I wanted to shoot the gun that day. My stepfather, Jim, brought a pistol and a rifle with us to the orchard dump. Jim let my older brother shoot the rifle. A skinny ten-year-old, Henry fell down from the recoil and we all laughed. My sister, eight years older than me, got to lay low on the ground and shoot the pistol at some rusty cans Jim had set up on one of the low trash piles. I wanted to try shooting, but Jim said if the rifle made Henry fall ass over kettle, it would knock me clean across the orchard. What about the pistol, I asked. I could shoot the pistol. After I’m sure a lot of whimpering and baby talk (my six-year-old self was forever getting in trouble for baby talk), Jim acquiesced and set me up with the pistol.

I laid my belly against a rise in the dirt where my siblings had taken their shots. I folded both hands around the handle of the pistol and sighted my target. When I wanted to concentrate hard as a kid, I bit my lower lip. Sucking my lip was right up there with baby-talk for getting me in trouble. Lip pulled under teeth, I had my eye looking down the barrel of the pistol, right over the knob at the end, lining it up with the rusted can on a trash barrel a few yards away. I squeezed the trigger with my pointer finger, and nothing happened. You have to pull hard, Jim said.

I bent both my index fingers over the trigger and squeezed. The recoil sent the gun back into my face, bruising my eye, hitting my mouth, and driving my teeth into my lower lip. My brother was laughing at me. My sister, bored now that it was not her turn, complained she wanted to leave. Jim was telling me that it looked like I might get a fat lip and a shiner where the gun hit me. He was also trying to pry the pistol from my hand; having squeezed so hard to fire, my hands didn’t seem to want to let loose. In all this, I kept my eye squinted at the target, or where the target had been. Knocking a can off a rusted metal barrel seemed worth the black eye from the recoil.

~

I once had a job cataloging Theodore Roosevelt Collection photographs at Harvard. One of the many hunting trips documented in the collection is a famed “wolf hunt” with “Catch ‘em Alive” Jack Abernathy. Abernathy had a method of catching a wolf by thrusting his hand into the wolf’s mouth and grabbing the jaw at the hinge behind the teeth, disabling the wolf’s ability to bite. The live animals were sold on to zoos and Wild West shows.

The hunt took place in Oklahoma in April 1905. Roosevelt wrote of the encounter with wonder, especially the sight of Abernathy leaping from his horse to catch an animal in the mouth and incapacitate it in a matter of minutes. Abernathy’s manner and vigor matched Roosevelt’s idea of manliness. He was so impressed with the man, Roosevelt invited Abernathy to the White House, and for more than a decade after, Roosevelt continued to invite Abernathy to perform for friends and dignitaries in the East, performing the version of the West so idealized by Roosevelt, as a wild place to be tamed, as a place to test the mettle of men.

The most widely distributed photograph of this hunt shows Roosevelt and Abernathy at the center of a group of men. The hunt has ended and the gear the men wear is dirty and disheveled from the day. Abernathy is wearing leather gauntlets. In one gloved hand, he holds a canid up by its lower teeth. He is holding the animal up with its jaw at about hip height. Abernathy is not a tall man; he is half a head or more shorter than everyone else in the picture. The animal, noted as “living” on the back of the photograph I cataloged, has its hind legs and tail dangling, almost touching the ground. Even small wolves are about four feet long. If you consider that hip height is about half the full height of the average person, either Abernathy is eight feet tall and therefore everyone around him is over eight feet tall, or what he holds in his hand in the photograph is not a wolf, not even a small one. I recognize a coyote when I see one. Coyotes average two and a half feet in length.

~

Jim used to run a trap line, catching raccoon, rabbit, muskrat, even skunk, but mostly he trapped coyotes. We lived in an orchard at a bend in the Columbia River. The sage-covered hills beyond the orchard were a rich area for coyote trapping. He used leg hold traps, dug into a pit and staked to the ground. The traps were baited with pungent scents, sometimes a bit of rotting meat, or a commercial pheromone concoction bought out of a trapping catalog, or a ladle-full of gunk from a white five-gallon bucket. It was a bucket mostly of fish-heads and guts passed on to us by an orchard worker who was an avid fisherman, but Jim added to this his own ingredients, a secret formula of bait-scent.

Coyotes were as much a part of my childhood as apple trees and rattlesnakes. Our house sat in the middle of the orchard, just a small plot of land surrounded by fruit trees. The house was a single story, square foundation with a wide front porch. A lawn of short-mown grass bordered the house on all sides, short to discourage rattlesnakes, or make them easier to spot at least. In the back corner of the yard was a garden, in the front corner an old clapboard shed. The front of the shed opened with two plywood doors that hung heavy on the hinges. The shed had no foundation. A dirt floor changed to gravel where the shed opened out to the road.

Jim kept his trapping gear in the shed and used the space to skin and stretch pelts. When skinning, Jim hung coyotes from the shed rafters, strung up by the tendons of their hind legs. Skinning a coyote isn’t so tough. After a few cuts are made at the back legs and around the butt and tail, most of the skinning is peeling the hide away from the flesh, like pulling off a tight sweater. More cuts are made at the neck, ears, and skull to pull the skin over the head.

A newly skinned pelt is a “greased hide.” As a kid when I heard Jim talk about greased hides, I thought grease had something to do with the process, like he oiled up the coyote flesh to help remove the hide, make the tugging and peeling easier. A greased hide must be scraped, stretched, and dried. The scraping is exactly that, removing bits of flesh and fat from the underskin. Jim would then pull the hide over a wooden stretcher, pointed at one end then gradually widening out, like a small ironing board. The hides were dried fur-side in, the coyote turned inside out. The snout and head were pulled over the pointed end of the stretcher. The shape was eerily similar to the triangular skull of the coyote, but flat with empty eyes where the fur had been cut around the sockets. Leaning against the walls of the shed, stretched and drying pelts looked like gruesome coyote puppets.

Skinned coyotes were left hanging from the rafters while Jim took care of the greased hides. Skinless, the coyote bodies were white and ghostly pink where flesh and muscle shone through the layer of fat recently exposed. It was always hard to look at the skinned coyotes. A dead coyote with fur was still recognizably a coyote, a wild thing, teeth and growl and howl. Skinned, they just looked like thin, hairless dogs hung up by wire cut through the ankles of their hind legs.

~

Once or twice a year, Jim would gather all the animal pelts together and sell them on to a fur merchant. Pelts were graded and sized then sold on in bulk to the clothing industry to become coats and linings and trim. It takes 30 rabbits to make a jacket, more than a dozen skunks to make a fur wrap. Coyote fur is mostly used for trim, pieces from one pelt might be stitched onto the cuff or hem of many garments.

I was the youngest of my siblings, and for many years the youngest even of all the cousins. Most of the clothes I wore growing up came down to me from someone else. Coats were the worst. It seemed what came to me was never something simply outgrown by someone older, but outlived—stained and torn, not simply dulled in color like some of my hand-me-downs, but overworn, with dyes drained from the fabric.

One year after a particularly good trapping season, Jim returned from the fur buyer with a present for me—a winter jacket. Not rabbit or skunk fur, but red quilted cloth with a yellow lining. It zipped up the front and had a hood, red with yellow lining and trimmed in coyote fur. It was a little big for me. So I could grow into it, Jim said. I wore it proudly for weeks, careful not to get it dirty.

While I was waiting after school for the bus one day, an older girl, someone who lived in town and didn’t take the bus, asked me about the trim on my hood. There was not a lot of fur-wearing among the children at my elementary school. I told her it was coyote fur. She pointed at me and called me a dog, said I was wearing dog fur. The dog comment spread among my classmates the way cruelty can in an elementary school. Before the end of that winter, I had taken scissors to my hood, trying to cut away the coyote fur, ruining the jacket. I never got the chance to grow into it.

~

In his account of an African safari taken in 1909-1910, Roosevelt criticizes “game butchery as objectionable as any form of wanton cruelty and barbarity." This is something of a high horse position for Roosevelt, given that his expedition to Africa resulted in the killing or trapping of more than 11,000 animals. But then, he could claim his game butchery was for science, providing America’s natural history museums with display animals. Joining in the scientific expedition was a tracker and hunter, a sharpshooter, a taxidermist from Stanford, an Army surgeon, and Roosevelt’s son Kermit. Harvard’s photograph collection included hundreds of images from this safari. My descriptions of these became repetitive. Dead lion. Dead rhinoceros. Dead rhinoceros cut to be skinned. Dead lion. Dead antelope. Dead elephants prepared for skinning. Head and skin of a rhinoceros. Dead ibex.

After a couple years of working with the Roosevelt photographs, on a weekend trip to New York City, I happened to visit the American Museum of Natural History. So many of the animal displays at the museum are owed to Roosevelt and his hobbies. The dioramas are found in a series of darkened halls. A visitor stands in the dark looking through a huge plate glass window into a brightly lit room painted to look like a natural vista, with preserved flora in the foreground, all to serve as setting for taxidermied animal specimens. Most of the African animals in the museum came from Roosevelt’s safari trip. Many of the painted backgrounds were familiar to me as the backgrounds in the photographs I had seen of the animals lying dead where they were shot.

I looked at the animals with some scrutiny, squinting at the details. I hoped to recognize them from the photographs. Dead lion. Dead antelope. Dead ibex. But the taxidermied specimens in the dioramas were tied to those animals by only the thinnest of threads. Wearing the skin of an animal killed on another continent, the objects in the dioramas were no more the animal itself than a greased hide stretched on a board in Jim’s shed was a coyote.

~

Jim had various routes for traplines. We would run them sometimes in winter, but also in the dry seasons when there wasn’t much orchard work to do. At some point a year or more after I gave myself a black eye shooting the pistol at the dump, I was out checking traps with Jim. It was an early spring day, the chill of the surrounding air pushing against the radiating heat of the cloudless sun. We had checked two traps and found them empty. At each one, Jim had carefully disguised any sign we had been there, tearing a small limb off some nearby sagebrush to sweep away our footprints and disguise our scent. He also rebaited the traps from a jar he had packed with us, filling the cold air with the reek of musk and rot. I held my breath for as long as I could as we walked away from each trap, trying not to breathe in the smell. I held my breath and held my breath until finally I had to gasp out and swallow big mouthfuls of air that, despite my efforts, still tasted of coyote bait.

Between the traps we crossed over land covered in short yellow grasses, dotted with the round grey shapes of sagebrush. With some distance from the traps and in the heat of the sun, the smell of the sagebrush rose camphor-bitter and dusty. Jim had his binoculars out, looking ahead to the next trap. He laid a hand on my shoulder and pulled me along behind him. We moved along a stand of sagebrush, going the long way around it to the next trap instead of the straight path we’d been on. I couldn’t see through the brush, and Jim’s movements indicated the need for quiet, so I did not ask any questions.

Coming around the sagebrush, I stopped short just beside Jim. There was a coyote in the trap. The coyote was standing, its nose wrinkled high on its snout. As it sniffed the air at us, the split from nose to mouth opened like a curtain, canid lips pulled over the gums of the teeth, baring them, yellow mountain ranges standing on pools of red gums, the upper teeth parted just slightly from the lower. The mouth edges were pulled back so far, I could see the pink web of the jaw hinge behind the teeth.

The trap sat heavy on the ground just behind the coyote who was pulling at it, having dragged it from the hole. In the trap was a grey fur leg bit by the steel jaws. The leg was dark and wet with blood and saliva where the coyote had been gnawing, gnawing at the leg, pulling and gnawing, biting where the trap had closed. The coyote’s foot hung from the leg below the trap jaws. It looked like a rabbit’s foot, like those I could buy from the quarter machines at the front of the Safeway, gum balls, and super balls, and rabbit feet died green and yellow. The coyote foot hung loose by a sinew, by a tendon. Foot caught in the steel, the coyote pulled its leg away from the trap, stepping on three legs toward us, sniffing the air, and baring its teeth.

Jim took the pistol out and knelt down beside me. He had been talking but I couldn’t hear him, all I heard was a low rumble growl and occasional defiant yip coming from the coyote. Jim was talking and putting the pistol in my hand, holding it up in the direction of the coyote. My hand fell to my side, the weight of the pistol too much for my suddenly weak arm. I looked at the coyote, pulling and pulling at the trap. The dry black leather of its nose was brushed with a spot of grey, dust from where the nose had touched the ground near the hind foot as it gnawed.

Jim raised my hand and the pistol. Kneeling behind me, he bolstered my elbow with his arm, wrapped his hand over mine on the pistol, slid his index finger into the ring guard and rested it on mine. Jim always talked about looking into the eyes of an animal when shooting, holding it still with a stare. I stared at the dust spot on the nose of the coyote as I felt the pressure of Jim’s hand close over mine, pressing my palm to the gun, squeezing his finger over mine, steady, steady, until the trigger was pulled.