Once They Were Hats: In Search of the Mighty Beaver by Frances Backhouse

Author:Frances Backhouse [Backhouse, Frances]
Language: ara
Format: epub
Tags: Animals, Beavers, Ecosystems & Habitats, Endangered Species, History, Nature, Non-Fiction, Science, Wildlife
ISBN: 9781770907553
Google: wXkuCQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00VXGDAZM
Publisher: ECW/ORIM
Published: 2015-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

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.Seven.

ONE MADE BEAVER

The beaver dangled from a chain looped around its left foreleg and thrown over a rafter. It was the first thing I noticed as I entered the workshop out behind trapper Pete Wise’s house. Not the lush coyote and bobcat pelts hanging from nails on the plywood walls. Not the inside-out raccoons and otters stretched over drying boards or even the stack of cured beaver skins. They would all come into focus later and were, in any case, expected. This intact animal, on the other hand, glancing coquettishly over one shoulder through lifeless, black-bead eyes, caught me off-guard. This was the beaver I was going to skin.

NAFA’s Trapper Relations Manager had suggested that Pete, a long-time trapper and experienced trapper-education instructor, would be a good person to give me a glimpse into the supply side of the modern-day fur trade. Pete had readily agreed to my request and decided that the curriculum for my visit should include a hands-on lesson in preparing beaver pelts. However, although it was January, the preferred time for catching beavers, he didn’t have a fresh specimen on hand. I knew he was thawing one he had stored in his freezer the previous summer when he’d been too busy to deal with it, but I hadn’t anticipated meeting it quite like this.

The week before, when Pete and I were making arrangements for him to pick me up at the airport, he had told me he would be wearing a “camo wildlife control hat, wool camo vest, grey hoodie, black pants and felt pac boots.” I spotted him instantly. We collected my luggage from the carousel and walked out to his truck, a silver Toyota Tacoma with a jumble of traps and a dead calf (bait, I learned later) half-covered by snow in the back. The seat covers matched Pete’s camo hat and vest. He shooed his border collie, Nunk, into the space behind the seats, tossed my bag in beside her and shifted a rifle so I could fasten my seat belt. He had already started outlining his philosophy of trapping for me. “Humaneness, in my world, is tantamount,” he said.

At 62, Pete was a burly good ol’ boy with blue eyes, a white horseshoe moustache and a bald head generally hidden under a ball cap. He had been trapping for 53 years, starting with muskrats in the sloughs of the Lower Fraser Valley. Originally, he had pursued his quarry with a bow and arrow, but when a local trapper showed him how to set traps and offered to buy his skins, he enthusiastically adopted a new approach. After Pete graduated from high school, he moved from job to job — bar manager one year, heavy equipment operator the next — but always trapped on the side. Eventually, it got to the point “where work interfered with trapping.” Then in the late 1970s, he landed a government contract to apprehend “nuisance” beavers and realized he had found the perfect career. A few years later, he started the business that has kept him fully employed ever since.

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