Made Beaver

Lyrics

The creek freezes quiet from the edges in.
A slap of a tail you don’t hear again.
The work of the trap, the work of the knife.
The work of a woman’s hands, scraping a life
from the inside out, stretched on a willow frame.
Until the fur shines. Until it speaks its name.
A prime winter pelt. Warmth against the bone.
Something that breathed. Something you had known.

Down at the post, the air is thick with smoke.
And the smell of wool blankets from the Norfolk folk.
He doesn’t take the fur, not at first.
He gives you a coin to carry your thirst.
Cut from a kettle, a piece of brass scrap.
Stamped with three letters, a promise, a trap.
H. B. C.
It feels cold in your hand. Lighter than you’d think.

They called it a Made Beaver.
The price of a soul.
A good trade, they told you, to make a man whole.
A kettle for the water. A gun for the deer.
The cost was a river that would disappear.
They called it a Made Beaver.

A new flintlock musket, that’ll run you twelve.
Twelve breathing lives stacked up on a shelf.
Six for a blanket to keep out the frost.
You can count what you’re gaining.
You can’t count what you’ve lost.
One for a knife, so sharp and so thin.
To skin the next brother of your own damn skin.

Across the salt water, on the second day of May,
sixteen seventy, so the parchments say.
A king named Charles, with a ribbon and a ring,
signed away a watershed, a map of a thing.
He called it Rupert's Land. He never saw the snow.
Just drew a line around a place his traders would go.
And the coin in your palm was the ghost of his seal.
Making a fiction feel terribly real.

A Made Beaver.
Yeah, a Made Beaver.
Scrap of brass in the mud by the shore.
The beaver don’t build here no more.
No more.