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A LOT DEPENDS ON THE TRAPPER | |
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By RAYMOND S. SPEARS
WE are all of us interested in Good Trapping Country. So I am going to talk along a bit on the subject, trusting that when I'm wrong, the boys will set us all right on the subject. And in the first place, we'll try and find out what we mean by "Good Trapping Country" — and in the last place, I hope we'll know more about it than in the beginning, for after all there's no use writing if it doesn't help somebody to know more after he has read than before he read what we have to say.
"Where can I find good trapping country?" will help understand the real meaning of the term. We trappers all speak of 'good trapping country' when our way of setting traps there brings fur to the stretcher. Lots of us, however, miss the other point:
Where there are furs there is a chance for trapping them.
Some of the boys are packing up to go to Hudson Bay and Northern Canada, and to Central Alaska, and British Columbia. Lots of fur there, of course! But is it good trapping country where the trapper is sure to lose his life if he isn't used to taking care of himself away back yonder? I reckon not.
We needn't talk about that cold-killing tundra land! It sounds fascinating, to be where marten hang from every well sweep, and the green timber is lined with fur trails. I never felt colder, though, than one day only a few miles back in the green timber, with no compass, on a dull day and I lost the blazed trail of a trapper who used out of the east end of Lake Superior. I did a heap of thinking — but what would I have done, 300 miles north of there, in regular he-wolf country?
Trapping, where furs are scarce, it pays to study the kinds of places where various animals live, and why they go there. There are a thousand things to learn about various animals, and I should not be surprised if the Northern mink.
out of furs are those who know the wild animals. Three or four years ago, I wrote about fur farming and the opportunities it offers. I mentioned the muskrat marshes, especially -— not the familiar great sea marshes of the Chesapeake, Delaware, Pamlico and other places where shrewd men had already discovered the income proposition in raising twenty to forty or so musk rats to the acre — worth, a few years back, ten or twenty cents an acre, — but the little ponds, lakes, sloughs, bayous and other rat localities. Only a few escaped the steady and relentless trapping. Yet I suppose that for ten years, those flats yielded to the trappers about two hundred rats a season, or about $60 worth. Then all the trappers dropped out. I dare say not a trap was set there for five or six years, and one man caught in one fall enough rats to supply skins for more than a cord of their skins, a stack ten feet long, and over four feet high.
Our problem is to recognize good fur country. I know that hundreds of young men, especially, are going to start forth this fall to make a Big Killing in the fur game; of thousands of questions that have come to H-T-T the past five years, I suppose 15 per cent or more wanted to locate "good trapping country."
My object, now, is to bring together all the information I have been able to gather on this subject, and find out what it has to help us out in the matter. The more I've traveled — and I've run around more than 10,000 miles since last June, and perhaps 40,000 miles the past twenty years, always looking into this trapping question with particular interest — tinlow, who is a home worker, if only we could know the right thing to say and the way to say it. I don't want to give the impression that I am butting in on some other man's affairs; I do most heartily want to let folks have the benefit of any facts I happen to possess.
The trappers who are going to make the big catches next winter will most of them locate their trapping country in August, September and October, unless they already know where they are going. The paper, last night, told of Bob Llewellyn who brought into Bend, Oregon, fifty-nine martens and nine mink, to show for three months trapping. This is called the richest take thereabouts in years, and the value is put at $2,000, or more than $20 a day for the time out. That sounds good ; it is fine ; but listen : "Llewellyn is a veteran trapper and has been wintering in the Davis Lake country" of Central Oregon, "but the lonesome life of the trapper has its reward."
It was not chance, if this item is true; the man who knew his work won through to the big reward, a year's pay for three months' toil. I do not recall a single instance in which these great catches came tc mere play trappers. The man who cleaned up on the flats where I learned to shoot was Bill Light, an old, old trapper, who as a 14-year-old boy, went in as striker for one of the last of the famous Adirondack trappers — Old Man Coudray. If the stories of trappers catching i.ooo, 4,000 or more muskrats is true of "open country," the successful men invariably made their discovery of good trapping country in spite of rumors and the blindness of others in the same locality.
where he lived, and he wanted to go to Canada, or away off yonder.
One of the boys said, "There's no fur around here; perhaps a wolf goes through once a week, but never twice through the same place, so there's no use trying to trap for wolves!"
I can just see that trapper. He takes his rifle, or gun, and goes off for a walk. He hunts around a while, and if he doesn't see fur tracks every half mile, fur is "scarce". Yet I know that about 25 per cent of the trappers would give half their outfits, just to be in a country where a wolf goes through, once a week or so.
Let's make a statement, and examine it:
''A man isn't a trapper, unless he walks twenty miles a day."
That is in most country, too much. If a man wants to be a trapper, he should aim to walk not less than 100 miles a week, and do this, either over a line, or spot trapping. In spot trapping, traps should be visited every clay, especially for muskrats, skunk and mink trapping in clearings, and where coon, possum, and other field animals are abroad.
We're thinking, now, about "regular" trappers. In any event, if one is just trapping for fun and a little profit, with only an hour or two a day for the running around, he should see to it that he figure on the number of hours and use those hours in business-like fashion — and if one has two hours a day, six days a week, and ten hours for Sunday, he can.
Only, in order to get the most out of trapping, one should observe the prime requisite is "no waste time", no fussing around a brush pile to poke out a rabbit, no hunting around to kill a grouse, no lying under the trees to get a whack at a squirrel.
Just walking won't do any good. A real trapper will use his legs going from place to place — and every place will mean something to him; first, he'll examine it for any one of several kinds of furs; he'll be right careful before he'll decide "There's no fur around here"; he'll be at a good deal of pains to discover "likely ground", but he won't pass up any particular hollow, or straw stack, or wood patch, or sandy knolls, or spring hole, or brook with a "Pshaw!
Nothing is there!"
We'll take up a lot of different kinds
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