Another trapper gives his method in the following: "In setting traps for wolves and coyotes, I set them mostly on the trails made by stock. I use steel pins made from rake teeth. With a short handled axe I cut out a place in the trail so the trap will be level with the top of the ground when covered. I use paper over the jaws and set two No. 4 traps at a setting, putting them fourteen or twenty inches apart. A wolfs foot is good for brushing the dirt over the traps so as to make everything look as natural as possible. I use a pair of gloves in handling my traps and set them where the trail is narrow and on a little knoll, or where the trail goes around a bank or between two hills.
"Leave all wolf and coyote carcasses near the traps after skinning them, as they make a good decoy. A good plan is to throw your rope around a piece of meat and drag it from your saddle horn. Take a dozen No. 4 traps and go up and down the dusty trail and set them on the drag mark. If you hide them well, you will get Mr. Wolf or Coyote. I do not use bait in warm weather and not much in cold weather. A grey wolf is hard to catch by bait, unless very hungry and he is seldom troubled that way where there are cattle and horses on the range."
CHAPTER XVI.
SNOW SET METHODS.
When the ground is covered with snow, trapping for wolves is exceedingly difficult and there are few, if any trappers who can make a success of it. Throughout Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as in Canada, a few are caught by the most persistent hunters, but the winter catch never amounts to much.
It is difficult to make a set in the snow and leave no signs when the set is finished, and even if one can make a neat set it will seldom remain long in working order. This is the rule, but there is one exception, a set which is successful, but can only be used in places where the winter temperature is such that the snow will remain a long time in a loose, powdery condition. In other words it can only be used successfully in the North, where the weather is very cold. The method referred to is the one used by the northern Indians for trapping both the fox and wolf. It is made as follows:
Having the trap attached to a heavy clog, and well cleaned by boiling or washing, go out onto the ice of some windswept lake and scrape up a pile of snow. Make it cone-shaped about three feet in height and six or seven feet in diameter at the base. Bury the clog, or drag, in the mound, and stretch up the chain, so as to bring the trap to the top. Make the mound hard by beating it with a snowshoe, and in the top, scoop a hole about five inches deep and somewhat larger than the trap. Line this hole well with dry moss or cat-tail down, the down is best, and place the trap in the nest. Fill inside of the jaws, and under the pan with cat-tail down and after the trap has become cold, so that there is no danger of the snow sticking to it, sift snow over it, to the depth of an inch. Do not touch this snow with the hands or it will freeze hard and the trap will not spring.