He leveled his shotgun, sighted on the topmost owl and squeezed the trigger. Almost before the booming report died, he got the second owl with the other barrel. In a frantic haste, he ejected the two empty shells and slipped fresh ones in, but with a great flapping of wings, the geese were already airborne. Andy sighed again and watched them go. He still might shoot, but he could no longer be certain of a kill and it was far better to let the geese escape than to wound one.
Andy turned dejectedly away from the slough. His swamp was not on one of the great flyways, down or up which, according to the season, waterfowl stream. Only the strays alighted here, and some seasons they were very few. The boy shrugged and walked on. The two geese he had hoped to get would have provided his Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners—and several more besides. But the great horned owls were far too dangerous to be tolerated. Andy longed for the freeze—up that would make his muskrats safe.
The next day, on a different slough, Andy bagged two mallards out of a flock that beat hastily into the air before him, and the day after that he got two more. He plucked and dressed the ducks, wrapped each separately in flour sacking and hung it in his shed to freeze. These were the last of the waterfowl. If more came, he missed them.
The weather, never very cold or very warm, dropped to a few degrees below freezing every night and climbed a few degrees above it every day. There were some more snow flurries and brittle shell ice formed on the edges of some ponds and sloughs. But, except in places that were shadowed all day long, both snow and ice melted under the noon sun. Andy made ready for the trapping and small game season.
An hour before dawn on opening day, he had breakfasted. He let Frosty out, and with the shotgun under his arm, started off.
His way led him into the hills, rather than the swamp, for this morning he intended to set fox traps and there were more foxes in the hills. Black night was just shading into gray dawn when he threaded his path among a copse of scrub oak toward a huge stump that had supported a great pine but that was now a melancholy, moss- and lichen-covered relic. Andy pawed aside some dead leaves that seemed to have blown into the stump and revealed his fox traps.
Along with a packsack, leather trapping gloves, a roll of canvas, a bottle of scent, trap stakes and even the hatchet used to drive the stakes, they had been in the stump all summer and no trace of human scent could possibly cling to them. Before doing anything else, Andy slipped his hands into the gloves. Being careful to touch them with nothing except the gloves, he put eight traps, eight stakes, the roll of canvas, the hatchet and the bottle of scent into the packsack and shouldered it. The hills were cut with numerous tote roads over which, at one time, wagons loaded with timber had traveled. Though some were brush-grown, most such roads remained open enough so that foxes en route from one place to another traveled them. Approaching such a road, Andy stopped.
He unrolled his strip of canvas, walking on it as he did so. When he came to the middle of the road, he knelt to study the ground carefully. After he was sure he had memorized every tiny detail, he used the hatchet's blade to scoop a hole just big enough to hide a set trap. The surplus earth he scattered to either side. He started a stake through the trap ring and kept pounding until the top of the stake was level with its surroundings. Then he replaced every leaf and every blade of grass exactly as it had been.
Andy took the bottle of scent from his pack, uncorked it and grimaced. The scent was a nauseous substance, composed of exactly measured portions of thoroughly rotted fish; the castor, or scent glands, of beaver; oil of asafetida and oil of wintergreen. Its odor would shame the most formidable skunk, but foxes found it irresistible! Andy put one drop on his set trap and, rolling up his canvas as he did so, walked backwards. In like manner, he set seven more fox traps.