The Beauty of Furs

At lunch with the girls, the younger ones are talking about furs, & what looks good with certain hair colours. Red fox looks no good with my hair, says one. White fox looks snobbish, beautiful but snobbish, says another one. They talk about the pronunciations of coyote. I think of my brother catching muskrat. I think of pushing the drown-set into the weeds, the freezing water of the Elbow, the brown banks & snow we lived with, soft smell of aspen buds not yet coming out of the trees, & us in our nylon coats in the backyards of Elbow Park Estates, practically downtown, trapping. Coy-oh-tea, the women say. In some places they say Ky-oot or Ky-oht, I say, thinking of the country where my brother now lives, the moan of coyotes unseen, calling the night sky. & me caught in the drown-set so deeply, my breath snuffled for years. & then it comes. They are talking about the beauty of furs, and how so-and-so’s family is in the business. I remember, I say, I remember my mother had a muskrat coat, & when she wore it & you grabbed her too hard by the arm, fur came out. Eileen, fifteen years older than me, starts to laugh, & puts her hand on my shoulder, laughing. We both start laughing. I start to explain to her that it was old; my mother wore it to church on Sunday & got upset if we grabbed her arm. We’re laughing so hard, now the young ones are looking at us, together we are laughing, in our house there was a beaver coat like that, Eileen said, then suddenly we are crying, crying for those fur coats & the pride of our mothers, our mothers’ pride, smell of the coat at church on Sunday, smell of the river, & us so small, our hair wet, kneeling in that smell of fur beside our mothers