If you can procure an ancient egg you have the tidbit for any varmint that may hit your track. You perhaps have heard much about the so-called "scents" or oils. They in a way are good to disguise the dreaded human odor, but may well be dispensed with and some are entirely out of place. Time will obliterate any and all human odor, providing you use your implements with tact and good judgment, your bait will keep and it will draw better a day or two after the first set. I never could teach any one much unless he went along the line with me. Trapping is a profession and not every one is by nature adapted for it, but some take to it as natural as a duck to water.
I get three or four dead chickens and start out. I place them along the bank and usually tie them to some small tree so that the head will about reach the ground. I never build a pen around them. I wait until something get to eating them, and then I take a trap and place it directly in front of where it has been eaten, and use more traps if necessary. I have caught as many as three skunks around one chicken, — have caught more that way than any way I have tried. Brother trappers try my plan and be convinced.
The entrails of muskrat, rabbit, chicken or duck will make far better bait than the animal or bird itself. In very cold weather I use the oil of wild duck which I save in the fall, but even in using the baits I speak of I invariably dig up the ground, unless it is a water set or a swamp set on some log.
In cold weather, or in fact during the entire trapping season, fur-bearing animals are searching for something to eat and consequently the trap that is baited is more liable to catch than one that is not. Fresh rabbit is an excellent bait for most animals.
CHAPTER XXII.
SCENT AND DECOYS.
It is claimed by trappers that some methods are good while others are not. I have bought nearly all of the methods put on the market and find that all are good if properly used, says a well known trapper. Experience has taught me that you can catch any kind of an animal with decoy. Experience has also taught me that you can catch any kind of an animal without decoy. My belief is that there is one decoy that is of great value, especially in the running season, and it is that of the famous beaver castor. Few animals can pass it without investigating.
You can, however, use all the decoys put together, and if you do not set the trap properly you might as well set traps on top of a straw stack, back of some barn, to catch a fox, and you will get him just as quick. But if your trap is set somewhere near his haunts, on a knoll or under vines, at a hollow stump, tree or hole, and baited with a good piece of fresh bait, you will catch just as many if not more in the fall, than you will with the decoy.