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A Trapper's True Story I once was a trapper and where I made footsteps I echoed a shadow of blood. I gripped every season with my bare hands and did what I had to do, sometimes more, though I knew I would die and lie naked underground, my skin like every winter's ice.
One day, as I checked my lines, I walked into a clearing where morning unveiled amazing pure light. I knew myself more than alive, and that very instant I saw the mother fox in my trap.
She'd been nursing her kits, four of them, while my jagged vice cut into her flesh to the bone; she'd been crazy with fear and pain, I could tell, for there was much blood splattered all around. And as I walked toward the vixen, she raised her head to watch me come through the clearing. And she gently picked up each one of her young by the neck, one at a time, and lay it close to her breath and licked her milk from its face, and snapped its neck. She did that to all four before I could reach her.
And as she watched me over her newly born, over her dead she had saved from my hands, I knew I would never trap again. And I never have, though I killed her with one bullet as she lay back waiting to die. I buried the mother and her fur, and tonight, in the warming nighttime of spring I wonder if ever I'll sleep until morning again. James Strecker is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Black on jazz and Pas de Vingt on ballet, both with artist Harold Town. Widely published as a poet, freelance writer and photographer, he is also Professor of English at Sheridan College, an Intensive Journal Consultant, a publisher, a graphoanalyst, and recipient of the Hamilton Arts Awards for 1992. A Trapper's True Story is taken from Strecker's collection, Echosystem, which was published in 1993 by Mini Mocho Press (Jackson Station, P.O. Box 57424, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, L8P 4X2)

This is Chelsea one of my beautiful cats!