My Trapper Mom

MY TRAPPER MOM

Prologue
A Canadian Wilderness Odyssey
I was born in 1965, a forgotten soul left at Toronto General Hospital. Or perhaps I was taken, snatched away for profit by the Catholic Children's Aid of Toronto. Back then, it was a lucrative business - legally kidnapping newborns from young mothers. My adoptive mother, Doris, found me in a local newspaper, likely the Toronto Star. She and her then husband, Soren, had recently moved from Denmark and decided to adopt me as a special birthday gift for my stepbrother, Jimmy, who had also been adopted by mom. Jimmy was about three years older than me.

Mom, A Barren Woman
Doris, or "Trapper Mom" as we affectionately called her, was a Danish woman with a heart as big as the wilderness she loved. She couldn't have children of her own medically, so adopting us was her way of building a family. From age of two mentioned in the chapters, she taught me how to survive in the wild, from cooking, sewing, skinning animals to crafting moccasins just to name a tiny few. We'd spend hours together, her knitting needles clicking away, or her singer sewing machine with the foot treadle pumping, baking and cooking you name it. Life was real, hard and fun.

A Harsh Yet Beautiful Life
Our home was a remote hand built, two story, four room log cabin in Northern Ontario, Canada, approximately 33 miles from the nearest town. To reach civilization, we'd have to navigate treacherous rivers by boat or canoe, or in winter, by foot on snow shoes and a team of Husky dogs pulling survival gear in a sled across the frozen surface of the rivers ice. It was a harsh existence, but it was also beautiful. Trapper Mom was a fearless woman, skilled at hunting and fishing and an all round woodlands survivalist. She'd brave the icy waters to help her then husband to provide for our family, her husky dogs always by her side.