Beaver Trapper

I met Henry the day after beaver season had closed. Henry was seventy-eight and had hiked down from his place on Basswood Lake and it was some fifteen miles of rather tough going with the trail full of muck from the recent rains, but he was fresh and chipper and full of talk of the woods and happy as a man can be at the prospect of making a stake.

Henry was an Indian, a French Indian of the Chippewa band at Lac La Croix, with the blood of the old Voyageurs running in his veins. His hair was long and unkempt, turned up over his short collar, and, with his beard, he looked to me as though he had stepped out of the pages of the past. For that matter, all of Henry's life had been spent in the wilderness lake country of the Minnesota-Ontario border, and he knew the life of the bush from long before the days of planes and steel.

When he was a young man, the Hudson's Bay company was still operating on the border and Henry trapped for them and drew his supplies from their trading posts. He was here at the time of the famous Riel Rebellion when General Dawson had led a thousand troops through the wilderness to establish peace in the northwest territories. He had seen the early days and he had seen the late days, but he was still a part of the past, as much a part as though changes had never come. Henry was a living link with the past. But now, instead of trapping entirely for a living, he ran a motor boat on Basswood, transporting parties of canoeists to the jumping off places on the border. Tourists were just another phase in the wilderness life he had known.

But now he was puzzled, for regulations had reached in even to the remote confines of his wilderness cabin. In the first place, he had discovered that he could only take four beaver, that each one had to be tagged, that they must be delivered and checked through the district game warden within a certain number of days of the closing of the season. And now, as though that wasn't enough, he had also received an application for gas rationing which he had to fill out in order to get gas to run his motorboat during the season to come. He showed me the forms, wrinkled and dirty from much carrying around, and showed me the card on which he was to make application for his food ration book. And for the first time in my life, I saw that Henry was troubled and concerned.

"I know there is a war on," he said. "Tommy is gone, Vince is somewhere in Australia, Freddie will probably be going soon too and I'll be all alone up there. I know we've got to win, but I can't understand all of this stuff." He tapped his papers with a gnarled finger. "I don't want much stuff, just enough to get along on. The army can take my boat, these hides, the shack on Basswood, everything I've got, and I'd rather give it to them than figure out what's in these papers."

He shook his grizzled old head despairingly, shoved the papers into his pocket, and went off down the road, the last of the Voyageurs. War and civilization had caught up to him at last.