In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [39]
The cold coming on brought my family and the Langs together even more. The parsonage was always warm, seasoned by years of woodsmoke and the heavy smells of simple cooking: meats roasted and fried, potatoes and onions and bacon grease.
The gut smell of green hides that Sarah’s husband brought home seemed as much a part of the parsonage as the brewing aroma of coffee. Off the kitchen, the enclosed porch housed Terry’s cache, the tools of his trade: skunk scent (to mask his own human odor), Borax to cure the hides, waterproof boots and cold-weather garb, and the traps hung according to size—the small rodent and weasel traps with their lightly hinged jaws; the larger ones for cats and coyotes, possibly bear. Rods and reels, creels, his bow and sharp arrows, targets he would tack to a tree and aim at, as though he needed practice: at the center of each one, a fist-sized pattern of holes.
As much as I anticipated my times with the women, I thrilled to be with Terry on the porch or out past the creek. The attention he paid me was that of an older brother, and even though I knew that what he did with guns and hides was men’s business, I found the intricacies of stretching hides and target practice much more compelling than baking the perfect pie.
Terry knew the secrets of the woods. Once he caught a young red-tailed hawk from its nest and brought it to the parsonage, believing he could train it like a falcon. It glared at us from its perch above the curing pelts. Sunday morning service found it screeching its hunger while Brother Lang raised his voice, competing for the congregation’s attention, until Terry sneaked out and shot a squirrel to satisfy the bird, demanding as any god.
His expert sense of the woods and the ways of animals drew Terry the respect and recognition of his peers—other men who, like him, loved their lives in the woods. He could exist for weeks in the wilderness with nothing other than his knife to live by, mimicking the magpie’s chortle, bellying down to the water to drink like a cat. When strange men came into town, wearing their stiff new hats and pressed pants, flipping their wallets open at the cafe long enough for Gladys or Holly to take note of the sheaf of bills, it was Terry’s name that got passed to them: he was the one who could find them the elk they wanted, who could lead them to the bear raking grubs from the spongy wood, taking on her winter’s fat.
One winter, a group of these men paid Terry well to track a bear to her den, where they aimed and shot the sow to death with their precisely honed arrows. When they pulled her from her cave, Terry discovered the cub.
He would never have done it had he known, he said. He brought the young boar to the parsonage and made it a bed behind the stove, holding it when it cried in its little human voice, rocking it like it belonged. I loved to cradle the cub and feed it its bottle. It grunted and mewled, docile until something set it off—the bottle gone empty, its plaything snagged beneath a chair leg. Within a few weeks we were jumping atop the furniture to evade its rampages and sharp teeth: Sister Lang’s calves were mottled with punctures and bruises, and I can still see the small white scars where the cub sunk his sharp incisors into my shoulder.
Eventually, Terry sold the cub to a man who ran a tourist trap farther east on Highway 12. We heard later that the bear had bitten someone and been shipped off to a zoo in California. I wondered if it remembered us as it snuffled in its bedding for warmth, looking with its small eyes into the sea of faces.
Terry showed me how to slide the knife between hide and muscle, how to make the short, delicate cuts that separated the sticky tissue. I’d watch him work the body of a coyote from its skin in one easy piece, leaving the pink carcass glistening in its shimmering caul.
Once, while walking his trapline, Terry discovered the tracks of two bobcats, a mated