Right before the Monfort Wind Farm with the dancing white windmills, we veer off to the right. After a series of curves and small bluff inclines we turn right and stop at a stop sign guarding a railroad track. A spotted deer lunges in front of Jared’s truck. We wiggle up a winding road to a new ranch house, very long, almost Frank Lloyd Wrightian in character.
A man, about 65 with ½” whiskers wearing an A & W Root Beer ballcap, is carrying a teevee to his pickup. Jared gets out and gives him a hand. Jeff and I are waiting in my car. I have no idea where we are or why we stopped. Although both Jared and I have cell phones, this is remote country, not many towers; connections can be made only at the top of the bluffs.
It is sunny, 90 degrees, no storm in site.
The man turns out to be Jacob the fur trapper. He invites us into his home. It is quite modern and extremely tidy. The furs draped over the back of his couch are beautiful beyond compare. He brings out albums of pictures. Some show his driveway filled with rows of dead animals. Racoon, red fox, coyote, and some I don’t even know, stacked. A day’s bounty. He has limits and a special license. He takes us out to an outbuilding. This is where the blood and guts fly, although there is no trace of either. He shows us a machine and explains how the feet are clamped in and the body is uprighted and the skin peeled off in one swoop. I kind of finish what he is saying because he is a bit shy to say the skinned part. All of the finished furs are shipped to Alaska. There they are tagged and put into lots. The individual furs are mixed with other trapper’s bounty and a huge auction begins. Buyers from all over the world gather and buy what will in due course reside on the backs of hoity-toity society women. This is how it works: say Jacob has one red fox in a lot of 7 furs. Whatever that lot goes for he will receive 1/7 of the price.
I hope you aren’t going ISH. This is RealLife. It’s how our ancestors ate and kept themselves warm so they could survive. Do you wince when you travel through Nebraska and go past those trucks full of crying steer that will eventually be a silent guest at your next barbecue?
As an interesting side note I should tell you how my brother met Jacob. When Jared was a teenager he and a group of his pals went gold panning in Montana. That’s where he first met Jared. Then about five years later in a dumpy blues bar in an Illinois border town they met again. And earlier this year when my brother bought his Mississippi River cabin, he remet Jared at the local grocery store. Three different states! Odd coincidences. Although I must say that my brother is even more curious than I am and will chat up anybody he thinks is even slightly interesting. Mostly that is old men, I guess because our dad is gone.
I love the way a man keeps his eye on the prize and goes for it. Jared gave us the trapper. Yes!
Next stop is 17 miles the other direction. It is the BARN, the flathead fish head barn. Ohmigod it is amazing! Now when I first read the passage in Huckleberry Finn about the 6’ catfish that could throw you all the way into Illinois, well I was giving dramatic license to Mark Twain. Fiction is full of hyperbole. And even when Jared told me about the elusive black-skinned monster fish, I took it as a bit of a made-up fish story, but here right before my eyes was proof. Heads of giant flatheads had been nailed all over the side of a barn and yes they were twice the size of a man’s head and yes even though the body wasn’t there you knew it could easily be 6’ long! I am snapping pictures like a fool. Trying to capture the right angle. Photographing the beaver tails and the deer antlers. Oh man it was a site I have yet to recover from. The fish do exist.
