We’ve lived at the edge of the first bench above the flood plain for twenty-five years. The Conewango Creek would be called a river in most parts of the country. Muskrat sightings were common from the beginning. I don’t remember exactly when I first noticed the trail in the snow leading from the creek bank to our composter, but I do recall taking note of the tracks and tail marks and being watchful thereafter, to see what our visitor was up to. A few days later I saw a muskrat swim, with the peculiar, fluid grace of his kind, to the low spot on the bank where the trail began. He hurried across the open space of the narrow creekside flat where I have a fire pit and an archery range, then paused, looking nervous and furtive, before climbing the steep slope up to our yard and the composter. He paused again, reached between the composter’s wooden slats to grab a section of grapefruit skin, dashed hurriedly back down the trail, and plunged into the creek gripping the bright citrus treasure in his teeth. I was delighted. I began leaving offerings down on the flat to spare him the nervous, risky journey to our yard: orange and grapefruit skins, scraps of lettuce and an occasional carrot. He continued to take the orange and grapefruit skins home with him, but carried the greens and carrots to the shelter of one of the plastic lawn chairs by the fire pit where he could feast relatively sheltered from the gaze of hawks and owls. I responded by making one of the chairs a feeding station and stood often at our kitchen window with binoculars to watch our newfound friend eagerly supplement his vitamin-sparse winter diet.

How did the muskrat discover our composter in the first place? Chased there by a predator scare, a waft of citrus scent carried to the creek by the evening thermal, or some adventurous urge to journey beyond the safety of the creek? The latter, admittedly anthropomorphic possibility appeals to me. While it’s important not to get so far into such projections of human qualities into non-human realities that they begin to masquerade as fact, it’s equally important to recognize they provide openings for affection not unlike those that enable our affections for fellow human beings. Drawn into closer observation of the small details of muskrat behavior, the hand-like deftness of their front paws, their cat-like grooming, the contrast between their nervousness on land and their confident ease in the water, I quickly realized that I’d been observing more than one, perhaps several, individuals. I looked upon them with growing affection, with friendship.

When a trapper set muskrat traps on my property, less than thirty yards from my house without my permission, I angrily ripped the traps out and hurled them far into the creek. I never saw the trapper, but if I had he would probably have been treated to a frightening display of my dark side. I’ve always had problems with trapping. Killing for money, rather than meat, is ethically troubling for reasons I hope I can safely assume are fairly obvious. That first step back away from the simple raw need of sustenance toward commerce is loaded with spiritual and moral risk. Sustenance has intrinsic limits integral with its pragmatic purpose as well as a tradition of reverence and ceremony, dating far back into the Pleistocene, and perhaps beyond. Natural sustenance nurtures awareness of the web of symbiosis which sustains us and the constant, poignant exchange of death for life which defines the courage required by consciousness. How does one connect to such awareness through the price of furs? Trapping seemed like nothing but another variation on the cruel edge of commerce gnawing on our Earth’s beleaguered wildness.

To be fair, I must admit that such awareness has been lost for many hunters, and I don’t just mean the redneck rabble who, as one fellow put it when I tried to speak to him about the meaning(s) of deer hunting, “just like to shoot the bastards.” Many hunters who might be easily and superficially described as serious and sophisticated have simply substituted a record book entry for dollars and thus effectively reduced the hunt to a simulation of commerce in their pursuit of trophies and scores. Still, even among those groups, the animals themselves command at least a vestigial reverence rooted in the hunter’s direct, often harsh, encounters with wild land and the beauty, courage, and resourcefulness of their prey.

My misgivings about trapping readily coalesced around these particular muskrats who became nearly as sympathetically individual as my cats. The thought of one of them struggling and dying in the jaws of a trap was not a vehicle for philosophical speculation or abstract ethical concern. It was not something that could be readily swept away by an explanation of game management theory and practice. These animals were my friends or, if that’s too much of an anthropomorphic stretch, they were, at least, my neighbors.

When I saw a trapper working the far side of the creek, a queasy dread arose in my heart and gut. I longed for a way to protect the muskrats, my muskrats.

I am a hunter. I have hunted all my life. My generation is the first in my family to learn to hunt outside the realm of need and sustenance. I am well aware that my muskrat friends could be killed and eaten any day by a coyote, fox, eagle, owl, or mink. I know that they live in a world of hazard, as indeed do we all, despite human skill in candy coating the hard, sharp, wild edge of nature. I have killed and eaten deer I knew and liked as individuals. My view of the world is hardly Bambi-esque, but I don’t see animals as abstractions, objects, or automatons. In my writing I feel as uncomfortable referring to a specific animal with the grammatically correct “it” as I do with some of the gender biases built into the English language. I sometimes indulge in both because I am unwilling to make my writing a constant vehicle of protest against linguistic injustices that anyone who can read and understand my work can surely see through.

I see animals as individuals—each with an element of uniqueness, consciousness, and personal history. Evaluating the nature and magnitude of that individuality in relation to my own is well beyond my limited knowledge and meager wisdom, but a failure to respect its visible glimmers would be a failure to respect both myself and the web of earthly connection (quite literally, the common ground) that roots our species and all others to the Earth. The compassionate respect we owe our fellow creatures is inseparable from the respect we owe our own uniquely human capacity for compassion. The ability to see our fellow creatures as abstract units in a mechanistic world may well be the hole through which evil leaks into humanity, the true original sin.

My misgivings about trapping and affection for my muskrats made it fairly easy to see the trapper across the creek as an abstract personification of the cruel edge of human greed, even while recognizing the irony of my failure to compassionately recognize his individuality and sentience. There was nothing in my world to put those feelings to test, nothing to reveal the presence of simplistic bias cleverly disguised as well-considered opinion. Years passed. I fed the muskrats in the winter, watched them through binoculars from the kitchen window, and felt a small flush of anxious anger on the rare occasions when I saw a trapper checking his trap line on the far side of the creek.

Last winter, my wife and I were invited to a Christmas party. As the evening wore on, small groups coalesced around several disparate topics of conversation and, as is typical, I ended up in a group talking about hunting, fishing, woods, and wildlife. The subject of coyotes came up. Partly to spare myself the discomfort of listening to the predator-phobic tales of wanton coyote killing that are sadly too common among hunters I spoke up and said, “I like them.”

Another man echoed my sentiments with smiling enthusiasm. “Yeah, I like them too.”

“I encountered one that I got to know once—I followed his tracks for years and learned a lot from him,” I said.

Darin’s eyes lit up. “They’re fascinating. When I started trying to trap them, it took me three years to get the first one.”

He was a trapper. But I liked Darin. He’s one of those people who radiate a fundamental, heartfelt gentleness and a bright, free energy that tells you that you needn’t worry about petty prejudices or foolish ego issues. He spoke about coyotes with enthusiasm, affection, and reverence. I told him about a coyote I had observed both directly and by following his distinctive tracks in winter. I had come to see him first as an intelligent, conscious being and later as a friend and teacher. Emboldened by Darin’s smiling nods, I spoke of my puzzled distaste for the predator phobia displayed by so many of my fellow hunters. He shared his own coyote stories which, although they came from his pursuit of them, were not tales of deadly success and manly triumph, but of wonder, beauty, and respect.

I think of myself, with an uncomfortably admitted touch of intellectual vanity, as open-minded. But it’s rare anyone alters a strongly felt aspect of my thinking. I tend to experience more fine tuning than change in the challenges of conversation edging politely, or even heatedly, over into debate. Books have changed my thinking far more than conversation. But I left the party with my head buzzing from a little too much wine and my thoughts about trapping in the midst of a transformation.

Killing entangled in money remains an uncomfortable issue for me, and I have some developing thoughts about the ethos of blood commerce. But it’s not really the fur trade that I intended to write about.

A couple of weeks ago a man was checking a trap line across the creek behind my house, and I saw him in a different light. Yesterday, I saw one of my muskrats swimming along the bank. I felt a brief flicker of worry for him, not unlike what I felt for my cats when I first heard about a recall of tainted cat food. Such feelings aren’t simply neurotic, although they can certainly get that way if not kept in balance by joy, hope, distraction, and a little hard-nosed realism. They are part of the bedrock of our humanity. Such feelings are the same that motivate those who loathe hunting, who see it as a cruel barbarism driven by sick egos and stunted hearts. In some cases they’re right, but, of course, golf, automobiles, home decorating, coin collecting, sex, beer, and careers can also be driven by sick egos and stunted hearts. Callousness is one of passion’s perennial hazards. The killing of wild animals for food is natural and, when done with reverence and compassion, can be as clean an expression of primal divinity as planting a seed, making love or giving birth, despite the fierce poignancy of its climactic moments.

I still worry about my muskrats in odd poignant moments of creekside watching, but I think of the trapper as a force of nature in the same category as the raptors, coyotes, and minks, as one of the millennial hazards of a muskrat’s wild life. If a trapper catches one of my aquatic friends, I hope he’s a good trapper with wildness, love, and wonder in his heart.

I’ve met one of the local minks. He had bright eyes that met mine briefly before he vanished. He may eat a muskrat, but he also shares the hazard of traps. I love the geese who raise their young on the creek, yet I also ate two of them last winter and have two more in my freezer. The marriage of love and sustenance is as complex and subtle as the marriage of minds and bodies. The silencers on my bowstring are made of fur. The quiet they bring to the loosing of an arrow helps me bring food to my family. Love is large. Life is short.