Personal History
My parents were professional people who had worked hard to move up from their modest beginnings. They strove to give my brother and me more than we deserved as they grew to appreciate the finer things in life, which rarely included hunting and fishing. However, for reasons yet not understood, I craved a different existence and secretly wished we were poor mountain people subsiding in a dirt-floor shack 40 miles from the nearest road instead of our Upper Middle Class existence in a nice subdivision.
While the other kids in the neighborhood traded baseball cards and threw footballs, I went feral — snagging fish in the drainage ditch, building lean-to’s in the neighbor’s wooded fencerow and occasionally setting the nearby cornfield ablaze attempting to cook a pilfered can of soup over an open fire. It was a glorious life kids today aren’t allowed to experience, at least not without a helmet, knee pads, fireproof uniform, safety briefing, coach, assistant coach and parental booster club.
Around my 12th birthday, I made a wonderful discovery — the nearby hardware store sold traps. Eureka! I was on my way to becoming a real trapper. After pestering all the neighbors for paying chores — I cleaned every garage, mowed every yard and walked every dog in the neighborhood, whether they needed it or not — I was the proud owner of several new Victor foot traps, much to the consternation of my mother and amusement of my father.
Finally, I was a trapper with portfolio but needed someplace to pursue the wily muskrat, beaver, mink, elk, caribou or whatever else I could bag. Unfortunately, my parents weren’t thrilled with the idea of giving me bus fare to Canada so by default, I was forced to trap in the drainage ditch near my house.
The tiny creek was a shallow affair slogging through a prominent golf course. It offered approximately a mile of riparian habitat chock-full of bank-destroying muskrats but there was one problem with this lush ecosystem — it was infested with a troublesome nuisance species: golfers. I quickly realized late-season linksters took a dim view of a kid interrupting their game by popping up in the middle of the fairway carrying deceased muskrats.
Thus, checking the traps required running the creek in the pre-dawn before school and before the groundskeepers arrived for work. Every morning I would get up early and pedal my bike to the course. Sauntering along in the inky pre-dawn blackness without the benefit of a flashlight — it would have given away my secret profession — I found most of my traps sprung because 12-year-old self-taught trappers don’t have a high success rate.
However, the occasional dullard muskrat would make a fatal mistake and end up being sold to the fur buyer. Selling my hard-won animals was another unique experience as the buyer was a cantankerous man who lived in a decrepit trailer at the junkyard. He and his residence smelled like skunk, badly. I loved it.
Trappers are required by oath to carry some type of firearm to dispatch animals and protect themselves from bears, wolves or hostile natives, particularly those wearing knickers and carrying clubs. As my parents were even less thrilled about providing me with the lever-action .22 I coveted, I had to come up with another plan.
