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. We did all this with our gloves on, both to keep our hands from freezing and to avoid leaving human scent on the traps or anywhere around the set.

We found two additional sites and made two more sets. When we were finished, we skied back to the house. On the way Pa reminded me that I must check these traps every day, no matter how blustery or cold it got.

“Don’t want a fox with its leg caught, freezing to death,” Pa said. “Besides, you might snag one of the neighbor’s dogs. Want to make sure you don’t let a neighbor’s dog freeze, or there’ll be hell to pay.” This was the first I was hearing about this possible problem. I wasn’t looking forward to that downside of my trapping venture.

The next morning at first light, I was on my skis with my .22 in hand and on my way to my trap line. The temperature was well below zero, and the wind continued out of the northwest. When I got beyond our woodlot, the full force of the frigid wind caught me, causing my eyes to water and making it difficult to see any distance. The cold snow squeaked as I moved along, and I stopped often to turn my face out of the wind—I didn’t want frostbite as a souvenir of my first day checking my trap line.

As I approached the hill, I strained my eyes to detect any movement or any sign that the first set of traps had been disturbed. If it looked suspicious, I knew I’d have to approach cautiously, my rifle at the ready. Pa had told me that sometimes an animal gets caught only by its toes and if disturbed, it will pull itself free and escape.

My eyes caught a movement. Something was there. Did I catch a fox the first night? How lucky that would be. I hoped upon hope that I hadn’t caught a neighbor’s dog. If I had, Pa would probably make me pull up the trap line. He didn’t want trouble with the neighbors.

Carefully I skied closer to the set, my rifle ready to shoot. When I got within a few yards, the animal jumped, and I saw what I’d caught: a huge jackrabbit. The rabbit was wearing its white winter coat and had blended in well with the snow-covered field. Had the animal not moved, it would have been all but impossible to see.

I wondered aloud, “Now what am I gonna do?” I quickly saw that the trap had broken one of the jackrabbit’s back legs. Worse, I knew that it was against the law to trap jackrabbits. Not only had I not caught a fox, but I had broken the law too. How would I explain all of this to Pa? Should I try to remove the jackrabbit from the trap and let it go? That would cover the legal bases, but would it be humane? How long could a jackrabbit survive in frigid weather with a broken leg? A fox or some other predator would surely find it and kill it. As I thought about what Pa would do in this situation, the big jackrabbit made another lurch, pulling hard on the trap that held its leg fast in its iron claws. Another jerk and the big rabbit would likely pull free and hobble away on three legs. I released the safety on my rifle, pulled it to my shoulder, aimed at the whiskered head with the long, black-tipped ears, and pulled the trigger. The sound of the rifle shot was muffled by the wind.

I removed the dead rabbit from the trap, covered the blood-spattered snow with fresh powder, and reset the trap. Then I headed for home, my rifle in one hand and the rabbit in the other. A few flakes of snow now flew on the northwest wind, but I scarcely felt them as I skied along, thinking about the illegal rabbit I was carrying.

“What’ve you got there?” Pa said when he spotted me with the jackrabbit.

I blurted out the entire story, feeling more than a little guilty about my illegal catch.

“Wasn’t your fault,” Pa said. “That old rabbit was nosing around where he shouldn’t have been. You did the right thing by putting the animal out of its misery. Never want to let an animal suffer. If you’d let him out of the trap he would have suffered a few days before he froze to death or a fox or dog got him.”

I felt better, but I wished I’d shot the rabbit while hunting. Then I could have told my friends about it. Now I had to keep quiet.

For the rest of that winter, I inspected my traps every morning, no matter how cold or how blustery the weather. I did not catch another jackrabbit. I didn’t catch any foxes, either. I saw evidence that they’d come up to the sets and checked out the dead chickens, but they seemed to know that they shouldn’t get too close, and they didn’t.

That winter would be the first and the last time I had a trap line. When I weighed the bounty money I might earn against my chances of catching a fox plus the frigid early-morning ski trips of more than a half mile, I decided it wasn’t worth it. I would have to come up with a new moneymaking venture for the winter months. I knew I could earn money the coming summer by picking cucumbers and green beans—Pa let my brothers and me keep the money we earned from picking these crops—and I knew I would earn a penny a bushel picking potatoes the following fall. But I was at a loss about how to earn money in winter. Like a lot of farmers, I never did figure that out.