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Most days of the week, in the late afternoon, Celeste and I drive out to the farm to visit my dad, to help him deal with some ongoing medical matters. Coming up soon on his ninety-fourth birthday, Dad is pretty sharp, I’d say, but he sometimes struggles to recall various common nouns or, especially, names of long-known but infrequently-seen acquaintances. A few weeks before Christmas, Dad mentioned a visitor had stopped in to see him that day, and he couldn’t recall the man’s name, but I eventually understood that Dad was referring to Lou Ellefson, who lives on an adjacent farm.
“What did Lou come by for?” I asked.
“He wanted to set some traps,” Dad said. “I told him I thought that would be all right.”
“Traps?” I said. “What kind of traps?”
“He didn’t say what kind of traps. Regular traps. Steel traps, I suppose.”
“What does he want to catch?” I asked.
What seems like not so long ago, a farm family a little farther toward Fjord from Lou’s had lost sheep, a lot of sheep, one by one, to a wolf, and so a wolf came first into my mind, and I asked Dad whether someone had seen signs of a wolf, but Dad said, No, it was “those animals that go like this,” and he showed me, stretching his right arm out about waist high and bringing his hand, palm down, across in front of him in a series of rhythmic arcs, like a bounding creature of some sort, and I was puzzled.
“What’s that,” I asked my father, “a jackrabbit?” We don’t actually have jackrabbits around here, we have bunnies, and bunnies bound, sometimes, when escaping danger, but not in a graceful way like Dad’s gesturing suggested. Still, jackrabbit seemed worth a guess.
“Not a jackrabbit,” Dad said, scowling, scoffing.
My next guess was, “A kangaroo?”
Dad shook his head, no, don’t be silly, and furrowed his brow as he searched for the name. “I had them out here one time, below the house. They came up from the crick, three of them, bounding through the grass across the north pasture. They would rise up where I could see them above the grass and then disappear and then show up again farther along.” With his right hand he again demonstrated the creatures’ bounding, unhurried trajectory. “I could see them from the kitchen window here,” he said. “They went into the woods north of the barn.”
“Hmm,” I said, still thinking. “Coyotes?” We had once seen a coyote saunter between the house and the white garage in daylight; I thought it possible that coyotes might also bound. Doesn’t Wile E. Coyote bound at times?
But Dad said, No, Lou was not trying to trap coyotes, and we gave up and left whatever they were, those animals, unidentified.
That was, as I say, several weeks ago, and the mystery animals did not again cross my mind until the day after New Year’s, when Dad mentioned that a farmer who leases land from him had come by with a rent check on the last day of the old year, and the farmer had said he would come by another day soon, presumably to discuss an extension of the present lease agreement. I asked Dad if he had other offers for renting the acreage, and he said, No, not from farmers, but he had sometimes received inquiries from hunters. He remarked that he permits relatives to hunt on the place and “rarely,” he said, “others as well.” He mentioned again “the fellow who was going to set some traps,” and I said, “Oh, yeah, how’s Lou Ellefson doing with that, and have you remembered what kind of animal he is after? Not jackrabbits or kangaroos, I know.”
Dad said, “No, Lou has not come up to the house again.” Then Dad told me once more, “It’s the animals that go like this.”
“Where’s he setting these traps?” I asked.
“In the crick, of course,” Dad said.
“Oh!” I said, “Are these fur-bearing animals?”
“Yes,” Dad said. “They go like this”—he showed me, up down up down up. “They go like this”—he did it again—“in the ocean.”
“In the ocean!?” I marveled. “Are they otters?”
“Otters,” Dad said, “yes, that’s what they are, otters.”
“I never heard about otters on this farm.”
“Oh, yes, I told you, Dave, I once saw a family of them cross the north pasture in the tall grass.”
In this year just begun, I wish for you, my readers, what would be impossible for the otters to achieve, even absent the lethal intent of Mr. Louis L. Ellefson. That is to say, I wish for you twelve months of life’s inevitable ups and downs, but with many, many more highs than lows.
♦
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