Cory Rausch emptied a garbage bag of pig guts onto the snow, followed by bristly skin and a head. They’re from a butcher friend, parts that would otherwise go to waste.
“What this does is, it attracts the birds, and then the birds attract the coyotes and the fox,” he explained.
Rausch was running a trapline near his home in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. He pointed to a clump of trees near the pile of bait.
“There’s a snare there, a snare there and a snare there,” he said.
All season long, Rausch has been checking the looped wire snares and steel foot traps, slowly adding to his collection of furs – beaver and fox, muskrat and coyote. Every once in a while he keeps one to make into something warm, like the otter hat he always wears. But he’ll auction most of the furs off during Anchorage’s Fur Rondy celebration.
Across Alaska, trappers like Rausch are preparing for the annual auction. In a few weeks, Rausch will stand onstage with his elementary-age sons, holding up their year’s worth of furs. They’ve only done it a handful of times, since Rausch and his family are new to the state. He said at first the boys were excited and nervous. But now, it feels normal – part of a life of hunting, trapping and harvesting. That’s what drew Rausch to the state, he said. There’s a beauty in having a hand in feeding and clothing your family.
Dreaming of something different
Rausch got out of the Army about a decade ago, in his early 20s. He was already thinking about Alaska and a life of trapping and hunting. But when he told people, he said, they all had the same response.
“Like, ‘That's stupid,’” he said. “Everyone's like, ‘No, that's not a plan.’”
He went home to Ohio. But the places he used to trap and hunt were being built up, turned into stores and subdivisions. He said he was fishing toxic rivers, and hating it. He was falling back into old habits. He felt directionless. Alaska lodged in his mind.
“One day I was just like, ‘I'm done. I'm done,’” he said. “And I literally packed everything up and I just left.”
He and his young family eventually landed in the Mat-Su, in a town named Houston, where a sign entering the city reads “Welcome to the real Alaska.”
Now he takes his sons out on the trapline with him, and on longer hunting and camping trips. They both have fur hats from animals they trapped together. One of their favorite meals is bear burger tacos. You just have to know how to cook it right, Rausch said.
An act of intimacy and respect
Out on the trapline earlier this month, Rausch drove his snowmachine down narrow trails, willow branches snapping past him. He pointed out the traces of coyote tracks, and the pink tape he uses to mark each wire snare or steel foot trap. He explained how the foot traps are designed to allow blood flow, so they don’t maim, and how he sets up the wire snares to kill quickly.
Rausch said he loves being out here, watching the animals, learning their behavior and strategizing.
But he doesn’t necessarily like killing them.
“Believe it or not, I feel bad,” he said. “Sometimes I hate killing. I really do. It's, you know – you watch the life leave that animal.”
Rausch said he knows some people think trapping is cruel and unnecessary, especially nowadays, when it’s easy to just buy meat and warm clothes. But for him, it's about being connected to life’s necessities and facing the violence of eating meat and wearing fur in a state where that’s often the warmest option. It’s something you don’t have to think about when you’re shopping at a store.
“You don’t know your food,” he said. “There’s not an intimate relationship like – ‘I just called this bull moose in, put a clean shot on it, and now I'm gonna pack it out and I'm gonna process it, I'm gonna put it in my freezer, and it's gonna feed me and my family.’ That's very intimate.”
Just because you see it in the store, he said, doesn't mean that animal didn't die. It’s just hidden, he said. That makes it easy and convenient. You can pretend you’re not part of it.
But Rausch wants to be part of it. It creates meaning, he said.
His life here definitely isn’t perfect, he said. But it has meaning in a way it never did back in Ohio.
‘We got something’
Rausch headed down trail after trail, passing empty traps and empty snares. Then –
“We got something,” he said, pointing to his left and killing the engine. “Looks like a bunny.”
It was a snowshoe hare, nearly hidden among the young birch trees. It was frozen solid, neck caught in the wire snare, a tiny bit of blood around its mouth.
Rausch disentangled it and examined the fur. Probably won’t make it to the fur auction, he said. The skin was papery and delicate.
But in a day or two, after it thaws, it would make a nice dinner.
He'll just fry it up in butter, he said, and serve it with his sons’ favorite sides – salad and mashed potatoes from his garden.
