Living in balance with nature

Page 6

Although he scarcely finished Grade 4 in a school that only held classes three months out of the year, Rick Tetso now earns about $25,000 tax free each year by trapping.

At age 10, Tetso started trapping his "back yard," a narrow 60 km stretch of muskeg located 85 km west of Fort Simpson, N.W.T. He grew up on his father's trapline and learned how to survive from his Elders on the rugged land only 500 km south of the Arctic Circle.

Tetso, now 29, says furbearing animals are plentiful, although he notes with a smile "there's not much fox and always too many spruce chickens."

The trapping business has been good to him, but Tetso admits he still just "breaks even" after buying the provisions he can't hunt down such as gasoline and spices.

The Slavey Indian trades furs in Fort Simpson at the Hudson Bay, which was four days hike before Tetso bought his snowmobile and an all-terrain vehicle (A.T.V.) about 10 years ago. Tetso and his parents, Fred and Mary, who are in their sixties, would walk to the tiny fur trading post. "It only takes two days by paddle," he boasts, adding he made the trip by canoe recently when his A.T.V. had a flat tire.

Even with the drawbacks a trapper must endure, Tetso has never seriously considered another line of work. "Another job would keep me away from the land. I feel like I'm missing something really exciting when I'm not in the bush . . . I don't want to miss anything," he explains.

Tetso learns all he needs to know about surviving and making ends meet in the bush from his Elders. For example, he learned to read the sky and predict weather conditions, a skill no trapper can survive without.

The weather affects everyone, but for Tetso there is almost no margin for error. If a sudden storm should appear in the sky and he's caught unprepared, it could cost him days ? even weeks of work. Much worse, it could cost him his life.

Tetso doesn't have a million dollar weather balloon, but he can forecast the weather days in advance by "the redness of the sky at sunset."

A successful day's work also depends largely on wind direction. Tetso says, "a trapper must walk with the wind in his face" and stay down wind from animals, which are easily alerted to an approaching hunter by scent and sound. A good trapper will use the noise of rustling leaves blowing in the wind to cover his approach, he adds.

Tetso says the most difficult animal to capture is a moose, even though tracking the animal is not hard. "You can even tell if it's a bull or a cow by its droppings." But, if there is no wind, he says a hunter can't get any closer than a mile to a moose.

"The Elders always say that a moose is higher than us, that it can see into a person's life . . . into his future. I respect their words. The moose and all of the other animals keep me alive," Tetso concludes.