Three Against the Wilderness by Eric Collier

Author:Eric Collier [Collier, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO006000, HIS006020
ISBN: 978-1-926741-99-4
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Perhaps Veasy should never have been out on the ice, tending traps alone, in the first place. It happened the previous winter, in January. Veasy wasn’t quite seven, wouldn’t be for another six months. Still, he knew how to set the traps even if he couldn’t pry their springs down with his hands. Instead he scuffed the snow from a windfall or rock, placed the trap on it and depressed the springs with his foot. And held a foot on them until he’d set the trigger on the pan, and they were now ready to catch things, even his own fingers, if they happened to bump the pan. No doubt this had happened, but if so, he kept the secret to himself.

He kept pestering me to let him set the traps out for himself until finally, a little against my will, I gave in. Lillian told me, “No, he’s too young to be out on the ice alone, messing around with mink sets.”

“Is he?” I wondered. And, glancing back to a hazy past, I began trying to remember how old I had been when I first shot a starling with a .22. Maybe seven or eight. And no one had been around to show me how to handle the .22 except maybe an older brother. Whereas Veasy had seen both me and Lillian setting out mink traps since he was old enough to slip along on skis.

“Is he?” I repeated. “Just a few traps set around the lake here at the house, well within hollering distance if anything went wrong? After all, it would give him something to do after school hours, and on Saturdays and Sundays. He’s a bit young, yes, but maybe not too young to set out a trap or two and maybe catch a fine mink.”

“He’s too young,” Lillian insisted.

“I’ve been over to the big lake on my skis,” Veasy joined in. “Lots of times. By myself.” By the big lake, he meant Meldrum, which was three-quarters of a mile from the cabin, well out of hollering distance. And sensing that I was wavering, even if his mother wasn’t, he asked me directly, “Can’t I put out just two or three traps at the lake by the house? I can ski awful fast now, quicker than you go on snowshoes.” That part of it was fact. I said nothing, looking to Lillian for a decision. After at least five minutes of thinking it over, she said, “He does go quite a piece away on his skis. Too far sometimes. He was up the creek yesterday, gone for over an hour. And when I asked him where he’d been all that time he said halfway up the hill back of the house, to the old bear den where we smoked out our very first bear. That’s a mile and a half from here.” Then, with a small sigh of resignation: “Maybe it will be all right for him to be out on the lake, fixing a trap or two.

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