The Quiet Season by Jerry Apps

Author:Jerry Apps
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

TRAP LINE

During Christmas vacation when I was twelve, Pa asked me if I would be interested in running a trap line along the back side of our farm. “Might catch a fox and earn a little bounty money,” he said, referring to the modest fee the state paid fox hunters as an incentive to control the population of the little canids. “The pelts are worth something too,” he added. Pa knew a fur buyer who would pay a few dollars for each pelt.

Of course I was interested; I always wanted to earn a little extra money, and trapping fox sounded like an easy way to do it. Besides, I was itching to use the new pair of skis I had gotten for Christmas.

Pa dug around in the pump house and found his steel traps—the kind that would spring and clamp itself around the leg of an animal unfortunate enough to step on it. He showed me how to set the trap by putting a foot on each side of the spring and then carefully lifting the plate in the center of the trap and slipping the little metal trigger in place. Setting the trigger was the most difficult and most dangerous part of the job; if your foot slipped off the spring, your finger would be caught in the trap—possibly broken—as the jaws snapped together with considerable force. Then Pa explained how to establish a set, what he called an arrangement of traps and bait intended to attract an unsuspecting fox.

On a blustery Saturday morning with a cold wind blowing out of the northwest, Pa and I skied out to the back of the farm, carrying the traps, three dead chickens, and three sizable blocks of wood from our woodpile. Pa and I always skied without using ski poles so that our hands would be free to carry a rifle, traps, or whatever else needed carrying. (We never skied just for recreation—or as Pa would have considered it, without a real purpose.)

The chickens, of course, would be bait. On occasion throughout the winter, one of the laying hens would die, and we’d toss the unfortunate bird behind the chicken house to be buried in spring, when the ground thawed. Although the birds were frozen stiff, according to Pa they would still be attractive to a hungry fox. The blocks of wood, wired to the chains on the traps, would slow down a caught animal and keep it from traveling too far in the deep snow.

We skied past our woodlot and into a field where we’d grown oats the previous summer, then stopped at the top of a little hill. “This looks a good place for a set,” Pa said, pointing out several fox tracks in the snow.

We laid a chicken on the snow and then carefully set a trap on each side of it, covering the traps with a light dusting of snow. Pa smoothed the snow so it looked as if someone had merely tossed out a dead chicken, and then we set the triggers on the traps.

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