those battles just about glowed red with rage. If he had come home drunk one night and cut our throats with a kitchen knife and set fire to the trailer and shot himself in the temple with his.22 pistol, it probably wouldn’t have surprised any of our neighbors. Those sorts of domestic holocausts are regular enough occurrences in isolated north-country towns as to be almost predictable.
The forest was his escape. Whenever things got too hot at home, he disappeared into the woods with a rifle or a fly rod and we wouldn’t see him again for days. Then he’d return with a skipper buck he’d shot for the freezer or a knapsack full of trout. Peace offerings.
My dad said he was a poacher out of necessity; he took game whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself because he was too proud to accept food stamps. That’s what he said, anyway.
During the legal deer season in November he would spend days following the hoofprints of a big buck along oak ridges and down into dark valleys where icy creeks ran fast through thickets of cedar and tamarack. He never fired until he had the best possible shot on the biggest buck he was likely to see that year. Then he would spend hours dragging his gutted, 200-pound trophy out of the forest.
I can’t remember a single Thanksgiving when we didn’t have a dead buck hanging in the trees outside our trailer, within view of the road. My dad said he hung the carcass outside to age the deer meat and give it a rich, gamey taste. But I knew he did it to prove to the men who lived in the neighboring houses-the same rough-and- tumble crowd he worked with at the sawmill and drank with at the Red Stallion in Carrabassett-that he was a better hunter than they were and, therefore, to his way of thinking, and mine, more of a man. A dead deer in a tree was just the way he chose to advertise himself.
The last year my father lived with us-before my mother packed me up for good to live with her sister in Portland-he kept a trapping shed behind the trailer we had rented near the town of Dead River. Steel traps hung from my mom’s clotheslines. Other traps were piled high inside the rickety shed. Also back there was a fifty-gallon barrel filled to the brim with a foul-smelling liquid he used to dye the traps to better conceal them in the brush. My mother forbade me from entering the shed or touching any of his equipment, but I spent many hours watching him while he waxed his traps outside with paraffin.
One December morning my mom drove into Farmington to take her Dale Carnegie course. Normally, she was reluctant to leave my dad to babysit me. She knew he was likely to go out suddenly, abandoning me alone in the trailer. This morning, however, I was tucked in bed with a pretty bad chest cold, which meant she couldn’t pawn me off on the neighbors.
After she’d gone, he came into my darkened bedroom and flicked on the light. He wore a faded flannel shirt stretched tight across his big chest and stained wool pants tucked into rubber hip boots. His long hair was slicked back behind his ears. His beard needed trimming.
“Hey,” he said. “How’d you like to go trapping? It’ll be our secret from your mom.”
“But I’m sick,” I told him.
“You’ve got a cold. It won’t kill you to get outside. You said you wanted to go. I’m giving you the chance. So quit whining and get up.”
I got up. Over my pajamas I put on a bulky snowmobile suit, the one that made me look like a pint-sized version of the Michelin man. Outside, I could hear the clanging noise of my father loading the back of his Ford pickup. I hurried outside, nearly tripping over my too-big boots.
It was a bitterly cold morning. Little snow had fallen so far that year. What there was of it lay in hard blue patches in the shadows of the pines. But the ground was frozen solid, and the frigid air stung my cheeks and made my eyes water.
The cab of my father’s pickup smelled of pungent animal odors: musk and urine. I turned my face to the crack in the window and tried to breathe in the clean, cold air that whistled through.
My father grinned. “You’ll get used to it.”
Beneath my feet was a wooden crate filled with Mason jars containing glands afloat in murky fluids. Scents and lures. To make some of them he put animal parts in a blender.
My nose began to run. I wiped it with my sleeve, leaving a slimy trail on the fabric.
“How’s that cold?”
“OK.”
He winked at me. “You’re a tough little guy, aren’t you?”
I smiled. “How do you know where to trap, Dad?”
“That depends,” he said. “For foxes, you want a mix of fields and wood. Maybe some trails coming in. For mink, the best places are the streams that lead from pond to pond. After that, it’s trial and error. Here’s a place for coons,” he said, pulling over beside a thicket of brambles. “I got a coon trap back in there. Come see.”
I followed him as best I could through the dense puckerbrush. Branches scratched at my face, and I had to cover my eyes with my arm to keep from getting switched. A hundred or so yards from the road, I caught up with him. He stood beside a little stream. The water of the stream was black and so quickly moving that it hadn’t yet frozen, although there was ice crusted along the edges.
“Look,” he said, and pointed.
At the base of a tree on the bank of the stream was a big raccoon. It clung stiffly to the trunk. The steel trap grasped one of its black hind paws firmly, and the chain that held the trap was twisted around the trunk. After having been caught, the raccoon had tried to climb the tree to safety. But the trap had him pinned.
While I watched, my father drew his.22 pistol out of the pocket of his drab army coat and leveled it at the raccoon’s head. The sound of the shot made me jump.
I hadn’t realized the raccoon was still alive.
It jerked and let go of the tree. My father put away his gun and waited for the quivering to stop. Then he approached the dead animal and released it and set it on the bank. He straightened out the chain and reset the trap, hiding the jaws with dead leaves so they were all but invisible.
