The Fur Trappers

We put canoes in the water, perhaps harkening back to the days of the mountain men, or maybe even an Indian in a birch bark canoe. We had set traps the previous day, and were now checking them. The very first set we looked at had a muskrat in it.

For many years, I’ve been pondering having a fall fur harvesting program for kids. Show them a little bit of the history that opened up this country, and introduce them to a sport that helped many a farm (or city) boy put change in their pocket over the years as well as the challenge of matching wits with something like a fox!

This year, it finally happened. What precipitated the venture was a new teacher at Central Springs who is an avid trapper, and so with his help and encouragement, I recruited another local trapper and we offered a trapping program.

My goal was simple, teach the kids the very basic idea of how trapping works. We split into three groups, kind of trapping three different ways.

I set my traps in a marsh for muskrats, and the other two groups basically went with land sets for fox and coon, and water sets for mink and muskrat.

We all had some luck, but in my case just barely. That first trap we checked turned out to be the only one with a muskrat in it. The others brought in 1 coon, 2 mink, and 2 other muskrats.

We went through the basics, with he students helping, and skinned out the catch and instead of selling things, decided that it would be nice to have the participants end up with one of their skins. Since there wasn’t quite enough catch to go around, it was necessary to have a lottery. The lucky ones will end up with a tanned hide in the end.

To top off the fall experience, I then lined up a coon hunting expedition. My own coon hunting experiences have all been bad. First hunt we turned loose the dogs and never saw them again for 2 days. They never barked, or probably ran so far away that we wouldn’t be able to hear them barking if they did…

Second hunt was better as we didn’t loose the dogs, but we didn’t find any coon either.

So this was going to be the “third times a charm!” or a least I hoped.

So, lining up a group of participants, we headed out to the woods with a local coon hunter. The dog was let loose and in a short period of time, was barking. “He’s treed” was pronounced and we headed off to the sound of the barks. The dog was barking up a tree all right, but there wasn’t a coon in sight. As the tree actually hung out over the river, is was likely that the coon simply baled out of the tree and swam across. So, off went the dog again.

In a short time he barked “treed” again and this time there was a coon. It could be mentioned here that I have one of the coolest guns for this sport, it’s a .22 with a green laser (for sighting). Most of you have seen some sort of laser pointer where you can see the “dot” pointing on a screen or other object. We this is a step up. It’s a pretty powerful green laser and you can see the BEAM in the air as you shine it up, almost like a light saber! Of course what ever the beam is pointing at is where the bullet is going to go.

So, I handed the gun to one of the lucky kids and he pulled the trigger. The coon fell out of the tree and the dog got in a few chomps. Dogs love to chomp coon for some reason. In the past, I had two Brittany Spaniels that dearly loved to chomp on any coon that they might find while we were out hunting pheasants. Something about coon I suppose, maybe they taste good…..

That was it for the night, one coon. We had a few other times when the dog “treed” but there weren’t any coon when we looked. So we headed home (after letting each of the participants try a couple shots with the rifle shooting at a can).

It was a lot of fun to watch the dog as he vacuumed the forest with his nose. One time, we came upon a big long tree trunk laying on the ground, the kind of place you can imagine a coon walking along the top of, and there was the dog trotting down the side of the log, snuffling the top of the log the whole time. D

I’ve heard one “dog professional” make a statement concerning a dogs nose. “You know” he began, “how when you just bake cookies and the smell fills the house, you smell the cookies. Well, a dog smells egg, flour, butter, chocolate….” Imagine what it must be like to be able to smell a woods the way a dog does.