Sometimes they paused before the delicate imprint of a fox, like a snow etching made by a master hand; sometimes the double track of marten and his lesser cousin, the ermine; once the great cowlike mark of a caribou, seeking the pale-green reindeer moss that hung like tresses from the trees. Seemingly every kind of northern animal of which Ned had ever heard had immediately preceded them through the glade.
“Where there’s timber, there’s marten,” Doomsdorf explained. “Marten, I suppose you know, are the most valuable furs we take, outside of silver and blue fox—and one of the easiest taken. The marten’s such a ruthless hunter that he doesn’t look what he’s running into. You won’t find them far on the open barrens, but they are in hundreds in the long, narrow timber belt between Twelve-Mile cabin, to-night’s stop, and Forks cabin that you’ll hit to-morrow night. And we’ll make our first set right here.”
He took one of the traps from Ned’s shoulder and showed him how to make the set. The bait was placed a few feet above the trap, in this case, on the trunk of the tree, so that to reach it the marten would almost certainly spring the trap.
“Put ’em fairly thick through here,” Doomsdorf advised. “Lay more emphasis on fox and lynx in the open barrens.” He stepped back from the set. “Do you think you can find this place again?”
Ned looked it over with minute care, marking it in relation to certain dead trees that lay across the creek. “I think I can.”
“That’s the very essential of trapping, naturally. It will come to be second nature after a while—without marking it by trees or anything. You’ll have better than a hundred traps; and it isn’t as easy as it looks. Remember, I won’t be with you the next time you pass this way.”
They tramped on, and Doomsdorf pointed out where a wolverine had come down the glade and crossed the creek. “You’ll curse at the very name of wolverine before the season’s done,” Doomsdorf told him, as Ned paused to study the imprint. “He’s the demon of the snow so far as the trapper is concerned. Nevertheless, you’ll want to take a skin for your own use. It’s the one fur for the hood of a parka—you can wear it over your mouth in fifty below and it doesn’t get covered with ice from your breath. But you’ll have to be a smarter man than I think you are to catch him.”
A few minutes later the timber became to be more noticeably stunted, the trees farther and farther apart, and soon they were in the open. These were the barren lands, deep moss or rich marsh grass already heavy with snow; and the only trees remaining were a few willow, quivering aspen, and birch along the bank of the creek. From time to time the two men stopped to place their traps, Doomsdorf explaining the various “sets”, how to conceal the cold steel of which most all creatures have such an instinctive fear, and how to eliminate the human smell that might otherwise keep the more cunning of the fur-bearers from the bait. Once they paused before a great, cruel instrument of iron, seemingly much too large to be a trap, that had been left at the set from the previous trapping season.
“Lift it,” Doomsdorf advised. Ned bent, finding the iron itself heavy in his arms.
“No creature’s going to walk away with that on his leg, is he?”