When Burwash is abducted by the former Commissioner of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, he remains rolled up in his nest of duct tape. He doesn’t tongue at the strip across his mouth, loosen it with spittle, or even try to edge the blindfold off. It’s a blindfold that’s been tied by a survivalist, lashed so tight that an ounce more torque could split his head clean in half.
On the night of his twenty-first birthday, Burwash was asleep in his apartment when he felt two paws on his chest. Oh Monty, he cooed from that place between slumber and animation, and reached out to cuddle his childhood dog, the notorious bed-jumper, Mr. Montgomery. It was then that he felt a good shove in the gut and remembered the pooch had been a ghost for nearly a decade. He opened his eyes, a blindfold came down over his head.
They roll away from Portland for hours. With one cheek pressed against the corrugated metal of the van floor, Burwash measures time. It’s a complicated formula involving the revving of his heart, the clicking of the wheel axle below and a topography devoid of hairpin turns, stoplights, oncoming traffic.
This is not hostage-taking, the Commissioner tells Burwash as he shoves him roughly through a thicket of snowberry shrub. He says, This situation is not a result of your material value.
It’s a shack in the woods armored with aluminum and tar paper siding. The Commissioner says, If you want to know where you’ll be shitting, you little shit, pick a tree. Inside, he drops Burwash to the floor like a sack of weasels. He says, Listen up good, Burwash. The Commissioner knows his name.
Burwash blames his father for everything. A habit gleaned from his mother who, when there wasn’t enough cash to buy things like hot sandwiches would say, Blame your Father. Burwash can trace a marshy path of implication between his absent dad and nearly every one of his misfortunes. Including, but not exclusively: his accident with the riding lawn mower in high school, his current state of unemployment and a certain lack of social grace.
His mother would say, He’s got enough to keep that woman in Florida for the winter. Is it fair, Burwash, that you go all year without a lousy hot sandwich? But Burwash didn’t care for hot sandwiches. Not until the cafeteria introduced the delicious Sloppy Joe. Then Burwash got mad.
You shriek like a schoolgirl getting her bum touched, the Commissioner says after he rips the duct tape from Burwash’s mouth. Does you no good. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Burwash drops to his knees, fingers his chafed mouth and looks around. A wood stove pipes away in the corner. There are metal clamps and claws rusting around the room like great, palaeontological ruins. Burwash is frightened, he constipates so easily, he doesn’t think he can make himself poop in the woods. He looks up at his captor, a gorilla in army fatigues with a flat-top brush cut and shaggy neck. He has tiny swine eyes, set close together so that they seem to telescope into one when he leans in close. When he barks, his breath is a meaty blast, You’re here because you’re a Ninny. Burwash is surprised and thinks, I am? Yeah, the Commissioner says, as if reading this thought, And I’m gonna shove my hand up your ass and rip the ninny right out of you.
The Commissioner starts calling him Pansy. And Nervous Nellie. And Nancy-Boy. He says Burwash is too manly a name for such a scrawny tit. He won’t be hearing it again until he shapes up. That’s why he’s here; someone’s decided he should become a man or perish. And I’m not kidding about that last part, the Commissioner says. We make it look like accidents out here, Ninny. Burwash is frightened and itchy. He’s forced to sleep on the floor, under a swag of animal pelts draped from a ceiling beam. Confused, he lies awake between one rusted trap and another and thinks, A Pansy? That’s simply not true. He has a healthy appetite for women. He has lusted after women. Sure he has.
There’s a little fried chicken on his breakfast plate. Burwash is so empty-bellied he might actually be able to down some meat this early in the morning. Right, he searches the table top for a fork and knife. The Commissioner is frying something on the wood stove, he’s wearing an army t-shirt and buckskin pants. From where Burwash is seated, it looks as though one of those pelts shimmied from the rafters and inched its way down the back of the Commissioner’s neck. He turns around, skillet in hand, fixes his piggy eyes on Burwash. Hey Missy, he says. Eat up all your squirrel or you won’t get another.
Burwash tries to escape while the Commissioner’s out pooping. It’s cold outside and all he has on are his socks and some gym pants. There’s a little stream behind the shack, partially choked by weeds. He runs along side it on his tip-toes. He has this idea that a trail of running water might lead him somewhere. And somewhere seems preferable to here, because he’s sure as heck not eating any squirrel. He chases along about fifty feet through an undergrowth of pacific ninebark before the stream clogs up completely. His escape route terminates in a pond; just a small jigger of water circled by rotting stumps and mounds of vegetation. Burwash looks down. His socks have sponged up the marsh and his nipples are hard like acorns. There’s a fallen tree draped across the bank of the pond, and he crawls underneath it to die.
At least you got some guts, the Commissioner says, jamming him into a chair. Even if you’re a stupid fucking idiot. He tugs one of the animal furs from the ceiling. Its suspension cord pulls taut then snaps, and the animal slinks down into the man’s paws. This here is muskrat, he says, and shoves the pelt in his face. This here Missy, is what you’ll be eating, sleeping, breathing.
A second little fried squirrel on his plate. It sits untouched until the Commissioner reaches over and twists off an arm.
Day three, Burwash is so hungry, he picks at a deep-fried haunch.
Only his father would deliver him into the hands of a survivalist. It makes sense. This is probably routine in Florida, a right of passage when men turn twenty-one. Burwash suspects the idea came from one of the old man’s Japanese-investor friends. Same guys who’d learned to grow kittens in Plexiglas cubes. His father even had a shotgun mounted to the back of his golf cart. Just in case any alligators slipped onto the course. My father thinks I’m a fag, Burwash thinks. He is angry at the assumption, at the sudden intervention. The old man’s remote controlling of his life.
Complete misery as he follows the Commissioner through the woods. He’s wearing a winter parka and Wellingtons that leave his aching feet an inch of discomfort in which to slide around. He’s going to have to take a pumice stone to the tough skin that’s beginning to calcify on his heels. The Commissioner looks back at him and says, You miserable load of shit, get a move on. Burwash is carrying a bucket of vegetable slop to bait muskrat traps around the pond. In his week of incarceration, he has only been able to poop in the woods once. His belly aches and he’d give anything for a tall glass of Metamucil. On the bright side, he’s actually grown a rich cover of facial stubble. The thickest he’s ever been able to harvest.
Let’s see what Santa left, the Commissioner says, and sloshes over to a collapsed metal box near a mound of twigs. Burwash stands shivering on the shore, breathing through his mouth to avoid the fumes of fermenting slosh in his bucket. The Commissioner looks up and yells, Get your skinny ass over here, now! Burwash wonders what would happen if he refused to follow the Commissioner’s orders. Would he really peg him off with that Winchester he kept mounted between his shoulder blades? Burwash pushes off the shore, sensing all manner of pond life through the Wellies. His left foot charges into a sinkhole and a glop of marsh water laps into his boot. He suppresses a squeal.
The trap consists of two metal squares held in a tension setting by a spring. The spring has been triggered and something dead waits with a crushed head between the two panels. It’s a big one, the Commissioner says, prying the animal free. Burwash’s hands twitch as he unfolds the burlap sack. The Commissioner steps over, waving the glossy creature in the air. He’s surprised by the sheen, the glisten of fresh kill. Burwash looks between the man’s brush cut and the muskrat. Both appear bristled and course. He imagines, however, they are both soft to the touch.
You move, and you’re next, the Commissioner says preparing to skin the muskrat. Burwash braces himself against the side of the table, feeling as fucked as the little beast. He’s been locked up, shoved around and yelled at. Now this. He will positively faint if there’s a lot of blood. The Commissioner positions the skinning knife against a hind leg and begins to slice a passage across the belly from paw to vent. He leverages his weight against the back of the blade and crunches through the bones of each paw. Burwash tastes bile. Oh my goodness, he thinks. Oh Lordy. The Commissioner cuts neatly around the flattened braid of a tail and drops it, along with the paws, into a bucket of unusables on the ground. The Commissioner’s face is placid, eyes impossibly narrow with the pleasure of good sport. He lays down the knife and begins to manually work the skin off inside out. Burwash feels a liquid swish through his bowels. He wishes he had the nerve to pick up the skinning knife and eviscerate the Commissioner. But he does not. He watches the man work careful fingers between the animals pelt and flesh, peeling skin away from eyes and lips. Burwash is reminded of his grandmother who taught him to peel an orange in one single strip. He is reminded of dark nights, pushing the fleshy foreskin of his penis back and forth. When the muskrat has finally released its fur, the Commissioner takes the flat edge of the knife to the hide and begins to scrape. To get rid of the fat, he says. His voice, for the first time, gentle.
You don’t so much look like a pansy, the Commissioner says sometime into their second week. Burwash’s heart leaps. Does this mean he’s going to be let go? Course, those are the best kind to break, the Commissioner says with an unfriendly smile.
Dear Ed,
I am wanting to mount a muskrat. I tried to skin one for mounting recently and had a lot of problems with the back feet trying to invert to the toes. The skin ripped when I tried to remove it from the bottom foot pad. Is there some other way to do this? Am I doing something wrong? My wife has jokingly said, Looks like you’re losing your touch. Am I?
Bob Smith
Bob,
I would suggest you split the back feet and pull the skin over the toes. Since the split is on the bottom of the foot, simply sew and place on your habitat. If the seam still shows, use some Sculpt-All to cover the mend.
Ed
What these people want is a shoulder to cry on. The Commissioner says one night, folding away his stationary. But I’m not in the business of dispensing pity. He writes an advice column for Furtakers Quarterly and when Burwash asks if his real name is Ed, he replies, It’s my pen-name, you dimwit.
Some nights he reads letters from his readers out loud. It makes Burwash angry that men, all across the country, should be so obsessed by the elusive one. In reality, he now knows muskrats are bottom-feeders, stupid creatures, lured by carrots and apple cores to snout around between those two metal panels. Once in a while the Commissioner will make him rig up a trap himself. If they’re stalking the underwater dens that rim the mouth of the pond, Burwash will have to dunk his hands into the frigid swamp and sluice around the mud for a stable trap surface. This often takes so long that the Commissioner loses patience and shoves him out of the way. Burwash will wade up the bank, examine the runway trails in the soil, kick around chunks of scat.
Burwash is really the Second. His father is Burwash the First. A pretension that — if Burwash’s mother had been paying closer attention — would have indicated he already had his sights set on better things. An orchid exporting business running out of Florida. A florist with an enormous bucket (compared to her relatively tiny waist and flat chest). Burwash remembers standing in the garage after the First left. His mom was trying to assess the damage. She held up an empty pup tent box and through a face of tears said, Well it looks like you’re going to grow up without a father figure or a camping set. It’s been months since the First’s last phone call; a session of disappointed grunts and the question, You got any special ladies you’re boning, son? Often, during dinner, as Burwash picks through the delicate muskrat bones for its gamey offering, he wonders if his father has any misgivings about his contract with the Commissioner. He wonders if anyone’s noticed he’s been missing for three weeks. Perhaps the lady at the General Electric company; she’s always ready with a smile when he goes to pay his bill.
The Commissioner likes to mind-fuck him. Sometimes when Burwash is scrubbing the dishes — without the mercy of dishwashing gloves — or stretching out a pelt on the wire rack, the Commissioner will come in from God knows where with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Burwash is determined not to cry as the beast stands over the sink, cradling the bucket under his arm, and drilling drumsticks into his maw. He lets out a juicy belch, then settling down at the table with a fork, plugs his mouth with coleslaw. Burwash throws himself into his sleeping bag. He faces the wall like a jealous lover and tries to soothe himself with thoughts that soon he’ll contract rickets and die. What he’d give for a squeeze of lime juice! On the positive side, he’s now pooping like mad in the woods. Marked his own tree and is able to squat and release kind of like a pro.
You think I’m gay? Burwash asks.
The Commissioner is running a lube patch through his gun from breech to muzzle. He says, We don’t use that word around here, boy. That word’s for when it’s too late.
Burwash dated Brenda Larson in college. She was a philosophy student as well; a devotee of Kierkegaard. He admits he wasn’t entirely attracted to her. He was torn between wanting to have sex and wanting to hash out a real good debate on existentialism. In her dorm room, Brenda would push up her glasses and pull down her skirt, modestly. Burwash recognized this as movement of infinite resignation; one little push and Brenda would offer it up. They’d get a good start, but then his pants would soften up. He’d push Brenda back on the bed and try instead to engage her in some fiery indirect communication.
Burwash lays out a clean flannel shirt for the Commissioner one night. He’s been asked to speak at the Furtakers Quarterly Banquet. From his pocket he pulls a tattered scrap of paper and begins to read. I used to be the Commissioner of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Being a military man before that, I ran this state like a clean whistle, whatever they say about me. I was let go in ’81. That was due to being on the wrong side of an incident involving a young female biologist and some contraband sea otter pelt. I say, hearsay. But, title or not, I still got the stats, the facts, and that’s what counts. You need to know about bobcat? Between ’77 and ’78, two-thousand, one hundred forty-six bobcat were taken. I said, clean as a whistle. So when I say forty-six bobcat at the end, I mean forty-six bobcat. Not a hide more. I got stats for pine marten and grey fox and otter. But the muskrat is one that stands alone. Muskrat is the holiest of all these little fuckers scurrying through the bush. Indians used to call it musquach. Some folks around here like to call it marsh rabbit. In ’77 to ‘78, I let eighteen thousand, one hundred and fifty six muskrat leave these woods. You get that? Each bring in about two dollars and change. That’s over $26, 300 for trappers. That’s why you gotta love the muskrat. It’s stupid. Easy to trap. Plentiful. God bless the ‘rat.
Burwash never gets used to the kill and refuses to clear the traps. The Commissioner laughs at this timidity and says, All in good time. Burwash’s bowels flounder, how much longer will he be here? He still turns his head away when the animals are dropped into his sack. He still has the occasional compulsion to vomit, but avoids this by pressing his tongue hard against his front teeth. Each of his fingernails have acquired a crescent of dirt, the signature of a bush man. He must be doing well; the Commissioner has stopped calling him Pansy. He calls him nothing.
The night of his speech to Furtakers Quarterly, the Commissioner comes in with Burger King in one hand and a lumpy blonde in the other. Neither acknowledges Burwash, who, in a communal pair of skid-marked long johns, is stoking the oven. They kick the cabin door shut and make their way across the room like a grotesque, co-joined beast. The blonde gargles out a deep-throated laugh and plants her mouth over the Commissioner’s snout. In a boozy envelope, they drop onto the cot. Burwash is overcome. He slinks back to his sleeping bag and hides. He covers his ears against the laughter, which is quickly turning into a series of rapturous yelps. There’s a lot of shoving and slurping and metal springs aggravated to the point of snap. Burwash tries to label his feelings. A certain brand of jealousy and territorialism. He chews a rough and cracked knuckle. It would be nice to blame his father. He tries meting out the guilt but finds his thoughts distracted by the noisy copulation. Burwash is drawn by the chronometry of the Commissioner’s ploughing heave, and the blonde’s absorbent grunts. For some reason, his father’s big-assed florist drifts into his mind. The blonde pauses briefly between howls to say something; a complete phrase timed to dovetail into the end of the big man’s pow. It gives Burwash a clue as to where he’s been held captive this long month, Welcome to Clackamas County.
Dear Ed,
I’ve built plenty of figure 4 traps (just models using the living room cushions) and I’m wondering if you’ve ever had success with them. Do you find it lethal? What are some secrets? Mine seem so slow and I’m just about ready to give up. I’m not a quitter by nature, but at this rate I’m never going to trap a real live one. What do you think?
Padrig Reardon
Padrig,
A good way to practice the triggering aspects of figure 4’s is on you own pets. I have one of those plastic milk carton boxes and trapped my neighbor’s cat fifteen times in a row using sardines as a bait. It helped me work out angles and weights. Practice with lots of stuff, but you don’t even have to kill to get some good experience. Most pets fall for it every time. When you’re building a real trap, make sure you have a solid whomping surface under the deadfall such as a rock. Otherwise having their head punched into soft sand or snow by the deadfall will do nothing but irritate a critter.
Ed
Burwash is not coming to love the wilderness. It’s nothing like that. But he does admire his new facial hair. And he no longer runs on his tip-toes. He knows he’s in Clackamas county, but Clackamas county sprawls clear across the state of Oregon. He considers, but then quickly rejects, the idea of climbing a tree and scanning the horizon for Mount Hood. It’s not that he’s come to like his captor, this isn’t Stockholm Syndrome or anything, but some respect is due to the bulky man. To the two strides it takes him to clear the shack, to the muscles twisted around his forearms. His father had arms like that, back in the years of polyester slacks. Back before he’d packed up the camping gear and pointed the station wagon toward Florida. After the man left, Burwash had learned to buy phone cards at the 7-Eleven. Would call him from the booth on the corner. If his father didn’t pick up, he’d just listen to the tape recorder instead, wondering, When are you coming back for me? Burwash looks around the cabin. Same question. His life, he realizes, is spent waiting for long distance answers.
Sometimes, after he’s baited a trap he will wait. He knows it’s ridiculous since he’s just clattered and fussed around the mouth of the den. But he wants to see a live one. Wants to see its guard hair ripple like snakeskin. That’s the thing about being a trapper, you don’t get the hunter’s satisfaction of watching an animal drop in the bush. Just the end results, never the chase. Burwash feels the weighty heft of each boot as he skirts around the marsh, as he hides in a lace of hooker’s willow. He pulls his coat tight around him, smelling the mingle of sweat and plastic and wool. He’s beginning to understand the humiliation of men like Padrig and Bob. What one might do for the elusive one.
When Burwash comes back from checking the traps he finds the current Miss Fin, Feather and Fur sitting at the table. She’s about twenty years old with brown hair and a teased fringe. The Commissioner brought me by, she tells him. Burwash stands at the door, fingering his luxurious beard. What should he say? He drops the sack of muskrats on the linoleum and looks down at his sleeping bag. She stands up. Burwash notices her laced-up boots are scuffed at each toe. We can use his cot, right? She points to the Commissioner’s corner of the room. Burwash thinks about his dad; is this what he meant about special lady friends? He follows her to the cot. He is shy with her.
Later when she’s lacing on her boots she says, I used to be Miss Teen Sulphur Mine. Each of her sentences end in the lilt of up-speak, her paragraphs punctuated by a weak cough. She tells him she has wanted the title of Miss Fin, Feather and Fur her entire life. And here I am, she says, spreading her hands out, showing her empty palms. She is sad about things too. Next fall she’ll have to hand her crown down to another girl.
At least you know what it felt like, Burwash says in a voice thick with understanding. The girl nods. But he just wants her to leave.
The Commissioner says, It’s your turn. Sink or swim. Once the delicate pelts are on their stretching boards, he takes the chopping knife and hands it to Burwash. Like I showed you. He adds, If you ever want to see civilization again. Burwash accidentally drops the knife and startles himself as it clanks on the table. He’s afraid to look up at the Commissioner so he concentrates, instead, on the naked carcass in front of him. He clenches his teeth and lops off the head. It separates with surprising ease, with a minimal amount of fluid and blood. He begins to eviscerate the animal with a cut that begins at the tip of the breastbone and cruises down to encircle the vent. Burwash pushes his fingers between the ribs and eases the body cavity open. He spreads apart a chest full of treasures, a tangle of blue-blooded organs, a soggy mass of extinguished life. He says to himself that these hands, these prying fingers belong to some other person. These don’t even look like his; the worker’s knuckles, red and chafed. The fingernails, mottled and pared to a working length. With the body cavity open, he grasps the viscera above the stomach and tugs them down and out the way the Commissioner’s showed him. The heart and lungs hang like a prune and two apricots on a branch. He plucks them last. His hands only begin to shake as he cuts the musk glands out from inside the legs, as he drops the thing into brine to draw away blood.
Secretly, Burwash likes the rinse of salty game left in his mouth after dinner. The Commissioner fetches some beer out from a hole near the stream. The combination of tastes soothes him now and he wonders if it wasn’t just this simple appreciation that his father wanted to share. A message to his son across many long, distorted miles. Burwash loosens up a belch. He hasn’t flossed in over a month.
He’s asleep when he feels the Commissioner’s giant paws grab him by the shoulders. Burwash is hauled to his feet and feels the blindfold cut a sharp channel across the bridge of his nose. You might be used to it here, the Commissioner says, But your training is over. And he hauls him out into the woods. It takes about twenty minutes to get to the van. Most of that time, Burwash suspects, is spent walking in concentric circles.
Maybe I’ll stay, he says.
Nope, can’t do, the Commissioner replies. Burwash is silent. Disappointed. Don’t worry, the man says, reading his thoughts, Happens to a lot of fellows.
The Commissioner tosses him on his front lawn. Burwash can feel his wrists coming loose and he rolls himself to a sitting position. He smells motor oil and fried fish from the chip shack he knows to be down the street. He rubs his wrists and lifts the blindfold. The Commissioner is back in the van. Burwash thinks of his father leaving for Florida and the orchids. The station wagon idling in the driveway, loaded with the Coleman stove, a tarp, even the plastic kiddie tent. Through the rolled-down window the Commissioner yells, See you, Burwash.
He watches the girls in the Japanese restaurant. He will try applying what he’s learned to this situation. It’s what the Commissioner intended, isn’t it? The man would say It’s a good place to start, with the chinky broads. They seem so simple and obedient, parceled in their tight kimonos. He notes the narrow girth of their skirts; they won’t be able to run far. When his waitress comes over he will slide across his booth toward her, pointing to something on the menu. When she bends her head close, order pad against her chest, he will grab her ass. His hand, the silk of the kimono, her small ass. It doesn’t matter which girl. To Burwash they all look like the same little sparrow. He watches her approaching. A frail thing whose hair is sliding out of a bun. She leans down to take his order. Burwash slides his hands out from under his thighs. Folds them together, sits tight.
