By Wilson Love
(NOTE: In this, the “Fishing Destinations Edition” of The Angler Magazine, let me say that my favorite destination to fish is wherever my friends invite me to go. And my favorite meal: the one I’m eating right now. It’s that daily contentment thing that took me about fifty years to grasp. Phil. 4: 11-13).
The old man taught me a lot. I was forty at the time and never asked his age. His health wasn’t good. Emphysema had taken his breath and his strength. Still, he smoked one cigarette after another and blamed secret government activities for his condition.
“Fur ain’t worth nothing now,” he would say with a little sadness. “The Anti’s efforts have seen to that. The only ones that fool with trapping now are like me and you that just enjoy it.”
I had asked Mark Allen to go with me to Barnardsville and set up two ponds with muskrat and mink traps. He was pretty well known in the valley as a trapper and fur buyer. My traps, and most of my plunder, came from his fur shed. But it was late in the season now and he hadn’t set a trap of his own. Asked by others for his skilled help, he just hadn’t had the motivation or energy to do the work of man’s ancient dominion. (Genesis 9: 2-3) He would, however, be glad to help me at Barnardsville if it wasn’t too cold on the day I wanted to go.
Well, it was cold that Saturday, but thank God no wind or rain. When we got to the ponds on Dillingham Creek I popped the trunk lid on the old Buick and hung my head. “I can’t believe it.”
“What’d you forget?” he said.
“I can’t believe I forgot my waders.”
“I’ve done the same.” He cracked a grin so small you had to be looking for it. “You were excited about going with me and what not. I know something about how people’s minds work.”
The old man was right. I figured he had already forgotten more about trapping than I would ever know, so I wanted to learn everything I could from him. Yes, I was excited.
We drove the eighteen miles back to my house and got the waders. It hadn’t warmed up at all since daylight and I offered him the use of my coveralls. He gladly accepted.
Back at the ponds, we started by the small lower one near Mr. Gordon’s house. The bank was mowed clean at least half way around the quarter acre of water. Traps in hand, the old man assumed the lead and headed for the briar patch that separated yard from woods. As he walked, he pulled a piece of tie wire off the roll in his left hand. We stopped and he said, “Throw one in beside that hump,” looking at a moss covered root in half a foot of water.
The old man cut another piece of wire and had two sets done before I got my little coilspring bedded. Man, he’s fast – I thought – or am I that slow?
He walked thirty feet down the wooded bank, turned and came straight back up. “Nothing down that way.”
What? My mind raced. If there’s anything here it is down that way. That’s where the cover is, I mused, but spoke nothing.
Moving back around the slick open bank he stopped at a spindly laurel bush two feet from the water’s edge. “Here, tie one to that bush and set it in this little pocket here.” I did as told and stuck a chunk of apple on a stick ten inches above the trap. “Fold a sycamore leaf over your apple. That way the rat can see it but anybody walking by won’t.” Clever.
We walked a short distance. He stared into the water to its black bottom. “Looks like they’re tunneling in, away out.” Enter ignorance.
“Really?”
Tunneling in from away out? Who knew? Who knew to look? And how can you tell? I don’t see anything. “Drive a stake and set one here, close to the bank as you can. Break your apple in three pieces and press it into the mud.” This I did and our next stop was right in front of Mr. Gordon’s house.
There, just off the front porch, sat a small boy on a black iron bench holding a fishing pole. From the peeling paint on his hat, face and shoulders, we guessed he had been working that spot for some time. Back to the water.
“See that plastic pipe? See if you can slip your foot under it and pick it up. We’ll tie off to it.” Okay, no trouble to lift a one inch irrigation line up off the bottom and wire a trap to it. But why? No muskrat is living or even visiting in Mr. Gordon’s front yard. Not here. Not within ten feet of the front porch and in plain view of that young fisherman. This place is barren. I’ve seen better signs on a frozen mud puddle. When I realized my mouth was open I snapped it shut. Had my disbelief shown?
One more set before going to the second pond. This was a mink set under a small bush with a dandling piece of trout for bait. “Maybe you can get a mink and pay for your gas at least,” he grinned.
Heavy grass, briars, and trees covered the banks of the larger upper pond. “This looks better,” I said and the old man’s pace picked up a little. Places I would have combed for sign he ignored. “Give me one of those conibears,” he quipped, so I reached into my bag and handed him a small bodygrip trap.
“You want to make this trail set?” he asked.
“No, I want to watch you.”
He set the trap by positioning it atop two small clearance sticks, shoved two pointed stabilizers through the top corners into the ground, built a “fence” of debris on either side, wired the chain off to a pine limb, and camouflaged the whole thing with dry weeds and vines in about a minute. My thought: the next rat that drives down this highway won’t know what hit him.
“I can’t do it that fast,” I said (not to mention that good). He grinned that little grin and lit another cigarette. “When I was trappin’ for a livin’ I’d a been finished here and moved on. I’ve slowed down a lot.”
Right.
We made four more trail sets and a few more water sets for a total of seventeen. Back at the car we slipped off our waders, drank coffee and crunched candy bars. The old man wiped his face with a white handkerchief. “There’s probably fifty or sixty muskrats here in the summertime, but there may not be ten now. They go down to bigger water in winter. We’ll catch a few.”
Four the first day. Three on the beautiful mowed edge of Mr. Gordon’s lawn and one in a blind trail set. Three more rats the next day with two snagged in the wide open spaces. I pulled the traps on the third day, taking our last catch from a set I’d never have made without him.
Wilson Love is Owner/Operator of The Practical Outdoorsman, a retail and consignment store.