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

by George Bird Grinnell

When the panther skin had been stretched, Hugh told Jack to put around it the same protection that they had stretched about the grizzly bear skin, and soon after this had been done supper was ready. The dishes were washed before the sun had set, and building up the fire, the two companions lounged about it with the comfortable feeling which follows a day of hard work. For setting traps, although it does not sound like very hard work, had really required a good deal of effort.

"Now, son," remarked Hugh, "we want to get started to-morrow morning in good season, and we ought to be on our way before it's plain daylight. Of course, I hope that we'll find a beaver in every trap, but it may be that we won't find anything but feet."

"How do you mean, Hugh? Is it so that the beaver will gnaw their feet off to get out of a trap?"

"Not so," said Hugh. "I don't reckon a beaver knows enough for that in the first place, or could do it in the second. A beaver's foot is made up of a whole lot of pretty strong bones, and I question whether even a beaver could cut through those bones, and then he wouldn't know enough to do it. All a beaver knows when he gets caught is to struggle, and pull, and twist, and turn, and try to get away. Very often, if the traps are not properly set, they do get away, leaving their feet in the trap, but they don't gnaw their feet off; they twist them off. That is something that can be done and often is done, and that's the reason, as maybe I've told you before, that we always try to set our traps so that a beaver as soon as he gets caught, will plunge into deep water, and will be held there by the trap until he drowns. Then he has no opportunity of fighting with the trap and trying to get free. Of course, it often happens that it isn't possible to set your traps so that your beaver will drown, and where that isn't possible, you are likely to lose a good many of the beaver that you catch. It used to be a common thing to catch beaver with only three feet, sometimes with only two, and I once caught one that had only one foot, a hind foot that he got into the trap."

"I should think, Hugh, that a beaver that had been caught once and had got away would be mighty hard to catch again."

"Yes," said Hugh, "that's so, of course. He's always on the lookout for a trap, and then, too, if a beaver has lost a foot, a quarter of the chance of getting him is gone. If he's lost two feet he's only got two feet that can get into the trap, instead of having four, like an ordinary beaver. Lots of queer things happen in beaver trapping. I reckon I never told you that story of old Jim Beckwourth's about the beaver and the trap that was stolen by a buffalo."

"No," answered Jack. "That sounds as if it ought to be a queer story or a pretty good lie."

"Well," replied Hugh, "Jim Beckwourth had the name of being the biggest liar that ever traveled these prairies, but I wouldn't be surprised if he told the truth that time, and, anyway, Jim Bridger was with him when he found the trap with the beaver in it out on the high prairie a couple miles from where it was set.

"It seems, according to the story—it happened long before my time—that Jim came to a place where he'd set a trap and found that it was gone. There was sign there that some buffalo had crossed the creek just at this point. Jim hunted up and down the stream and couldn't find hair nor hide of the trap. The next day he and Jim Bridger went back again and looked some more, and not being able to find anything, they started on to join their party that was moving, and followed the buffalo trail that led from the place where the trap had been set. They had gone a couple of miles out on the prairie when they saw something, and going up to it found it to be a beaver, still in the trap, with the chain and float-stick all attached. Jim always claimed that one of the buffalo when crossing the creek got his head tangled in the chain of the trap and carried beaver, trap, and float-stick away out to the prairie before dropping it. It's a good story, but I'd hate to swear to it or to anything else that Jim Beckwourth ever said."

"That is a good story, Hugh," said Jack. "Isn't it wonderful," he added after a pause, "what strange things happen out here on the prairie, but there are lots of them that people back East wouldn't believe at all."