Drop City

endurance, strong in every way--but finally her eyes lost their focus and he was the only one talking.
    “You want to know about trapping?” he was saying, lecturing now, whether she wanted to hear it or not. “I'll tell you about trapping.”
    And he told her. Told her about the work Roy Sender had put into clearing forty-some-odd miles of paths through the trackless waste, all the way up one side of the Thirtymile and each of its attendant tributaries, and then down the other, a nine-day loop tramped in weather so bitter it would have killed anybody who was less than superhuman, and Roy Sender working the line till he was seventy-one years old. Roy had taken him under his wing, taught him how to make his sets for every kind of animal, to build a sled of birch eight feet long and no wider than his own shoulders, to skin out lynx and fox and ermine and make baits that were little atom bombs of stink designed to prick the nose and perk the ears of every predator in the country. He was a bachelor--a coot--cranky as a Ford with two cylinders missing, chewing him out and cursing him every step of the way, a man no woman had ever wanted to waste her time on, and he lived like a coot, denned up all winter in his cabin where he spent his time rearranging his things and making his living space as comfortable and squared-away as the picture of some low-slung and wood-gleaming saloon in a sailing ship. Sess sat at the feet of the coot of all coots, glad to be in his crusty company, and after the months sailed off over the horizon and they began to talk in seasons, seasons stretching to years, the old man warmed to him.
    “Why don't you build down at the mouth of the river there?” he said one spring night with the snow coming down like ticker tape and Sess camped in a canvas tent out back of the cabin. “Plenty of country for you here and the snowshoes coming up on their ten-year boom so there'll be plenty of fur for everybody, if anybody even wants it anymore. Hell, I don't have to tell you I'm not the man I used to be, you follow me? I got my knee, my back, my lungs for shitsake that make me feel like I'm drowning all the time--all of that, the price of getting old. And I get thinking about all the hard work I've put into this country and thinking it's all going to waste.”
    That was Roy Sender, that was his blessing. And to think of it now, out here in the cabin that had materialized out of the hopeful solicitation of that night--out here with his wife, with Pamela--was enough to stop him up with an emotion so transcendent he could barely draw his next breath. Suddenly he was sentimental, the glass of him half-filled with sorrow and half with joy. Suddenly, he was drunk.
    Pamela was two feet from him, sitting there at the table with her chin propped up on two fists, and her eyes were slipping south. Something rustled in the bush out back of the garden, and it wasn't the dogs--the dogs wouldn't be rustling anymore. He poured another shot of rum, struck a match and watched the blue flame flicker atop it before throwing it back. The night was mild, still mild, and the mosquitoes hadn't come on yet. Maybe they were observing a nuptial truce, maybe that was it, he thought. Damn decent of them too. He'd have to remember that next time he crushed half a dozen of them on his forearm or temple--live and let live, right? “Pamela,” he said, and her eyes flashed open.
    “I'm drunk, Sess,” she said. “I'm afraid I've gone and got drunk here.” And she smiled, a slow, weary, sanctified smile. “It's all your fault. Bringing a girl out here, getting her drunk. I'll bet you think I'm easy, don't you, huh?”
    He gave her the smile back, reached out for her hand and closed it in his own. He didn't want to talk anymore, all that fuel was gone from him now, didn't want to tell her how it felt the first time he walked the trapline and found a wolf like a big dog caught by one half-gnawed foot in a double-spring Newhouse trap intended for fox and how it just sat there staring at him out of its yellow eyes as if it couldn't comprehend the way the country had turned on it in this cold evil unnatural way and how he'd felt when he shot it and missed killing it and shot it again and again till the pelt was ruined and a hundred and ten pounds of raw wilderness lay spouting arterial blood at his feet, or how Roy Sender had taught him to rap a trapped fisher or ermine across the snout with a stick and then jerk at its heartstrings till