The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [91]
Franklin shrugged. He was like my brother Olaf in that way, not openly disagreeing but still expressing caution. “I’ve never been to an auction.” I’d sold my first season’s pelts in Spokane. “I guess now is the time.”
We all decided to go to Seattle and make an adventure of it, as Louise said. She contacted a neighbor boy to look after Lucy, and Lucky went out to the farm for the few days we’d be gone.
At the Seattle auction, we women sat in the back while the male buyers lifted their hats or flicked a finger beside their noses to indicate the lot of furs they wished to buy. Excitement crackled in the air between those representing the trappers and the buyers hoping to get the best profit for their manufacturing firms.
Pampering ourselves, we stayed at a fine hotel in Seattle and ate at the best restaurants. The eyes of my friends, Olea and Louise, sparkled in recognition of a buyer from Quebec they hadn’t seen for a while and the wife of a grader who sat with us after the auction.
“This is what I mean by passion,” Olea told me that evening as we prepared for yet another party. Her eyes sparkled. “Isn’t this grand?”
I did enjoy the hoopla and Franklin’s attention as well. Mostly, I eavesdropped to hear anything I could about what the Finns were doing, how the industry was moving. If I mentioned their ranching program, people scoffed. “Oh, you know those Finns,” they said. “I’ll bet it’s just rich gentlemen playing at a hobby. Why spend money gathering food for animals when the forests can do it for you?” A trapper’s wife interjected that it would be nice to have her man at home in the winter with a ranching operation, and the other women nodded. The conversation moved on, the idea of farming furs something for those dreaming Finns. When the auction events were over, we walked with Franklin to the train station. He’d head next to Montreal; we’d return to Coulee City. Louise and Olea had already boarded our train. I stood with Franklin, realizing I enjoyed his company and would miss it. Our friendship lacked pressure, carried the comfort of when I spent time with my brother, and had the added spark of bantering between two people who respected each other.
“I’ll write more often if you’d like me to,” Franklin said as we stood in the station.
“Do you think we need more information from you?” I said. He kept the women updated quite well, I thought.
“No,” he smiled. “I’d like more response.”
“Oh. Well, I can write reports more frequently,” I said.
“Clara. It’s you I’d like to hear from, not only the official correspondence of my women.”
“About my trapping?”
“I’m interested in you more than in trapping. Will you allow me to write of other things? More importantly, will you write back?”
I was glad he couldn’t hear my heartbeat. I liked the current arrangement. We were separated by miles, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that distance shortened by his knowing me better or differently. The train whistle blew over any answer he might have heard if I’d had the voice to give one.
“I’ll write back,” I told him, but I didn’t say about what.
By the next winter, I no longer felt baffled by the traps, though I still had much to learn about knowing where to set them. I still had two lines going now, both productive.
The Warrens were neighborly enough. At Christmas, they left me a wild turkey they’d shot. Once a salmon hung on a hook by my door. I set a packet of tobacco out for them, and it was gone by morning.
Louise worried out loud when I came home. She said that I seemed to grow taller but thinner and expressed concern about how hard I worked. Olea said more than once that she didn’t think this whole “trapping thing” was the best use of my time. It was difficult, cold work, though Lucky made it less so. There were occasional disputes about my not appreciating the work the two women performed at home or my “apparent preference for furs over friends.” The latter charge wasn’t so, but I could see how they might think so. Franklin’s letters