Brother,

I can still hear your voice although decades have passed— the baritone of a man who is approaching fifteen. Knees and knuckles numb, you stand on the snowy bank of the Shenango river, pulling an angry muskrat from an old steel trap. Like a eucharist you hold it up against the Pennsylvania sky, its only remaining paw bleeding, almost severed, dangling in the sun. Blue-lipped and barely eight, I shiver in the wind, and almost weep for home. “It made it all this way”— you say—“on three raw bones, and still defies its death, just like we must the cold.”