Jack the Young Trapper: An Eastern Boy's Fur Hunting in the Rocky Mountains

by George Bird Grinnell

The morning sun peeping over the snowy tops of the neighboring mountains found Jack and Hugh eating their breakfast and almost ready to start out on their trapping expedition. Soon after they had finished eating, Hugh hung his bottle of beaver medicine about his neck, filled his pockets and those of Jack with trigger-sticks and spindles, and then with half a dozen of the fall-logs under his arm and a bundle of bed-sticks on his back, he started down the stream, followed by Jack, similarly loaded. Hugh pointed out to Jack places along the stream where mink had passed, and before the morning was half gone they had set twelve falls, eight on the main stream and four on the little creek that Jack had followed up the day before.

Hugh set the traps in the way he had explained the night before. He drove the sharpened sticks into the ground near the border of the creek, sometimes up above in the grass, and at others down at the very margin of the water. When his V was about a foot long he left an opening two inches wide in each arm, and then in each arm drove three or four more sticks close together. On the ground and passing through the openings in the arms he placed the bed-stick, setting it well into the soil so that its top was nearly level with the ground. Sometimes he had to dig out a place for the bed-stick and at others he could pound it down to the proper level. Now he placed the fall-log, which passed through both openings in the arms, on top of the bed-stick and then put a spindle and a trigger-stick on the ground by them. Now he tied a stone, if he could find a good one, to the thicker end of the fall-log, or if he could not find a stone, he got three or four slender tree trunks which he rested on the butt of the fall-log at right angles to it.

Meantime he had sent Jack off down the creek to look for frogs, and presently Jack returned with a dozen that he had killed with a stick. Hugh now impaled one of the dead frogs on the pointed end of a spindle, which was notched so that the bait could not be pulled either way. Then with a willow twig he dropped a little of the beaver medicine on the frog, and then telling Jack to raise the fall-log, he placed the butt of the spindle on the bed-log, one end of the trigger-stick on the spindle, and then told Jack to very carefully lower the fall-log until it rested on the trigger-stick. Before this, with his knife he had smoothed away the sides of the fall-log where it passed between the upright sticks in both arms of the V, and had smoothed off the sticks between which the fall-log passed and which were to serve as the guides to the fall-log, which would meet the bed-stick with an even blow.

"There," said Hugh, as he very carefully removed his hands from the spindle and trigger-stick, "that ought to catch a mink if he'll only come and give a tug at that bait."

"Yes," said Jack, "I think it ought. It seems to me there's a good deal more science and pleasure in setting a trap of that kind than there is in just spreading the jaws of a beaver trap."

"Maybe you're right, son," said Hugh, standing back and looking at his trap. "It does look fairly ship-shape, doesn't it?"

"Yes," said Jack, "that looks to me like something that had some science and style about it."

The greater part of the day was devoted to setting these traps, but toward evening Jack and Hugh put on their rubber boots and walked off up to the beaver pond, where four traps were set. After they had finished this, Hugh said, "Son, I believe we might as well go down and look at those mink traps of ours. If anything has been caught we want to take it out and reset. Just as like as not we'll find something."

Jack was eager to learn the result of their morning efforts and wanted to press ahead of Hugh, but did not do so until they had almost reached the first of the dead-falls. Then he ran ahead a few steps, stopping and calling back to Hugh, "That first trap is sprung." When they got up to it they could see a pair of brown hips and a tail sticking out from under the fall-log, and lifting it, a good dark mink was found there, caught just as he should have been.