An eager-beaver trapper

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TUESDAY WITH…COLUMN

PALM DESERT, Calif. – It’s unfortunate that Simon Cuyer of North Creek, Mich., will not be on hand when the Maine Professional Guides Association meets this coming Friday night in Bangor. He’d be a knockout head table player if called upon to offer a few words.

Simon’s the kind, if he has to bed down, will cut some boughs and make a lean-to. One or two nights in the snowy north Michigan woods is no big deal. He’s done it hundreds of times since he started trapping with his father 60 years ago up in Quebec. And he figures he’ll do it many times more in the next 40 years. Cuyer, 63, is an Algonquin Indian and he figures he has that many more years of trapping left in him.

“My father lived to be 101 and he trapped right to the end,” Cuyer, tall and straight with only a few streaks of gray in his dark hair, said as talked. He added, “There’s no nicer music to my ears than the muffled rattle of traps in my pack, breaking the silence of the morning woods.”

While Cuyer talked recently, I listened intently:

“My father spent days cooking his traps in a brew of boiling water flavored by soft maple and red oak bark that eliminates human scent from them. This process, he claimed, removed a coating of paraffin that preserved the traps from rust. You can’t use oil because to the animals that also is a man odor.

“Even in the best days, trapping is a hard, rugged existence. In my part of the country, trappers spend the entire winter in the bush using tents and old cabins as their base camps. They follow their trap lines on snowshoes or, in some instances, with dog teams. Snowmobiles have opened the woods to almost anyone or everyone, it seems, trying to make a few extra dollars trapping beaver, muskrat, mink, fisher, raccoons, foxes, and coyote.”

WHERE CUYER lives, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, he vows every kid gets involved in hunting when he’s 12 or 13 and many of them resort to trapping to make enough money to buy a new rifle or a pair of skis.

He disdains the use of snowmobiles and relies entirely on his snowshoes. “Besides,” he said, “snowmobiles are banned from some areas I prefer to trap. There are fewer trappers and the woods are the way I like them, quiet and peaceful.”

The muskrat is the most popular of all the fur bearers but when the beaver season opens, the woodswise oldtimers like Cuyer make the part-time trappers and youngsters look like milkmaids. A year ago, Cuyer trapped open territory in the area of North Creek, N.Y. He had a good season, getting about 40 pelts which brought him between $30 and $45 each. He supplemented that with a few fisher and otter.

Cuyer asserts that he seldom plans to spend more than one day at a time on his trap lines; state law requires that traps be checked at least every 48 hours in the Adirondacks. Some areas, the law says a check needs to be made once every 24 hours.

Cuyer works doing different jobs during the remainder of the year. He’s earning his keep this winter taking tourists into the desert country. But he’s looking forward to returning home, somewhere in the province of Quebec.

CUYER IS looking forward to the day when he can go back to trapping full time.

“I’ll go back to Quebec this summer.You can still make a living trapping up there and it’s the chief occupation of my people. The desert is lovely, beautiful and the weather cannot be beat. But my goal is to again live with my people.”

Another traditional occupation that Cuyer practices is the construction of birchbark canoes. He makes three or four during the summer and they bring about $500 apiece. And anyone who tries to tout aluminum or fiberglass will get a strong argument from Cuyer.

“Ours aren’t made for shooting rapids, but with the proper care they’ll outlast any of those modern canoes.”

When he first heard about aluminum canoes he and his father were making birch canoes for $1 a foot.

“We’d make two a week for about $30 and we could live on that.”

Snowshoe-making is a craft he had to relinquish to the synthetic rage.

“I realize there are movements to stop trapping,” he said wistfully. “I can understand the feeling of people who are behind it, about killing animals. I couldn’t kill an animal either if I had to watch it die. But I’m an Indian and my people have always done it. It guess it’s in my nature.”

Simon Cuyer has a place in my book of memorable people. If there really is such a thing as one of a kind, this man’s one.

ON ANOTHER totally unrelated matter, the baseball lockout. It’s heartening to see this will not be the year when play-by-play broadcasters, those marvelous magpies who shorten summer days and nights for millions of us, are silenced.

Baseball fans take their heroes seriously, you see. To become one isn’t easy. The requirements are strict. They are, in effect, a restatement of the principals which drew to these shores the weak, the oppressed, and the hungry from all over the world in search of a dream.

That’s why a majority continues to subscribe to an old-fashioned ethos. It places a love of game and loyalty to team first, and sees each as a microcosm of a greater love to God, family, and country.

Instinctively, therefore, Americans take dim views of franchise city-hopping, team-swapping, and haggling over tons of dollars in outlandish, cradle-to-grave contracts.

They’re aberrations. Though America remains the last outpost where rich rewards await the achiever, it sets limits on greed that continued labor disputes in a mere game played by kids on sandlots all over the State of Maine.

PLAYERS ON one hand, seek free agency reduced; the owners have say no. Nothing revolutionary. Nothing to send an aroused citizenry charging onto the streets. Nothing critical, certainly, to the survival of the republic, or distress a citizenry more worried about feeding, clothing and educating the kids than the fat-car dialogue beteen 650 adults playing a schoolyard game.

If the regular season does not begin one day after April Fool’s Day, then so what? It’ll be remembered, unfortunately, as the time of the month when the family bills come due with what’s left of their paychecks.

The other day, I read where one of those baseball-playing dandies publicly stated that he’d chosen to be a martyr, willing to lose $11,000 per ball game – that’s $11,000 for each ball game – in support of the so-called lockout. I can only say if this bird is willing to lose $11,000 for a day’s work, the average working stiff can only find both himself and his employer’s values repulsive.

It seems the baseball establishment has ignored the most serious risk of all, the real world. If they’d ventured outside their cocoons, they might see how easily baseball can lose public favor and esteem. And, if baseball goes, who’s to say basketball, football, hockey, and even tennis won’t soon follow.

There’s something increasingly tiresome, nay spiritually corrupt, about today’s Big Buck Jock.

I’d rather spend my time swapping yarns with a man the cut of Simon Cuyer, an honest, straight-talking Algonquin Indian.