Wild Northerner Magazine Winter 2016/17 | Page 44

BY SCOTT HADDOW

Wild Northerner Staff

Alcide Giroux started a journey when he was six years old.

He continues it today at the age of 71.

Giroux is a bait and fur trapper. It is in his blood and nature. It has given Giroux a vast knowledge of the land, water, animals and habitat that can only be obtained by a lifetime of real experiences - ones that brought him close to death and danger along his way.

Earlier this year, Giroux published his first book - My First Sixty Years Enjoying Nature as a Trapper.

It covers the time in his life from the early 50s when he moved to a farm on the Sturgeon River in the River Valley at age six to 2011.

Alcide and his siblings and parents settled on family land on Dec.4, 1951. To get to and come from school, they crossed the river on a homemade boat because the bridge was unusable, . They helped swim a cow across the river and ate freshly-made cookies from a wood stove. It was here where Giroux began his journey. His family carved out a living with a trap line that started right at their homestead.

“My life is the bush in every aspect,” Giroux said. “I was raised in a Métis family. We respected the land and nature and enjoyed the harvest. It was like a romance for me. I fell in love with it all and I still love it.”

By the age of eight, Giroux was already a businessman. He had his own set of rabbit snares. He checked his lines along the way to church and school. He carried a BB gun and a small, black pocket book in which he kept records of the rabbits he caught and who he sold them to.

“I made 25 cents a rabbit and that went a long way,” Giroux said.

By his early teens, Giroux was working the family trap lines with his father, Philippe. His dad was French and Algonquin and was paramount in influencing Giroux’s life and teaching him the way of the land and trapping.

When he was 16, Giroux learned a lesson that stuck with him because it almost cost him his life. Giroux, his dog Bruno, and his older brother, Maurice (who was 19 at the time), were checking trap lines on a remote section of lakes in early November. The ice had come early that year and the brothers were forced to break ice on the lakes and ponds with their 12-foot boat made by their dad. The ice got too thick on one small lake, so the brothers spilt up. Giroux sat on a stump sticking out of the ice while his brother and dog made their way across the rest of the lake and onto another lake to check traps. As the sun warmed up the ice, it softened and the stump Giroux was sitting on began to slowly sink into the ice. Giroux knew he was screwed if his brother did not get back soon. He yelled for Maurice. Giroux was in the freezing water up to his knees and sinking deeper by the minute when his brother got to him. They got to shore and Maurice got a fire going and warmed up Giroux and saved his life.

“Never trust the ice,” Giroux said. “I almost lost my life. In this job, you are close to real problems.”

Giroux took over his father’s trap line, beginning in the winter of 1963-64. He was 18 and was a sturdy 180-pounds of muscle stacked on a five-foot-eight frame. It was Giroux’s last season trapping with his father. Philippe had a heart attack portaging a canoe while minnow trapping in December 1963. He was 48.

Giroux carried on with the business and grew it extensively over the years. Through the decades, Giroux would work jobs in the mines and other industries, but always came back to his trap lines every fall.

He stayed busy.

A life on the lines