Published: May 16, 2008 07:27 pm         

Trappers just don’t happen; they learn the hard way

My brother, Garth, and I were good trappers. If it hadn’t been for us, the muskrats would probably have overrun the Richardville Reserve area in the vicinity of Pipe Creek Falls. Being a good trapper is not a skill you inherit, however. It’s something you have to learn, and we whetted our skills trapping a rocky square that occupied approximately two acres on a farm Dad used to rent. This area was covered with small trees, rock piles and animal burrows of all kinds.

During our apprenticeship, we erased numerous groundhogs, or, if you prefer, woodchucks. They ate a lot of Dad’s corn so he wanted them eliminated. Garth and I were eager to oblige. We really cleaned that farm up pestwise. Mornings before the school bus came, and evenings after we got home, we ran our traps. If we caught a groundhog, it was a goner. If we caught a rabbit, it was meat on the table. We were polishing our skills and learning how to set a trap without getting caught in it ourselves, which is one of the first things you have to learn.

After dark during that time, we would give the sparrows time to get settled for the night, and then head for the barn with our flashlights and BB-guns. Our farm was minus the usual nests that occupied most barns along with the sparrows. The plague imported from England didn’t bother us at all; it was welcome target practice. We found it much easier to just shoot the sparrows than to pull down their nests. I’ll bet my Dad had the cleanest barn in Cass County.

All too often, people get careless when they are good at something, though, and the results are often tragic. In the morning, Garth and I always had to run the traps with the thought in mind that the school bus would soon be coming, and if breakfast was a bit late, we didn’t have any time to waste. Such was the case one morning as we ran our traps. We had something in one of them, and Garth was in too much of a hurry to take it easy. He hauled the animal out and much to his dismay noticed the animal had a white stripe down its back.

An animal with a white stripe down its back is seldom good news, and this one was no exception. Garth had hauled out a skunk, and this one wasn’t a shy, bashful skunk like Flower in the Walt Disney film “Bambi.” No, this was a skunk that had spent part of the night in a trap, and it wasn’t very happy. In fact, this skunk was downright mad, I would say, and my poor brother found that out real sudden like.

It might not have been so bad if Garth had pulled it out by the front foot, but unfortunately this animal was caught by one of its hind feet, and it came out of the hole shooting. (And it wasn’t firing blanks.) Garth soon learned what skunks were all about. When we got back to the house, it was decided that Garth wouldn’t be going to school that day. It wasn’t that he had only one set of clothes, it was just that Mom couldn’t get him smelling good enough to pass muster before the school bus came. I can’t remember Mom’s exact words, which is probably because she muttered most of them under her breath.

She finally got him to smell halfway decent. I don’t know whether she dipped him in tomato juice or peroxide or what, but she finally accomplished the task of making him presentable again. Maybe she used lye soap. Most of the women in those days had some of it around for stubborn stains. We made our own, but I can’t remember how we did it. It was powerful stuff, though.

Well, that was another part of trapping. You had to learn what was dangerous and what wasn’t. I’d advise anyone to find out what was on the other end of a chain if they were going to yank it out of a hole. Garth learned that lesson the hard way, but then he seemed to have the habit of learning things that way. I learned a lot from his mistakes.

When we left that farm, we moved back along Pipe Creek and Little Deer Creek where we trapped until we were out of high school. We learned more. We found winter water to be cold, and we learned to walk the creek bottoms in the dark without falling over everything we encountered. All in all, it was a good experience, and I developed the courage to run a trap line through a woods on a dark drizzly night when the wind was blowing and the sticks were snapping, after watching a Wolfman or a Frankenstein movie. One such night when a stick snapped and I looked up over the bank just as a cow bellowed in my face, I nearly fainted, and the hair stood up on my neck all day long, but I still ran my traps.

Joe Bowyer is a columnist for the Pharos-Tribune. He can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com