The Trooper and the Trapper

I hope you enjoy this story There is some truth to it. tom

The Trooper and the Trapper

By Tom Brosman

It was a late December evening and a heavy snowfall had been hammering the coast of Washington State for several hours. The usual misty rain had been replaced by a foot of snow, causing Highway 101 between Hoquiam and Forks to become a treacherous drive in the steady falling snow. Trooper Gus Nilsson, 897, was dispatched from the Hoquiam Detachment Office to find a disabled vehicle just north of Neilton, about 40 miles north on 101. Gus was worried about the disabled. If the driver had no heat, stranded up there in a remote area, it could be more than just uncomfortable. 

Just past marker 112, on the right side of the highway, there was a 40 foot drop off and a PUD substation directly below that, by the Donkey Creek Road turnoff. Underneath a foot of snow was a sheet of ice. When Gus’s Crown Vic rolled onto the sheet of ice, he lost control of the vehicle and even with the ABS brakes, he slid towards the drop off. He was able to stop the car before it went over, but the left front tire was in the wind, hanging over the edge. The trooper was thinking about the disabled up north waiting for him and about the mountains of paperwork he would have to fill out for his wrecked car. Not to mention, the career long ridicule and ribbing he would undergo if his car slid into the substation and took out power to the community. He carefully got out of the car as it creaked and rocked back and forth. There were lights coming up behind him, but his full attention was on his soon to be rolled over and demolished car. He was counting the days off without pay he would receive for this one. 

The vehicle coming up behind him stopped and the passenger door opened. Gus could smell the driver before he walked up to him. His uncle had been a beaver trapper for the state and had smelled like the man walking up to him. “Well, Son, you did a good job of balancing that car over the edge. Let’s get you back on firm ground.” The man went back to his pickup and coiled out a hundred feet of cable from his winch, attaching it underneath  the frame of Gus’s Crown Vic. “Stand away Son, this might not work. Come back with me and we shall see if this fish can be reeled in. I have hooked the great white whale.” 

It was a strange feeling for Gus, who spent his life rescuing people, to have a stranger stop in a snowstorm at night to rescue a state trooper. He felt that Dame Fortune had shined on him that night as his car was pulled slowly, with metal creaking sounds from off of the edge and back onto the highway. Gus walked to his car and put it in park and went back to shake the hand of the man who rescued him.

His name was Neldon Hacking. He had a small cabin at Neilton and was a professional fur trapper. The smells on his clothing were from musky lures he used to bait his traps for beaver and bobcats. He was just coming back from Hoquiam where he sent a box of fresh hides off to a fur buyer in Chicago.

He was headed for home when he saw Gus’s tail lights do the wiggle and wave as the cruiser was heading over the side. Gus offered the man money for his help. The man, with hair neatly trimmed and the clean cut look of a man who shaved every morning chuckled.  “Haaa, helping you out tonight was just payment on the note I owe”. Gus replied, “Note? What note?” “Well Son, it is my debt to the Universe, for two kidneys that work, plenty of free oxygen and the sound of the wind in the cedars trees outside my cabin in the morning”. They shook hands and Gus smiled as he got under way and he figured Neldon was following behind him “Just in case” Gus got stuck again. When they rolled into Neilton, Neldon flashed his lights at Gus and turned off to his cabin. Neldon never gave the whole matter much thought, though he did wonder and chuckle out loud if Gus had made a wet spot in his seat as his front end started over. After that, Neldon forgot about the whole matter.  Trooper Nilsson never did. He was able to rescue a tired cold couple from the disabled and had a big grin on his face, knowing his car was in one piece and that the State Patrol had no idea about his bobsledding attempt that night. He put the name Neldon Hacking on a very short list that most troopers have, a list of people for whom he would roll, without question to defend or rescue.

Several years passed. Gus saw Neldon once in a while and they visited when they could. They both laughed about the snowy nights when Gus tried to take out a substation. 

On a soft autumn morning in August, Neldon was at Swanson’s Market in Hoquiam buying some groceries. He was carrying out two bags of groceries. The cool, sweet wind was coming in from the ocean and the leaves were turning color. Neldon smelled the breeze and closed his eyes to savor it. He woke up in a hospital bed in Aberdeen. His own dad had died fairly young with heart issues and if Neldon had not been close to a fast ambulance and a good hospital, he would have to gone to be with his ancestors. The ER nurse asked him if he had family or friends locally.

“No family, but Trooper Gus Nilsson is a friend of mine”. She knew Gus and she knew how to get hold of him. In five minutes a dispatcher asked Gus, who was in service, over the air to call the Communications Center. When he called in, the dispatcher told Gus about Neldon.

A snow white patrol car with the license plate WSP897 was parked three minutes later in the emergency zone and a worried trooper made his way to Neldon’s room. The nurse told him that Neldon was in and out of consciousness. They needed information about Neldon. Someone needed to go to his residence to see if they could find out any medical history or family. “Gus, he is headed for surgery, but it would improve his chances if you found something about his health history. Right now, his chances are slim.”

In 20 minutes, Gus had signed out of service at his own residence and was headed to Neilton in his personal pickup to find Neldon’s cabin and find out what he could about his friend. He took the turn on the dirt road that Neldon had turned off on so many years before  and at the end of a half mile long road, he found Neldon’s cabin.

There was a big outbuilding in the back of the house and Gus went there first. There were pelts stretched and drying from beavers and bobcats and a coyote or two. Everything was neat and tidy and the hides were works of art, skinned with precisions, taking neither meat from the animal carcass or nicking or cutting the hide.

Inside the house, which was unlocked, Gus found paintings of rivers and red canyons in Utah and a large painting of Grays Harbor with fishing boats out working.  It was a nice setting but gave Gus no Intel on what Neldon’s past had been like. He checked the kitchen and bedroom and finally came to a locked door, the second bedroom. With a twist of the blade of his pocket knife, Gus opened door and turned on the light. On the wall, hung a medical degree From the University of Chicago. There were pictures of Dr.  Neldon Hacking shaking hands with other doctors and dignitaries. On the wall, where the best light in the room fell, Gus found his answer. There was a woman and a small girl, smiling back in peace and great affection. Gus opened the desk, finding more photos and a journal. It began in medical school. In his second year of med school, Neldon met a beautiful, soulful redhead who thought Neldon was the king of all men. They were married after his graduation and within a year, they had a daughter, Kathy. Neldon worshipped two things in life. His wife and daughter and the practice of medicine. The written words in the journal wore pain as Gus turned the pages. Neldon’s only next of kin was a sister who had moved to Texas to marry a rancher. Her name was Linda, Linda Stewart now. 

It was winter time in Chicago and Neldon, as usual, was working late, operating on a woman who had been in a car wreck, saving her life. As Neldon made the last suture and gave the nurse instructions, 20 blocks across town, his wife and daughter were killed instantly in a car wreck. A drunk driver T-boned them in an intersection.

Some men can bend and adapt to tragedy but a few are forever changed by it and left at a profound loss. When the news was delivered, something in Neldon snapped. Had he been with his wife and daughter instead of operating on a stranger, they would still be alive, or so he believed. He had put medicine first and lost his world.

Medicine no longer came easily to him in the months after the funerals. He was not the same man. He sold the house and moved to Neilton. His uncle had taught him to trap on the Upper Peninsula of New York State growing up and he fell back on it.

At the bottom of the drawer was an old Christmas card, from Linda Stewart, from Perryton, Texas. It was late Friday afternoon and Gus took the information back  to town and when he got home, called directory assistance for Texas.

Gus went back to the hospital. He had found nothing in Neldon’s papers about his health or his parent’s health. The nurse shook her head sadly.  Neldon was dying and deep down, it was what he wanted. He had no reason to live and all that he valued and adored had crossed the great river that night in the car crash.

Gus left on a journey early the next morning, hours before dawns’ light fell into Neldon’s room, where overhead, Neldon’s spirit could hear the calm flutter of angels’ wings. Angels who understood and had come for the doctor.

At SeaTac, Gus heard the announcement that the direct flight from Amarillo, Texas was on time. He watched as people filed out. Near the front of the line was a woman who reminded Gus of Neldon, but she held the hands of two small girls. Linda had two daughters and the dying doctor, had two nieces.

It was midmorning when the four of them rolled into Hoquiam and made a b-line for the hospital. It was the time, in between the here and the hereafter, when a tortured spirit is making his/her goodbyes, anxious to be gone. Neldon was ready to go. His spirit was at the door and the angels gently beckoning, when he heard, far away, the voices of two wee girls. “Uncle Neldon, come back, we love you”. It happens, but seldom, when a bruised and broken spirit asks to go back, but Neldon felt their small hands on his own and felt small tears dropping on his face.

Linda and the girls stayed three weeks with Neldon out at his cabin in the beautiful woods.   The girls walked with their beloved uncle through the big timber and saw the rivers and streams that Neldon loved so. It was decided that the girls would spend their summers with their uncle.

Gus had many meals with them and enjoyed much laughter. Toward the end of their visit, Millie, the oldest who was seven, handed Neldon a picture she had drawn with pencil and her mother had framed. Millie handed the kind trooper the wrapped gift. When Gus opened it, he added to the tears of joy, shed in that small home. It was a picture of Neldon, dressed in his trapper clothes and of Gus in his trooper uniform with arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling. The trooper and the trapper.