The Marsh King's Daughter(39)

Our pond was made when beavers dammed one of the Tahquamenon’s smaller unnamed tributaries. The largest beaver dam on record is more than half a mile long. That’s twice the length of the Hoover Dam, in case you were trying to picture it, which is pretty impressive when you consider that an adult male beaver is roughly the size and weight of a two-year-old child. Our dam was nowhere near that long. I used to walk along the top throwing rocks and sticks into the pond, or fishing largemouth bass, or sitting with my legs dangling over the dry side munching an apple. I liked the idea that the habitat I was exploring had been created by the animals that lived in it. Sometimes I’d tear apart a section of the dam to see how long it would take the beavers to fix it.

In addition to beavers, our pond was home to many species of fish, water insects, and birds, including ducks, blue herons, kingfishers, mergansers, and bald eagles. If you’ve never seen a bald eagle drop like a rock out of the sky and splash down into the still pond water and fly away with a pike or a walleye in its talons, you’re missing out.

After my father tried to drown my mother, I had to quit beaver trapping. I didn’t have a problem killing animals as long as it was done out of necessity and with respect, but leg traps kill by dragging the beavers under the water and holding them there, and death by drowning made my stomach turn.

What bothered me more than drowning beavers was that I didn’t understand why my father continued to trap them at all. Our utility shed was piled high with furs. Mink, beaver, otter, fox, coyote, wolf, muskrat, ermine. My father always taught that it was important to show respect for the animals we killed. That we should think before we pulled the trigger, and we shouldn’t be wasteful. That we shouldn’t shoot the first animal we see because it might be the only one of its kind we see all day, and that would mean the population was small and needed to be left alone for a while. Yet every year he added more furs to the piles. When I was very small I used to think that one day he would load the furs into his canoe and paddle up the river and trade them like the French and Indians used to do. I used to hope he’d take me with him. But after my father tried to drown my mother, I started to question the whole endeavor. I knew what he did to my mother was wrong. Maybe his excessive trapping was also wrong. If the end result of all that trapping was nothing but stacks of furs piled higher than my head, what was the point?

I thought about things like this as I sat on our back porch after supper as summer turned to fall, paging through the Geographics until it was too dark to see, hoping to find an article I hadn’t read. I used to like watching the evening wind blow across the grasses as the shadows spread over the marsh and the stars gradually came out, but lately the movement only made me restless. Sometimes Rambo would lift his head and scent the air and whine as he lay on the porch boards beside me, like he felt it, too. A sense of wanting, but not having; a feeling that there was something outside the boundaries of the marsh that was bigger, better, more. I’d stare at the dark band of trees along the horizon and try to imagine what lay beyond. When airplanes flew over our cabin, I’d shade my eyes and keep looking at the sky long after the planes were gone. I wondered about the people inside. Did they wish they were down in the marsh with me as much as I wished I was up in the air with them?

My father was worried about me, I could tell. He didn’t understand the changes that were coming over me any more than I did. Sometimes I’d catch him studying me when he thought I wasn’t watching, stroking his thin beard in the way he had that told me he was thinking long and hard. Usually this was the prelude to a story. A Native American legend, or a hunting or fishing story, or a story about something strange or funny or dramatic or scary or wonderful that had happened to him. I’d sit cross-legged with my hands folded respectfully in my lap the way he taught me and pretend to listen while my thoughts roamed. It wasn’t that I was no longer interested in my father’s stories. My father is one of the best storytellers I’ve ever known. But now I wanted to make my own.

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ONE DREARY, rainy morning that fall, my father decided it was time for me to learn how to make jelly. I couldn’t see why I needed to know. I wanted to take my father’s canoe to check my trapline. There was a family of red fox living on the other side of the ridge where the deer liked to gather, and I was hoping to snare one so my mother could make me a foxtail hat with ear flaps like the one my father wore. I didn’t care that it was raining. I wasn’t going to melt, and whatever got wet would dry out again eventually. When my mother announced at breakfast that because it was raining she was going to make jelly and said she wanted me to help, I put on my coat anyway, because my mother couldn’t tell me what to do. But my father could. So when he decreed that today was the day I was going to learn how to make jelly, I was stuck.

I would rather have helped my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table using a whetstone and a polishing cloth to sharpen and polish his knife collection, though the knives were already shiny and sharp. Our oil lamp was in the middle of the table. Normally we didn’t light the lamp during the day because we were running out of bear grease, but it was extra dark in the cabin that morning because of the rain.

My mother was stirring a pot of hot apple mash on the counter with a wooden spoon to cool it while another pot boiled and foamed on the stove. The empty jars she’d washed and dried waited on folded kitchen towels on the table. A tin can of melted paraffin sat on the back of the stove. My mother poured a layer of hot paraffin on top of the jelly after it set to seal the jars so the jelly wouldn’t get moldy, though mold grew anyway. She said the mold wouldn’t hurt us, but I’d noticed she scraped it off before she ate her jelly and threw the moldy parts away. The washtub on the floor was heaped with apple peelings. As soon as it stopped raining, my mother would carry the tub outside and dump the peelings on her compost pile.