Trapper John

           It was a Wednesday when I met Trapper John. I never dreamed that by mere happenstance my day would go from boring to interesting all because of the lessons one young man learned from two generations of gentlemen.

          My day started with a bit of surprise. Taking care of our feral cats, I opened the door of the cat room to dump yesterday’s water out and found a pile of fur. Someone ate something and if you know cats, you know they don’t pass hair or fur very well. That’s why they’re forever puking it up.

          Anyway, I took a quick look at the mess and decided I didn’t really need to know what it was anyway.

           I had something for my Miss Rosie. I know Lamar would come after it if I asked but I feel like that’s kinda rude. If I have something for Rosie, I should be the one to get it to her, don’cha think?

          I don’t get so much exercise these days since we lost our little dogs and my waistline will attest to that. So, I figured a walk down to the Kipps' house would do me good. “I have something for you,” I told Miss Rosie on my morning call.

          “Okay?”

          “I’ll walk it down later. I can use the exercise.”

          “We’re going out to the store,” she informed me.

          “Mm’kay. If you’re not there when I get there then I’ll just leave it in your newspaper box.”

          Besides whatever it was that I had for Rosie, I also had two J.D. letters. They both came on the same day though they were written weeks apart. She enjoys reading them and I didn’t tell her I was dropping them off too. Little surprises are always nice, don’cha think?

          “Well, Peg!” you say with exasperation. “What was it? What were you taking down for Miss Rosie? You always tell us that stuff!”

          I know, right! You’re like my best friend in the whole wide world and I can tell you anything. But in this case, I can’t remember what it was.

          “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter anyway,” you say.

          And it really doesn’t. But for the sake of the story, I called Miss Rosie and asked her. You know what she said? "I can't remember either!"

          “What am I going to put in my story?” I asked.

          “How about, I called Miss Rosie and she couldn’t remember either?” she suggested.

          “You mean, tell the truth?”

          Such a novel idea — I think I’ll go with that!

          Bundled up and ready to go, I picked up my camera. If there’s anything to take pictures of at all, it’ll probably be a hawk way up in the sky, I think. I might just as well put the big lens on. So, I did. Sometimes I put the little lens in my pocket in case I need it, but I didn’t anticipate needing it for just the short walk down to the Kipps and back.

Halfway down the driveway, I see bright red droplets on the fleecy whiteness of the snow.

          Blood! I bet this has something to do with what was outside the cat room, I thought, turned and looked back towards the house as if I could see it from where I was standing. I couldn’t. My attention turned to the tracks. Cat. I backtracked, sometimes loosing ‘em in the tire track but picking them up again on the other side. 

        It has to be Mr. Mister, I think to myself. Silly, I know. Who else would I be thinking it to? Mr. is the only cat that’s been outside. The boys Spitfire and Smudge haven’t been going out much lately or staying out long when they do go out and I know they weren’t out overnight. I hardly ever let Tiger out anymore because he wants to sit under the feeders and catch birds, so he’s got no one to blame but himself. And Macchiato has no interest in going out these days. As far as our old feral girls go, they’ve been staying inside their nice warm cat room. Thereby, my deductive reasoning has left Mr. Mister to be the culprit. But what was it? I found rabbit tracks that intersected his but nothing that looked like a scuffle. Could it have been a rabbit? I don’t know.

          Once I explored the crime scene and had as many answers as I could fathom, I moved on.

          I took a picture of a tree with a hole through it.

          I walked down the road far enough to see how many cars were under the Kipps' carport. Only one. They were gone. I stuffed the bag I was carrying into the box and took a picture of our pretty little creek.

          No cars had passed while I was on my way to the Kipps but one passed as I was heading home. It wasn’t slowing so I moved off the road into the snowbank. I’m glad I had my boots on! Halfway home I hear another car but this one slows and comes to a stop. The window rolls down.

          “Do you need some help?” I shook my head, then he saw the camera around my neck. “Oh. Now I see you’re just out taking pictures.”

          “I was just down to see the Kipps,” I think everyone knows the Kipps so I pointed back towards their house, “and now I’m going home,” and I pointed toward my house. “But thank you for stopping.”

          “Absolutely. That’s just the way I was raised. My dad always taught me to stop and help people whenever I can.”

          He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave. “What’s your name?”

“John.”

“Do you live around here, John?” I asked.

          “No. I was just out trapping at the state game lands.”

          And from thence ensued a very interesting conversation.

          “What’re you trapping?” I wanted to know.

          “Beavers. But they don’t really like us trapping at the game lands because we might catch an otter.”

          I didn’t know we had otters — or many beavers for that matter. “How many beaver can you get?” I wanted to know.

          “When I first started it was three. Now, it’s twenty.”  

          A car was coming down the road behind John and I was standing in the middle of the road. “Don’t leave! I still wanna talk to you!” and I moved to the side of the road behind John’s car.

          “Okay, but I better move over too.” He pulled his car ahead and off to the side, then got out.

I got a look at his winter pants and was tickled. I laughed. “You look like the consummate trapper there, John.” He pulled his hat on it wasn’t quite what I expected. “The only thing missing are the ear flaps!” I snapped a picture.

“So, do you have to have a license to trap beaver?”

          “Yeah.” John opened the trunk. “These are killer traps.”

          He pulled a pile of steel bars from the trunk and worked to straighten them out. In order to get a picture, I had to step way back. “I wish I had my small lens on but I don’t,” I explained and kicked myself for not slipping it into my pocket, “so I have to get pretty far back.”

          “That’s what a killer trap looks like,” John said.

          I was totally vested in this conversation. “That’s a killer trap,” I repeated because I wanted to remember the word and know that repeating something like a name will help it stick in your head. “Okay…”

          John went on to explain how the traps work. “And these wires right here, I’ll bend one this way and I’ll bend one like that. See, the otter can swim through it but the beaver can’t.  When a beaver tries to go through, it’ll catch this one or this one and it’ll spring.”

          I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see how anything sprang shut. “And it springs how?”

          “When you squeeze these together,” he pointed out a part of the trap, “this comes up to the top and you’ll take that hook and put it in that notch. And when you do that…”

          These and this, hooks and notches. I wasn’t getting it at all. “Would you set one for me?”

          John turned and put the trap back in his trunk as he said, “Yeah, I can set one for you.”

          Since he didn’t put it on the ground and use his foot to set it like you would the more traditional traps, a thought occurred to me. “You have to have a tool to set it?”

          “A rope or a tool. I can’t set it with my hands, not one like that. I have but it’s a pain.”

The back door slammed shut and he came around carrying a funky looking pair of pliers called, quite simply, a setter tool.

          “They’re pretty strong?” I asked.

          “Yes. There’s a brand-new one strong enough to break a man’s arm.”

          “Holy cow!”

John hooked each end of the setter tool onto the rings and started squeezing.

“Oh, I see!” At least how the setter tool worked. Strong enough to break a man’s arm, echoed in my head and I thought of my beautiful friend Jody. I’ll empty mouse traps all day long, she told me once, but I can’t set ‘em. She was afraid of getting her fingers snapped — and I don’t blame her. I’m always acutely conscious of where my fingers are when I’m setting traps. Imagine one of these, Jody!

          When the rings met in the center, John put both handles of the setter in the same hand, reached for a metal piece, and slid it into place. “Then the safety hook goes on.” He turned it around to set the other side, muttering, “...turn it around here.”

          “Are you afraid of getting caught in it?”

          John didn’t hesitate, “No. I’ve been doing this so long.”

          “How long?”

          “I’ve been trapping off and on since I was 12 — younger than 12 actually.” He was wrestling with the trap again. “It’s a bit of a pain.”

And I felt bad. Felt guilty that he was going through all that trouble for me. “I’m interested in seeing how it works and I can’t envision it in my head, that’s why I asked you to set it for me,” I explained.

          “Not a problem. I just gotta get this hook up here.” It slipped into place. “There we go.”

          “How many spring traps do you have — are they spring traps?”

          Asking two questions at once is a good way to make sure one of them doesn’t get answered.

“It’s called a conibear. And it was one of only three traps ever manufactured in this country that actually grossed one million dollars in sales its first year.”

“What can you trap with them besides…”

“Otters, beaver, some places you can use them on dry land and catch coons. Just about anything but mainly it’s a beaver trap — beaver and otter.”

“It kills them instantly?”

“Pretty much. It’s designed to catch ‘em around the neck.”

I was quiet, watching as John finished setting the trap. “Just like that, then you take the hooks off and its ready to go.”

          I couldn’t see how it killed. “So, now, what do you do with that?”

“You’ll put it in a channel the beavers are swimming through.” John set the trap on the ground.

          I was corn-fused. “And you set it on the bottom?” It didn’t seem like a good system to me.

          “You can set it on the bottom, you can suspend it under the ice with wires you can put it on a pole…” saying pole reminded John and he went around his car. Opening the door, he says, “Uh, it’s actually my dumb luck to have a pole in the back of the car.”

I laughed.

“You actually thread it through the springs like this…” and he paused as he demonstrated. 

“Then you’ll move these springs a little bit to tighten it and it sits right there.”

“And now what part closes?” I still couldn’t see what did the killing.

          “These!”

          “Oh,” I said like I understood, when I really didn’t.

          “I’ll show you that right now.” John reached in the trunk and brought out a branch. “They come through and hit them wires…” He tickled the wires with the end of the branch and snap! The trap closed.

          “Ohh. Ohh,” I said like Edith Bunker on All in the Family. “Gottcha.  “But the otters won’t hit it?” I was trying to understand why.

          “No, not when you off-set the triggers. Beavers are more round and will hit the trigger whereas otters are more slender. Now you wanna know what kind of force they have?” John directed my focus to the stick and turned it a little. “It dimpled the wood — put dents in it.”

          “It did, didn’t it.”

          “Yes, it did.” he agreed.

          Sometimes my mice are a little bloody after I trap them. Were beavers? “Are they bloody when you take them out?”

          “No.”

          “And what do you do with them after you catch them?”

John set about taking the pole from the trap and stowing his gear. “Skin ‘em. I take the skin. Sometimes I’ll take the meat.”

          I was surprised. “You eat it?”

          “Yeah, you can.”

          Wait a minute, John. That’s not what I asked! I reframed my question. “Have you?”

“I have once or twice in my life when I was real young.”

“And? Did you like it?”

“I was too young to remember.”

He’s been hunting all these years and hasn’t eaten it since he was young? Why? I didn’t ask, instead drawing my own conclusion. “And you don’t want to try it again?”

“Yeah. I actually have a recipe for it.” He finished putting stuff away and shut the trunk lid. “Take the hind quarters and back straps off and put it in a crock pot with some Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce...”

He paused long enough for me to interject, “You can actually say that word,” and laughed. I usually butcher it myself.

          “Yeah.” John barely paused as he continued with the recipe. “Horseradish. Let it cook down and you can add veggies or anything like that. I actually did a beef roast last night the same way.”

I realized he’d been remembering and recounting. “Did ya?”

“Yeah. I love wild game. It’s so much better for you than that stuff you buy in the stores.”

And that sent us off on a different tangent. “No growth hormones in it.”

“That’s it,” John agreed. “That’s my biggest pet peeve with commercially available meats is all the growth steroids and hormones they put in it. You stop and think about things like girls. When I was in high school, they didn’t look like they do now.”

“I know, right!”

“And I think a large part of that is the growth steroids and hormones they put in the meat.”

“Girls going into menstruation when they’re nine.”

“Yeah. Absolutely.” Then John was off on something else. “I love gardening. I just bought a canner this year so I’m gonna start canning my meat and veggies so I don’t have to freeze ‘em. I love to deer hunt and I do everything primitive, either black powder or archery — including my turkey hunting.

“You give 'em a sporting chance don’cha?”

“Absolutely, but I do so much of it that I usually don’t have too much of a problem getting a couple of deer and..”

A truck came up the road and stopped.

          “You guys all good?” he wanted to know.

          John answered. “Yeah, we’re good. Thank you.”

          And I was thankful he’d cared enough to stop. I could’ve been in trouble and he could’ve been my knight in shining armor. “Thanks for stopping!” I cheerfully called. He waved and pulled away, closing his window against the winter chill. I turned back to John. “That is so kind. Some people will just drive on past —” And a recent news story popped into my head. “How many people drove past that little baby the other day that was out in the middle of the road? The one the Fed Ex driver picked up.” The baby wasn’t really in the middle of the road. He was in a carrier on the side of the road.

          “Yep, Yep. Whenever I see anybody walking, I always stop and ask. Its like you here. I didn’t know if maybe you went off the road down here and you were walking for help — I didn’t see your camera at first. It’s just how I was raised. My grandfather was old school southern Baptist. He moved to PA from Tennessee when he was about two or three and that lifestyle came with him. It’s the way he was raised, and it’s the way he raised my father, and my father raised me.”

“Where did you get your love of hunting and trapping from?” I asked.

“From my dad.”

“From your dad.” I was hoping he’d elaborate.

“Yeah.”

“He did it a lot?”

“Yeah, he did. Back in the 70s when you could actually make money at it. He would catch enough fur and whatnot that that’s how they did Christmas for us.”

“Do you make any money — what’s a pelt worth now?”

“You don’t really make any money. I do it more for fun and to get myself out and about and just to do something. Back in the day you could make money at it but anymore it’s just too hard, you’d have to catch three times the amount of fur.”

“So, what are they going for?”

“Like a beaver skin, if it’s a blanket — “ John used his stick to draw a circle in the snow at his feet. “They measure across and down,” he added a cross to the center of his circle, “and add it up and that’s how they come up with the circumference. The big one I got was probably 65 inches and that’ll sell for between 25 and 35 dollars.

          “65 inches sounds pretty big to me. How big are they?”

          “Yeah, it’s about that big around,” John held his hands out to give me a visual reference.

          “How big do beavers get?”

          “They have documented cases of beaver weighing over 100 pounds.” John said.

I was properly impressed. “Holy cow! You wouldn’t want to run into him in a dark alley, would ya!”

“I’d have to drag him out just like a deer. The biggest one I ever caught weighed 52 pounds and that’s pretty common. I’ve caught a lot of ‘em in 47, 48, 49-pound range. I met a guy a couple of days ago that caught one that weighed 89 pounds, A friend of mine’s ex-girlfriend’s dad caught one between here and Dushore that weighed 65 pounds. I haven’t broken 52 pounds yet and I’ve tried.”

Speaking of big critters, “How about bear? Do you do hunt bear?”

           "I’ve hunted bear a few times. I’ve never killed one. I’ve come close, over in Wyalusing along the creek. Last year I killed a 10-point there. This year during the first day of archery season, I had a bear walk up to me and I started hunting for that bear and never saw it again. Even guys who drive that cornfield when it’s still standing during bear season drove it three times in one day and never pushed a bear out. Well, I figured out why. My cousin’s been seeing that bear swim the river out to an island.”

          “No! No way!”

          “Yep.”

Back to beaver. “So you use the pelts and just the pelts?”

“I’ll take the pelt and depending on whether I have the time or not I’ll actually flesh it and dry it. You’ll get a little more money for it. I harvest the caster and oil sacs out of the beaver, that’s how they mark their territory, it’s a great beaver lure, and you can actually sell them too. And the meat, I can either eat it or grind it up and make a bait for foxes, coyotes. things like that.”

          “Feed it to your dogs?” He didn’t say that one and maybe he doesn’t have any dogs.

          “You can do that too, and they say when you cook it up like I was telling you, it tastes just like pot roast.”

“What do you do with the rest of the animal?” I wanted to know.

“That pretty much covers most of the animal.”

“What about the skull?”

“The skulls?” John repeated. “A friend of mine actually is taking the skulls.”

“You know where this is going, don’t you?” I thought he might guess but he didn’t.

“Yeah,” he said in a downcast kinda voice. Maybe he thought I was a tree hugger and opposed hunting and trapping.  

“I was going to ask for one!”

“Peg, you’re weird!” you say.

I know, right! I take after cousin Suzy. She collects things like that too.

John brightened. “I can get you one!”

“Can you!” I was delighted.

“Yeah.”

“Give me your contact information, John, and I’ll send you pictures and — will you let me write about you — I’m a blogger — can I write about you?”

“Yeah. You can.”

I smiled. A thought popped into my head and came out my mouth. “God is good.” Then I felt the need to explain. “He put you on my path today to give me an interesting story to write in my blog next week.”

John wrote out his email and phone and handed it to me. “There you go.”

I took the slip of paper and read the info back to him. I wanted to make sure I read the letters and numbers correctly. A trick I learned to do if I don’t write it out for myself.

I stuffed the paper in my pocket. I really would like to have a beaver skull, and just in case John wanted to drop one off, “I live right there,” and I pointed to our mountain home.

          “It was nice to meet you, John.” I stuck my hand out. John took it.

          “It was nice to meet you, too.”

          Later, much later, days later even, I took the paper with John’s info from my jacket pocket and realized it was folded. Curious, and expecting to find nothing on the inside or maybe a grocery list, I found this. 

The truth of the past is hidden by the madness of today. 

Let’s call this one done!