The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

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.
    “Here,” he said, giving me the raccoon to carry by the ringed tail back to the truck.
    But the body was too heavy, and even using both hands I didn’t get very far with it. My father watched me struggle with my burden for a while before finally taking it away from me. He slung the raccoon over his shoulder, holding it by the tail. It swung back and forth along his back as he walked. Its eyes were open and on a level with my own as I followed behind him.
    The cold had frozen the snot inside my nostrils, and I began to cough. When we got back inside the truck, my father reached under his seat and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He held it between his legs while he drove, taking sips when there were no other cars on the road to see.
    At the next stop, I followed him down a hill. The grass was brittle from the cold and made a crunching noise beneath our boots, like a person eating potato chips. At the bottom was a frozen pond, filled with standing dead trees like sharpened poles. There was an area of open water at one end of the pond where a stream flowed out. A muskrat was struggling in the water, near a hummock of grass and dead branches where the trap had been set. My dad waded out into the knee-deep water until he stood over the small, writhing animal and shot it with his pistol.
    My father tossed the wet little carcass back at me so that I had to jump out of the way. Lying on the reed bank, the muskrat seemed very small. Its teeth were bared yellow, and its fur was slicked like it had been dipped in motor oil. I was wracked suddenly by a fit of coughing.
    My father was going on about prices. Muskrats, he said, brought in just a buck apiece, scarcely worth trapping. Raccoons could go as high as twelve dollars, if you skinned them out carefully. While he reset the trap, he rattled off the current prices he got for each of the species of animals he took. Otters, he said, got the best prices—as much as forty-two dollars for an otterskin.
    “There’s a hole in my boot,” I said softly.
    “What do you want me to do about it?”
    “My sock is wet.”
    His eyes bored into mine, forcing me to look away. “You want me to take you home?”
    “No.”
    “Then don’t be such a baby.”
    We made more stops along the trap line. Sometimes there were animals in the traps, and sometimes the sets were empty. As the day wore on, I began to cough steadily, bringing up gobs of green phlegm that I spit out into a mitten. My left foot, encased in its leaky boot, became soaked and numb. After a while, it was as if I were sleepwalking through a barren dreamland of skeletal trees, gravel pits, sunken meadows, and standing water, limping along, trying in vain to keep up with my father, who seemed only intermittently aware of my presence.
    He tuned the radio to a country music station, and he tapped his fingers along the steering wheel in time to the songs that were