Mitch Colton's father kept a rifle on the wall above the couch, and nobody in that house ever remarked on it any more than they'd remark on a clock. There was a coonskin cap on a hook by the door, the tail hanging down stiff, and out in the shed a red fox skin nailed flat to a board, the colour still vibrant, bright as if the fox had been alive the day before, though it had gone stiff with age underneath. An old beagle named Thumper lived tied up outside at a doghouse in the lot next door, retired now, his hunting done, and when he lifted his head at you it was slow and it took some effort. Mitch's father was a hunter the way some men are tall. It wasn't a hobby he'd picked up. It was just what he was.
He was the one who drove us to Summerside that Saturday, the two of us in the back of the truck, out past the gas station and the Irving and the last of the houses, until we pulled into the lot of a tractor dealership, rows of green machinery lined up along the fence catching the sun. There was a sign taped in the window of the warehouse. Fox Show, it said, and under that a date, and Mitch's father parked the truck like he'd done it before.
Inside, the warehouse smelled like diesel and sawdust and something else underneath that, sharper, animal. Long tables ran the length of the room in rows, the kind you'd fold up after a wedding, and on top of every table sat cages, wire cages set close together, and in every cage a fox.
They were smaller than I'd thought they'd be. Their coats were the thing everyone had come to look at, silver-black, the fur so dense it looked wet even dry, and a man walking the rows would stop and run a hand down one's back the way you'd check a bolt of cloth, feeling for the give of it. The foxes didn't move much. I noticed that before I understood why. Each one had a metal clamp fixed over its mouth, holding the jaws shut, and their eyes went to you and stayed on you as you passed, and that was the only part of them that still could.
Mitch's father knew half the men in the room by name. He shook hands and talked prices and once in a while picked a fox up himself, cradling it against his chest with one arm while his other hand parted the fur at the ribs to look at the skin underneath, checking for something I didn't have a word for yet. Mitch drifted ahead of me down the row, not much interested, the way you're not interested in a thing you've already seen a hundred times. I stayed where I was in front of one cage. The fox inside had its mouth clamped like the rest, and its eyes were on me, and I put two fingers up to the wire without deciding to, and it didn't flinch and didn't look away either.
I asked Mitch's father why the mouths were held shut like that. He said so they don't bite the judges, the same tone he'd have used for so the milk doesn't go sour, and kept walking. Somewhere further down the row a fox made a sound, muffled by the clamp, more air than voice, and nobody else in the room turned toward it.
We didn't stay past noon. In the truck on the way back Mitch's father talked about a buck he'd taken two falls before, the shot, the distance, the exact place low behind the shoulder where you were meant to put it if you wanted it clean, and Mitch nodded along like he'd heard the story enough times to say it back to him. I sat in the middle and looked out at the fields going by, red dirt turned over in the rows where somebody had planted late, and didn't say anything, and nobody asked me to.
It was maybe a month after that, or six weeks, that Mitch's father took us out to Lennox Island for a lobster supper, the three of us again in the truck, out past Tyne Valley and over the causeway onto the island, the water on both sides close enough to the road you could smell it before you saw it. The hall was a low building with folding tables inside, church-basement tables, and a woman came around with a big enamel pot and tipped lobster out onto sheets of newspaper spread across the table in front of us, red-shelled, steam still coming off them, and a roll of paper towel set down hard in the middle like a centerpiece.
Mitch's father showed me how to crack the claw properly, the heel of his hand coming down flat and sure, no wasted motion, and he pulled the tail meat out whole in one piece and ate it plain, no butter, the way I got the feeling he'd always eaten it. I couldn't touch it myself, my throat closing at the smell alone if I got too close, so the woman running the pot fixed me a plate instead, new potatoes boiled soft with the skins still on, green beans from somebody's garden, a few slices of pickled beet bleeding pink into everything else on the plate. Mitch's father talked to her like he knew her, or knew her family, or knew somebody who knew her family, the way everybody on that island seemed to know everybody else three ways removed. Butter ran down over his knuckles from the claw and he wiped it on the newspaper same as everyone at the table did. Nobody used the good plates. There weren't any.
I ate every bit of what was on my plate and felt fine about it after, full and warm, the beet juice gone dark under my fingernails, and it wasn't until we were back in the truck, dark now, headlights picking out the centre line, that I thought about the fox again, the two of us not so far apart in size, both of us handled that day by men who knew exactly what they were looking at and exactly what it was worth. Mitch's father got his lobster with butter on a sheet of newspaper and called it a good day. The fox had its mouth held shut so it couldn't say anything about any of it.
I never told Mitch's father that I thought about it that way. I'm not sure I'd have known how to say it even if I'd tried, not then, ten years old in the middle seat of a Ford with a full stomach and the smell of butter still on my hands. He'd have looked at me the way he looked at the fox on the table, checking the fur, feeling for the give of it, and he wouldn't have found anything there he recognized. A hunter is a hunter. A supper is a supper. The line he walked between the two of them wasn't a line I could see yet, and maybe it wasn't a line at all, maybe it was just the same rule applied twice, the animal is worth what it's worth and you take what you're given permission to take. I only knew the fox's eyes had followed me down the row same as the woman at Lennox Island had smiled at Mitch's father like she'd known him all her life, and that both of those were true at once, and that nobody in either room seemed to think there was anything strange about it.
I still have the coonskin cap somewhere, or Mitch does, or it's still hanging on that hook by the door for all I know. Thumper's long gone. The rifle's probably still on the wall. Some things on that island get handed down without anybody deciding to hand them down, they just stay where they were put, and you grow up walking past them so many times you stop seeing them as anything but furniture, until one Saturday somebody drives you to a warehouse and you see the whole shape of it laid out on folding tables.