"We took the trap to the stream to cleanse it, and then placing it on two poles we started for home. And a tug it gave us, too!"
[A FIGHT IN THE WOODS.]
Some years ago, while in the northern part of Maine, I spent the month of September and a portion of October at a "hay-farm" on the borders of Chamberlain Lake—Lake Apmoogenegamook, the Indians used to call it. The whole region was almost an unbroken wilderness. Game was plenty, and by way of recreation from my duties as an assistant engineer I had set up a "line of traps" for mink and sable—"saple," as old trappers say—along a small but very rapid, noisy stream called Bear Brook, which comes down into the lake through a gorge between two high spruce-clad mountains.
Huge boulders had rolled down the sides, and lay piled along the bed of the gorge. The brook, which was the outlet of a small pond, pent up among the ridges above, foamed and roared and gurgled down among rocks shaded by thick, black spruces, which leaned out from the sides of the ravine.
It was a wild place. I had stumbled upon it, one afternoon, while hunting a caribou (a kind of deer) some weeks before, and knew it must be good trapping ground; for the rocks and clear, black pools, in short the whole place had that peculiar, fishy smell which bespoke an abundance of trout; and where trout abound there are sure to be mink.
My traps were of that sort which hunters call "figure four" traps, made of stakes and poles, with a figure-four spring. Perhaps some of our boy readers may have caught squirrels in that way. For bait I used trout from the brook. I carried my hook and line with me, and after setting a trap, threw in my hook and pulled out trout enough to bait it. My line extended about a mile up the gorge, and comprised some twenty-five or thirty traps.
After setting them, I shot a number of red squirrels for a "drag," and thus connected the traps together. Perhaps I should explain that a drag is a bundle of squirrels or partridges newly killed and from which the blood is dripping, which are dragged along by a withe from trap to trap to make a trail and scent, so that the mink and sable will follow it.
It is customary to visit mink traps once in two or three days. But as I had plenty of time just then, I went to mine every forenoon.
During the first week after setting them I had excellent luck. I caught eleven mink and three sable—about fifty dollars' worth, as I reckoned it. My hopes of making a small fortune in the fur business were very sanguine, until one morning I found every trap torn up! The poles and stakes were scattered over the ground, spindles were broken to pieces, and at one or two places where there had been a mink in the trap, the head and bits of fur were lying about as if it had been devoured.
At first I thought that perhaps some fellow who had intended to trap there had done the mischief to drive me away (a very common trick among rival trappers); but when I saw that the minks had been torn to pieces, I knew the destruction was the work of some animal—a fisher, most likely, or as some call it, a "black-cat."