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 pronunciation 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 on 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