If any of you are beginners trapping fox, scent is a great help, if you happen to tuck anything around the trap that have effect, if a little scent is added. A fox can smell only one thing at a time. If the scent is stronger than human scent, they will not smell the human scent. Too many accidents in this way have their effect because the fox is a forest animal in existence. I use for fall trapping the fox pure skunk glands and pure strained honey (not sugar fed honey) but clover or flower honey. Winter scent, pure matrix from the female fox taken in the running season during the heat, a little muskrat musk and pure strained honey. This scent attracts the male fox and is the strongest scent in existence.
VERMONT HUNTER AND FOX SKINS.
Here is a first class fox decoy which can be made very easily, write Irving Brown, of Vermont. Take one half pint of skunk oil and the musk glands of a muskrat and one scent bag of a skunk, and you have the celebrated scent of Schofield, one of the first water set fox trappers in the East. This should be made in spring, but it is all right made at any time. It is not the best scent, however, but it is a most excellent one.
Here is the secret of the best and it is hard to prepare because you cannot get the female fox in the running season, which is February or March, in this climate very easily. Take the matrix of a female fox taken in the running season or, in other words, cut out the entire sexual organs and place them in a pint of alcohol, and the result will be the best scent ever made. Some do not use alcohol but salt the matrix. This is the scent you will buy the secret for $5.00, and you will be told that foxes are just crazy to get it. This is in a measure true, but a red fox will not step into a trap unless you use care in setting it, with any kind of scent. I don't care how frantic a fox is to get at the bait. They don't commit suicide if they know it.
There are many other ways to prepare for both mink and fox, all of them possessing merit, but my aim is to give the best, not those which are no use to the trapper. The more simple, as a rule, are the best. Some trappers are opposed to the use of scent, but you will find that man far behind others. The capture of fur bearing animals has become a science, as mink and fox become more wary so does man become more skillful in overcoming their shyness. We hear lots of secrets that were learned of the Indians. No doubt they had some good ones too, but the white trapper in the same place will outdistance any Indian I have ever seen or heard of. My experience among those people is that they are too lazy to use the care that a white man will use in either setting traps or stretching skins.
I have had a fox get into my snowshoes tracks and follow a long way because it was better traveling, says M. H. McAllister. Now that shows he was not afraid of human scent. Now about iron. How often does a fox go through a wire fence, or go near an old sugar house where there are iron gates? That shows he is not afraid of scent of iron.
Once there was an old trapper here, and the young men wanted him to show them how to set a fox trap, and he told them he would. So he got them out to show them how, and this is what he told them: "Remove all suspicion and lay a great temptation." Well, there it is. Now, in order to remove all suspicion you must remove all things that are not natural. A man's tracks and where he has been digging around with a spade or with his hands are not natural around a spring, are they? No. Well then, there is where the human scent question comes in. By instinct he is shown that man is his enemy, and when a man has pawed the bait over he uses his sense and knows that there is danger, for it is not natural.