Cormac McCarthy: The Crossing

Good God, he whispered.

Let me smell it, Boyd said.

No, said his father. He put the vial in his pocket and they went on to search for the traps but they couldnt find them. They looked through the rest of the house and out on the porch and in the smokehouse. They found some old number three longspring coyote traps hanging on the smokehouse wall but those were all the traps they found.

They're here somewheres, said their father.

They began again. After a while Boyd came from the kitchen. I got em, he said.

They were in two wooden crates and the crates had been piled over with stovewood. They were greased with something that may have been lard and they were packed in the crates like herrings.

What caused you to look in under there? said his father.

You said they was somewheres.

He spread some old newspapers on the linoleum of the kitchen floor and began to lift out the traps. They had the springs turned in to make them more compact and the chains were wrapped around them. He straightened one out. The greaseclogged chain rattled woodenly. It was forked with a ring and had a heavy snap on one end and a drag on the other. They squatted there looking at it. It looked enormous. That thing looks like a beartrap, Billy said.

It's a wolftrap. Number four and a half Newhouse.

He set out eight of them on the floor and wiped the grease from his hands with newspaper. They put the lid back on the crate and piled the stovewood back over the boxes the way Boyd had found them and their father went back out to the mudroom and returned with a small wooden box with a wirescreen bottom and a paper sack of logwood chips and a packbasket to put the traps in. Then they went out and fastened back the padlock on the front door and untied their horses and mounted up and rode back down to the house.

Mr Sanders came out on the porch but they didnt dismount. Just stay to supper, he said.

We better get back. I thank you.

Well.

I've got eight of the traps.

All right.

We'll see how it goes.

Well. You probably got your work cut out for you. She aint been in the country long enough to have no regular habits.

Echols said there wasnt none of em did anymore.

He would know. He's about half wolf hisself.

Their father nodded. He turned slightly in the saddle and looked out downcountry. He looked at the old man again.

You ever smell any of that stuff he baits with?

Yessir. I have.

Their father nodded. He raised one hand and turned the horse and they rode out into the road.

After supper they set the galvanized washtub on top of the stove and hand filled it with buckets and poured in a scoop of lye and set the traps to boil. They fed the fire until bedtime and then changed the water and put the traps back with the logwood chips and chunked the stove full and left it. Boyd woke once in the night and lay listening to the silence in the house and in the darkness and the stove ticking or the house creaking in the wind off the plain. When he looked over at Billy's bed it was empty and after a while he got up and walked out to the kitchen. Billy was sitting at the window in one of the kitchen chairs turned backwards. He had his arms crossed over the chairback and he was watching the moon over the river and the river trees and the mountains to the south. He turned and looked at Boyd standing in the door.

What are you doin? said Boyd.

I got up to mend the fire.

What are you lookin at?

Aint lookin at nothin. There aint nothin to look at.

What are you settin there for.

Billy didnt answer. After a while he said: Go on back to bed. I'll be in there directly.

Boyd came on into the kitchen. He stood at the table. Billy turned and looked at him.

What woke you up, he said.

You did.

I didnt make a sound.

I know it.

WHEN BILLY got up the next morning his father was sitting at the kitchen table with a leather apron in his lap and he was wearing a pair of old deerhide gloves and rubbing beeswax into the steel of one of the traps. The other traps were laid out on a calfskin on the floor and they were a deep blueblack in color. He looked up and then took off the gloves and put them in the apron with the trap and set the apron on the calfhide in the floor.

Help me with the washtub, he said. Then you can finish waxin these.

He did. He waxed them carefully, working the wax into the pan and the lettering in the pan and into the slots that the jaws were hinged into and into each link in the heavy fivefoot chains and into the heavy twopronged drag at the end of the chain. Then his father hung them outside in the cold where the house odors would not infect them. The morning following when his father entered their room and called him it was still dark.

Billy.

Yessir.

Breakfast be on the table in five minutes.

Yessir.

When they rode out of the lot it was breaking day, clear and cold. The traps were packed in the splitwillow basket that his father wore with the shoulderstraps loosed so that the bottom of the basket carried on the cantle of the saddle behind him. They rode due south. Above them Black Point was shining with new snow in a sun that had not yet risen over the valley floor. By the time they crossed the old road to Fitzpatrick Wells the sun was up there also and they crossed to the head of the pasture in the sun and began to climb into the Peloncillos.

Midmorning they were sitting their horses at the edge of the upland vega where the calf lay dead. Where they'd come up through the trees there was snow in the tracks his father's horse had made three days ago and under the shadow of the trees where the dead calf lay there were patches of snow that had not yet melted and the snow was bloody and trampled and crossed and recrossed with the tracks of coyotes and the calf was pulled apart and pieces scattered over the bloody snow and over the ground beyond. His father had taken off his gloves to roll a cigarette and he sat smoking with the gloves in one hand resting on the pommel of his saddle.

Dont get down, he said. See if you can see her track.

They rode over the ground. The horses were uneasy at the blood and the riders spoke to them in a sort of scoffing way as if they'd make the horses ashamed. He could see no traces of the wolf.

His father stood down from his horse. Come here, he said. f You aint goin to make a set here?

No. You can get down.

He got down. His father had slipped the packbasket straps and stood the basket in the snow and he knelt and blew the fresh snow out of the crystal print the wolf had made five nights ago.

Is that her?

That's her.

That's her front foot.

Yes.

It's big, aint it?

Yes.

She wont come back here?

No. She wont come back here.

The boy stood up. He looked off up the meadow. There were two ravens sitting in a barren tree. They must have flown as they were riding up. Other than that there was nothing.

Where do you reckon the rest of the cattle have got to?

I dont know.

If they's a cow dead in a pasture will the rest of the cattle stay there?

Depends on what it died of. They wont stay in a pasture with a wolf.

You think she's made another kill somewheres by now?

His father rose from where he'd squatted by the track and picked up the basket. There's a good chance of it, he said. You ready?

Yessir.

They mounted up and crossed the vega and entered the woods on the far side and followed the cattletrail up along the edge of the draw. The boy watched the ravens. After a while they dropped down out of the tree and flew silently back to the dead calf.

His father made the first set below the gap of the mountain where they knew the wolf had crossed. The boy sat his horse and watched while he threw down the calfhide hairside down and stepped down onto it and set down the packbasket.