The trapper puts his cheek to the ground and feels the frozen mud against his skin. He sniffs three short inhalations then moves his nose to the base of the thin maple. Nothing.

The old joints don't make it easy any more. He pushes himself up with a grunt, stumbles to the left, and using his rifle like a cane, stands straight. He looks down the game trail then back the way he came. A dusting of snow coats the fallen leaves. There are no tracks but he knows the wolf has been here. He must look harder.

Snow has collected on the trapper's parka, on the top of his mitts. His small pack, the old canvas sack he has had for as long as he remembers, feels heavy. He knows he should have left it at the cabin; it's only slowing his progress, weighing him down. He must work fast, before the snow covers the remaining signs.

Yesterday, he carefully erected a tiny tee-pee of twigs between two spruce saplings. Today, the sticks lie in a pile on the ground. A hare flying down the trail could have knocked it over, but he knows it wasn't that. He can sense it was the wolf. He can feel its presence.

The old man clenches his rifle and slouching underneath the bent alder bows, moves to the patch of moss. He squints at the depression in the green sponge and sees how an alder leaf is sticking out, higher on one side. Something has pressed down here. Something big. He looks to the left and sees another snowless depression in the moss. It has come this way.

The trapper began hunting the wolf his first summer in the bush, not long after the Great War. He was a young man, a boy really, when he stepped off the train at the station in Oba, squinting into the sun of hot summer afternoon. His gear was thrown onto the siding beside the tracks and the conductor, saying something in English, pointed to the two-story building. The hotel, he guessed.

He tried to learn English on the voyage from Finland. He bought a dictionary, one with pictures, to help him learn the words, but in the end, found the tattered Lutheran Bible to be the best teacher. Since he knew the Old Testament off by heart, he would read the English words and would understand in Finnish. He couldn't pronounce the words, only study the tracks they left on the page. But from that, he would learn.

The trapper joined a few of his school chums and his older brother as they set out for Canada in 1925. They were going to look for work in the mines and the lumber mills. Lots of jobs in Canada for a hardworking lad, they were told, and lots of folk from northern Finland ended up in lumber mills of Cochrane and Smooth Rock Falls, or the mines of Timmins, Sudbury and Kirkland Lake. But not him. He knew the kind of life these boys would have in the mines, then after work, they would live for the saloons and bars of the frontier towns. He wanted to do more than make money, only to spend it on sin. He wanted to do good in this world.

Soon after he arrived in Canada, the trapper hooked up with another young man, a Swede he met in Sudbury who had been issued a trapline permit for an area north of the Grand Trunk Railway. The Swede already had a bit of experience in the bush so the trapper would learn what he could from the man. And trapping was good back then. The fur prices were so high in the Twenties, they could buy everything they needed on credit at the Oba trading post, to be paid back the following spring, once they sold the pelts. He didn't know the Canadian North, but he could afford to figure it out. How hard could it be? Snaring hare back in Finland was easy enough, plus he had a gift for understanding animals. He could put himself in the animal's head, see through its eyes. Even the creatures in Canada, he was certain, would soon become his eyes, ears and nose. He had no doubt.

He and the Swede agreed to split the costs of equipment and supplies and the two of them took the train to Oba station, where they loaded a log raft the Swede had built, and poled their teepee of gear deep into the wilderness. By the first snow, they had built two rough cabins of logs and mud, one at Fire Lake and one a day's snowshoe trek away on Puskuta Lake. Each was furnished with a table and a wood stove, a window made from a pane of glass they found by the railway tracks, and a bed of spruce boughs.

But there was an evil in this New World. From the first walk of their trapline, he knew he was being watched. The wolf tracked him as he set his traps, sniffed out his every move and outmanoeuvred his every plan. It lurked outside their cabin, or in the bushes behind his campsite, it watched him as he snowshoed across the frozen lake. The wolf killed his marten, ate his moose, stole his baits. The wolf sought to destroy him in a slow death of starvation, or by freezing, or madness. It was the hand of the devil at work, he knew.

Evil was working in other ways too. Even here, in God's garden, a man could be lured into the trap of sin. There was a Brit named Archie with a trapline to the East, near Biscotasing Station, who fell to the temptation of greed. Beaver were so plentiful and the price was so high, the Brit just couldn't resist the twenty-five dollars he would get for each beaver pelt. Since the Department of Lands and Forests didn't permit non-natives to trap beaver in the land north of the Grand Trunk line, the Brit found his own way around the law: he pretended he was an Indian. He relinquished is identity as a civil and honest man in order to fool the game wardens into believing he was an Ojibway hunter. But the trapper wouldn't permit his partner, the Swede, to harvest beaver; he insisted they follow the law. Yet nearby was a man who had been tempted into deception and crime, baited by greed. The very thought of that man, and what he later became-a writer, a conservationist, a celebrity, a fake- still fills the trapper with rage.

The Swede had his demons too. For him, it was the evil of the pipe. When they set out from Oba for the winter, the Swede had provisioned himself with what the trapper thought to be an endless supply of tobacco. The trapper never smoked, only watched as the darkness grew longer and winter approached and the Swede spent countless hours sitting next to the wood stove, smoking his pipe. By mid-winter, he had exhausted his ration of tobacco and the demons took hold. The trapper witnessed the man fidgeting and fussing, then saw how he would walk to the Puskuta Lake cabin only to return the next day. One night, during a raging blizzard, the trapper woke to the sound of wood chopping from outdoors and the Swede, dressed only in his wool underwear, was surrounded by a blaze of flame and spark, trying to inhale the smoke from the burning cedar boughs. The following morning, the scorched and blistered Swede stuffed a pack with a few items, donned his snowshoes and marched away from the Fire Lake cabin. "I've had it," he told the trapper as he left. He pointed to the shelf of traps and their cache of a season's worth of furs. "You can have all of it. I'm done." The trapper never saw the Swede again, never heard what happened to him.

The trapper sniffs the ground where the moss meets the rock. It's here: the scent of skunk and herb and smoke. The beast has left him his sign. He looks ahead and sees where he will set the snare; a fallen log, three feet over the trail, awaits him like a gift. He will cut some branches and place them at the sides of the trail. He will channel the wolf into the snare. The trapper turns and follows his steps back the way he came, then pushes through the thick cedars to approach the trap from the side. The trail must remain pure. The wolf cannot know he has been here.

He remembers telling the kid about the wolf. The young man was a student who worked at the fishing lodge where the trapper guided Americans in the summer. The boy would come by the trapper's cabin some nights and they would have tea. He showed the kid how to smoke a whitefish by hanging a basket in the chimney and how to make a salad from fireweed shoots. He told him all his stories, and then, one night, he told him about the wolf.

"Why would God have put such an evil creature on the planet?" the trapper asked the kid one evening while they were fishing. He didn't give the young man a chance to think about an answer. "Because He wants to test man's goodness, that's why."

The trapper knew people like this kid didn't understand the need to kill wolves. These were city folk who had never seen the winter snow painted a sea of red and black with the blood of a half-dead moose, the unborn calf ripped from the cow, dragged by the pack away from its mother, her eyes still wide open as she watched her own child being devoured. City people, protesting at the fur auction, crying about the poor animal's rights; let them choose between the painless and quick death at the merciful hands of the trapper, or the gruesome torture of the wolf. "Everyone who goes out of the cities will be torn in pieces by the wolf because their transgressions are many, their apostasies are numerous." He quoted the scripture to the boy, and cast his line to the other side of the boat.

The boy didn't argue with the trapper, but he could tell the kid wasn't a believer. He was a pleasant enough lad to listen to the trapper's teachings and, for a while, he thought he might even convince the kid to see the truth. If he could take him away with him for one winter of trapping, he was sure the boy would come to know the evil that lurked in the forest. He would experience, firsthand, the true nature of the wolf. The boy could help him kill the wolf.

But the trapper soon learned better. He saw the books in the boy's cabin. The kid read stuff, books the University told him he needed to believe. "Lies, all of it," he told the kid. "Those schools and their professors are filling your head with crazy ideas." The trapper told him this before: how those so-called intellectuals are only trying to justify their jobs, keep getting their government grants by telling kids that everyone's opinion has value, that there's no such thing as the one truth. That is the problem with the world these days: everyone thinks that just because it's their opinion, it's the truth.

He saw the boy stare, not saying anything, as the trapper reeled in the line from his cast. He hooked his lure to an eye of the fishing rod and placed it on the floor of the canoe, then picked up his paddle. There would be no fish caught that night.

The trapper knows he must do God's work alone. He can't rely on the help of weaker men. It's the wolf that tests his purity, his faith. If only he can keep living without sin, he will be granted the grace to slay the beast. He recites these things as he twists the snare wire to the tree. He could sit downwind, on the rock, and wait for the wolf to come. It would be an easy shot, almost unfair. But he wants the wolf to hang like a common criminal, he wants to watch the wolf writhe as the air in his lungs turns to poison, he wants to step before the gasping beast, to place the muzzle of his rifle under the neck of the creature, press it upwards until the eyes of the monster meet his. He wants the wolf to know.

He imagines the wolf, sees through the wolf's eyes as he trots down the game trail, his nose inhaling the coming of the night. He can feel the slight touch of something foreign and cold on his shoulder, and instinctively, he bolts forward, fleeing from the burn of metal; he can feel the noose tighten, cutting into his throat. The trapper imagines the wolf realizing his defeat, understanding how the trapper has triumphed, once again. And he imagines the day when the wolf is no more. Only then, will his work be done. He will await the glorious hand that will raise him up and carry him into the warmth and comfort of the everlasting, where his toils and struggles, his purgatory, will finally be rewarded.

The trapper reaches for the fallen tree and pulls himself upwards until he is standing. It hurts him to straighten, now that he has crouched for so long. He feels the ache in his back and the fire in his knees. A lifetime in the north has taken its toll; damp autumn days in the swamps, winter nights tossing sticks into a fire in a draughty cabin, a back bent under the weight of pelt-laden packs on the portage to the train tracks in the spring. But he feels blessed today. Soon, he will be at peace.

The trapper stands back and looks at his work and knows that it is good.