The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (45 page)

It's what one might call a new form of holistic medicine: they teach patients how to take care of wounds, how to look for injuries, how to avoid burning their hands when cooking. It's an empathy factory, and it bustles. While there I met an octogenarian doing physical therapy to strengthen a numbed leg, a shy teenager from Micronesia who looked as if he had nothing more than a bad case of acne, a sturdy middle-aged Latino guy from Los Angeles with a persistent foot sore who reclined on his hospital bed like a Roman emperor. Staff members stopped by to lay hands on his bare shin and chat or to look at his feet—one of his big toes was swollen to the size of a potato. Ronnie Mathews came by on a sort of improvised walker—he's disabled himself—and whittled at the toe a little, casually, like a man giving a pedicure with a scalpel. (An advantage of working on leprosy patients is that you can often skip the anesthesia.)

I met Dane Hupp, a physical therapist who told me he sometimes chewed out the patients because “I treat them like my family.” He was worried about a patient who, if he didn't get over some bad habits, could lose his leg—though, he told me, they lost a lot more legs at the diabetes clinic where he used to work.

Irma Guerra, who runs the outpatient clinics from an office across the parking lot, told me she still thinks about Eddie Bacon. “We learn so much from people like him because they suffer. You can see how beautiful his personality is, what courage it takes to be like that. The people I've met I'll never forget.” Mathews told me he thought about Eddie, too. “I wake up some nights and wonder how he's doing.”

Captain John Figarola, of the U.S. Public Health Service, is head of rehabilitation at Baton Rouge. He is a tall, earnest New Orleanian with brown eyes and a beige uniform with small metal insignias on the collar tips. He talked to me at one end of a long table while Mathews delicately pared the infected finger of a nervous young man from Latin America. The surgeon was trying to cut away all the dead tissue on the finger before a bone infection further shortened the digit. “My friend,” he said, “I'm afraid if I send you home, the tip of the bone will get reinfected.”

Figarola told me that he loved his job because he and his staff are allowed to give care without measure—they can act on empathy. As Mathews worked, a little crescent of fingertip landed on the table between Figarola and me. “I work in utopia,” he told me, and threw the scrap away with a bit of paper tissue.

FROM
Orion

 

B
EAVERS ARE
, as far as animals go, odd contraptions. The largest rodent in North America, the beaver has webbed feet, a scaly tail, and two front teeth with orange enamel on the front and dentin in the back so that as they wear down they self-sharpen. They are powerful swimmers, chewers of trees, and builders of dams—some of which have been known to stretch for hundreds of feet. They were once trapped in unsustainable numbers for their fur, their fat, and their scent glands, which produce a secretion that has been used for medicinal purposes since antiquity. Pliny the Elder maintained that the smell of the glands was so powerful, much like smelling salts, as to cause a woman to miscarry, although it was later diluted in alcohol for use as a musky addition to perfumes.

When beavers were plentiful during the early days of the fur trade, my tribe, the Ojibwe, enjoyed an incredible quality of life. While other tribes were being wiped out or displaced, our birth rates were up and our land base was increased by a factor of twenty. In 1700 England exported roughly seventy thousand beaver-felt hats (beaver skins were dehaired, and only the hair was used in hat making). In 1770 the number of exported hats had risen to 21 million. But the demand (and supply) of beaver couldn't last.

Some estimates place the number of beavers in North America at over 60 million at the time of contact. By 1800 they were all but extinct east of the Mississippi. We Ojibwe shared much the same fate, pushed west, reduced in numbers, eking out an existence in the swamps and lowlands of the American interior. Though the tribe was once as defined by trapping beaver as the Aztecs were defined by gold or the Sioux by the buffalo hunt, by the twentieth century only the idea remained. The furs and the knowledge necessary to harvest them were fading.

 

As an Ojibwe child from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, I grew up around hunters. But aside from our mother teaching us to snare rabbits, we didn't trap animals, as “bush Indians” did. Instead we harvested wild rice in the fall, made maple sugar in the spring, and shopped for food like everyone else. My father (a Jew and a Holocaust survivor) and my mother (an Ojibwe Indian and tribal court judge) put as much emphasis on homework as they did on living off the land. None of the other kids from Leech Lake that I knew had grown up trapping or living off the land either. But this was still held up as the only truly Ojibwe way of life, and as I grew older I longed to commit myself to the bush. So when Dan Jones, an Ojibwe friend from across the border, offered to teach me to trap beaver on his trapline in northwestern Ontario, I said yes.

Lewis Henry Morgan in 1868 wrote, “The life of the trapper, although one of hardship and privation, is full of adventure. They lead, to a greater or less extent, a life of solitude in the trackless forests, encountering dangers of every kind, enduring fatigue and hunger, and experiencing, in return, the pleasures, such as they are, afforded by the hunt.”

Perhaps because I had never been trapping, I was sure that every word Morgan, a gentleman ethnologist and fan of the beaver, wrote was true; at least I wanted them to be true. I wanted the special knowledge that all trappers seem to possess. I wanted their forearms and their expertise with a knife. I wanted to be a part of that brotherhood of whom it was said in bars, and around kitchen tables, and over the open tailgates of dented pickups, “Oh, him? He's a real bushman. No one knows the bush like he does.”

I drove to Dan's reserve in northwestern Ontario after Christmas in 1996. The name of the reserve in English is somewhat odd: Redgut Bay (named after a former chief of the band). The Ojibwe name is much longer: Nigigoonsimini-kaaning (The Place of Abundant Little Otter Berries). I have never been able to find a “little otter berry,” nor have I found someone who has found one, so part of me wonders if “little otter berry” is a way of saying “otter shit.” Which just goes to show that if you scratch the surface of romance you'll find slapstick, and if you scrape off the slapstick you might find wonder, because after all, places (like animals) don't always give up their secrets.

All of this—romance, slapstick, wonder—were mingled in Dan. About five foot eight and more than two hundred pounds, Dan looks the way a traditional Ojibwe man should look: stocky, strong, black hair, dark skin. He's also—and I've tested this—pretty close to imperturbable. Once, when we were checking traps together on a beaver house, the ice broke underneath him and he fell into the freezing water. All he said after he got out was “oops.” He is indifferent as far as money is concerned. I've never known a stronger paddler. When you see him filleting fish or skinning animals, you think to yourself that he was born with a knife in his hands, yet when he sleeps he needs no less than three pillows to be comfortable. His jokes are terrible. He thinks it great sport to tease people in uncomfortable ways in public. He remains one of my very best friends and always will.

Dan mostly traps for two animals—beaver and pine marten (like a Canadian sable)—although he grew up trapping and snaring just about anything that moved. His mother once held the world record for beaver skinning. He was raised on the trapline, moving from the village out to the line in the winter, back to the village in the summer, to rice camp in the fall, and back to the trapline. His first memory is of lying in a rabbit-skin sleeping bag, watching the jagged outline of spruce against the sky.

We drove to the supermarket and loaded up on what Dan referred to as “trapping food”—cigarettes, bacon, eggs, butter, bread, Chips Ahoy!, Diet Pepsi, canned potatoes, oatmeal, and pork chops. His wife drove us out of town on a double-track path through stands of jack pine and over frozen creeks. We followed it for 12 miles and stopped. We offloaded the snowmobile, attached the sled, and filled it with food and clothes, then drove off the road toward Moose Bay—a clear, clean fingerlet of water stretching to the northernmost arm of Rainy Lake. An hour later we arrived at the cabin on a small bay surrounded by balsam and poplar.

Rainy Lake is in the Canadian Shield. There is water everywhere—pond after pond, river after river, lake after lake. According to geologists, the water is still learning where to go, channels and streams hardly set. This land of old rock and new water forms the base of the boreal forest—the largest unbroken forest in the world—and is the world's largest terrestrial biome. The land is studded with pine, fir, and spruce. In summer, it is almost impassable; in winter, if you step off your trail, 100 yards might as well be a mile through the deep snow.

There might be something about the Great Plains—the openness, the sense of scale—that is good for stories and epic struggles. Not so the boreal forest. Horizons are hard to come by. The sky is a fractured thing. There are precious few vistas. Instead you are enclosed, hemmed in, covered over. It is a good place for secrets and secret knowledge, for conspiracies and hauntings.

The cabin was less beautiful than the country around it and, as regulated by law, rather small—ours was 16 feet by 20 feet. Only trappers who buy the trapping rights to an area are allowed to build one. This one hadn't seen a human being since the previous year. If what happens on the trapline stays on the trapline, then it's equally true that what goes into the cabin stays in the cabin. Old cupboards were shoved in the corner between two nonworking gas ranges. A table, three beds (one a stowaway bed like you find in hotels), clothes, a wood stove, a box of beaver traps, and three or four bags of garbage completed the cabin. Under one of the beds I found a stack of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
magazines; a centerfold was tacked to the door. The whole place was overrun by mice. That night we cut firewood, got the cabin thawed out—it was minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit—cooked some pork chops, and chopped a hole in the lake to get water. Then I learned the first thing about trapping: how to play cribbage.

 

Trapping beavers is largely a matter of finding where they live. Before ice-up, either by walking along the shore or by canoe, the trapper will locate the beaver house, beaver dams, food stash, and channels (worn paths near convenient food sources) and place drowning sets at these areas using either 220 Conibears or 330 Conibears. This trap was invented about fifty years ago by Frank Ralph Conibear, an Anglo-Canadian trapper. It was a revolution in traps and trapping, making it much more certain and productive. Conibears, or body-grip traps, are two steel squares attached to one another by a hinge. Steel springs keep the jaws open. To set the trap, the springs are compressed and the steel squares of the trap are held together by a catch from which dangles a trigger. If a beaver swims through and touches the trigger, the catch moves up, and the springs, under tension, slam the steel squares open across the beaver's chest, neck, or head. Death is quick. Until the advent of body-grip traps, trappers relied on wire snares or, more often, leg-hold traps set in channels and at the entrances to a beaver lodge. These would close on the beaver's foot and drown it, or, often enough, the beaver would lose a leg in the trap.

Before steel or iron, trapping was another matter entirely. To trap beaver without the use of steel meant tearing open beaver houses to catch the beaver in its den, which is a hollow chamber above the waterline, or isolating the channels and runs under the ice. One would break open the house and wait at each and every channel for the beaver to surface, then kill it—with arrows, guns, or clubs—when it emerged. This was time-consuming and brutally hard work, and it took a lot of bodies—two people tearing up the house and four or five waiting at the channels.

But Dan and I had everything we needed, and we relied on steel body-grip traps exclusively. We would be trapping the entrances to the beaver houses on the string of ponds that, like terraces, are stacked one on top of the other all the way from the big lake deep into the woods, almost to where we were dropped off. We stopped at the first beaver house. Dan showed me how to tell if the house is occupied or “dead”: look for a cone of crystallized vapor on top of the house that looks like a nipple or wick. This is a sure sign that the house is live; the beavers' warm breath travels through the frozen slurry of mud and crisscross of sticks on top of the house. When it meets the subzero air, it freezes, creating the nipple. In the first pond, one house was live and the other dead. Once we located the live house, we got off the snowmobile, and with Dan in the lead, we tapped around the house with the point of the chisel. The ice is usually thinner over the entrances, worn by the passing in and out of the beavers' bodies. The chisel broke through, we cleared the ice and sticks away, and using a long bent pole, found the beaver run. We set our traps. Then on to the next, and the next, and the next. We put thirteen traps in the water that first day.

Perhaps this is the strangest thing about modern trapping among the Ojibwe: it is an age-old cultural practice, as ingrained, as natural, as everything else about our culture. The snare, the trap, the trail, the lure, the catch—these are the metaphors by which we make our meanings. Yet it has been many hundreds of years since we have even so much as worn a fur, except as decoration or for ceremonial purposes. As soon as we could, we traded pelts for guns, axes, kettles, wire, and cloth. Furs are fine, I guess (I have, for sentimental reasons, a beaver-skin cap and moose-hide gloves). But cloth—wool especially, but also cotton—lasts longer, is easier to clean, can be sewn into many more things, and holds up longer. I only know of one Indian who wears furs—Jim LaFriniere of White Earth Reservation has a muskrat-hide jacket. I don't think he wears it because he's Indian; I think he wears it because he is, at White Earth, a BIG MAN. Modern synthetics are even better than trade cloth. There is nothing quite like chopping a hole in the ice with an ax and getting covered in dirty slush, only to have it bead and then freeze on my Gore-Tex parka. As for gloves, moose skin gets slick fast when the water freezes, and the ax goes flying out of your hands. But waterproof gloves with rubberized palms—they make all the difference. All the furs we catch—with a few held back for ceremonial use—will go on the market. In 1996 beaver were fetching, as I remember, between thirty-five and fifty Canadian dollars per hide. Occasionally we ate the meat. Mostly we ate pork chops.