As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
I have been sifting through some of my Beloved Uncles papers and the dust gave me a headache and cough, but I am finding things in there which I never knew or had forgotten. They would mean nothing to most people, as they would have burned these things, but for me the history is fascinating and for me, there are things in those papers which reveal things I never knew about him.
That old shit was one of the best shots I ever saw. My Grandpa was the best. He was the best hunter, fisherman and little did I know, the best trapper I knew. That is what this is about, because in that era, you had those Goddamn stupid eastern trappers, with their shitty lures, who are still hawking the dead in names like Charles Dobbins, and then there were the midwest trappers and the western trappers, who have always been the ones who could trap.
In the east, these shitty trappers were always on about lures and pocket sets. In being shown how to trap, and experiencing the pocket set, the Red River Valley mink would not bother with such amateur stuff.
Most of the great mink trappers, never caught a thing, or that is what they told you, often. There were tappers like Art Weber of South Dakota who hired drivers to catch the fabled 100 mink a year. 100 mink was the legend of the mink men and the thieves and the competition made catching 100 mink near impossible.
Uncle used to set on muskrat houses, which mink would tunnel into and kill the rats. My brother always said Uncle was the only person who could use cattail duff and catch mink and not cattail duff.
I found a hardware store bill for traps he had purchased, and all of this is going to go into a book, but I want more of these things, but the problem is I am running out of things to look through. I have found an archery tag he had, I found a rabies shot for his dog, I found the title to one of his old pick ups, I even found the slip of the motor for the boat he purchased.
I came across though a few names of fur buyers which I remembered visiting with him when I was young, and that is where the ratty old sales slips had me eventually start counting the mink numbers he was catching. In those years, you could make a fantastic living trapping mink, 70 dollars in the 1960's would buy you about everything to live on for a month.
As I counted up the mink he had caught, what I could find recorded in December of 1968, for this crippled Army veteran was 40 mink.
Mink season started on the first week of November and ended December 31st, because they would singe or get their hair split as the coats wore. So a trapper had to work hard, but then Uncle was running his cattle operation at the same time, and he was hunting and fishing, and this was not driving across a state or hiring drives. This was in a two wheel drive Chevy pick up in winter, and with no help. To put up 40 mink in blind sets, as that is all he ever trapped, and in in riding along with him deer hunting (It was checking traps and I was the gate opener) he pointed to a spring and said, "I trapped there by a stump and caught mink. The stump was hollow and when I was a kid the owners had homemade win in it, and us kids got drunk".
That was about it for trapping information as the old boys never shared a thing. I never knew he was that good at trapping mink, as he was mainly focused on long hair as I got older as that is where the market shifted to, and for that he did get some instruction and caught piles of fur those years too. But to know in an era when there was that kind of competition as every kid trapped, the longliners were hard at it, and Uncle was still putting up those kinds of numbers is very impressive.
I still smile in I made a set (trap got stolen as it was on a highway), but I picked off 3 mink he would have caught when I was young and I never told him that, but he probably knew that kid was trapping and was frowning about it and yet pleased.
Of those 40 mink, most were grade 1, very few 2 and 3, and only one cotton mink. A cotton mink has white under fur, instead of brown That was a very good year, and I would have loved to have found all of his invoices for the past decades, but at this moment I am just thrilled to have the few scraps which showed me how good he really was.
The thing is, he was taught by an old trapper named Fred. Fred met the family because he a a bay stud horse which threw colts you could handle, and from that Fred and my fur buying Grandpa became lifelong friends, and the Fred sort of adopted Uncle in the process.
I remember Uncle telling me one time that there were skunks under a rock pile and in those years skunks brought some money, but Fred told Uncle that is as a fox den. Uncle knew it was not, but Fred needed Uncle to dig them out, and so his dug out fox turned into skunks.
When Fred died, he left Uncle his binoculars a 10 by 50 pair and his old trapping coat. Uncle said he wore that coat for years, but it was the trapping knowledge which Fred imparted which made the difference. Like all things with Grandpa, who trapped too and hunted, when Uncle grew up, he was better at most things, so Grandpa just went fishing northerns for awhile.
The old guy did help me skin my first fox though. I was cheated out of it by a fur buyer,but Uncle seemed quite pleased the kid was amounting to something in trapping fox.
It is still something I would that I had the money and time to do, in just trapping. I love the smells of a fur shed, love the scent of mink streams in the fall, love the rattle of chains as fox is caught. At this moment now I have only getting rid of vermin as I am on my 18th coon on Grandpas as they have dug the hell out of everything.
I told TL that I should have taxed Uncle before he died, and made him put a mark on every spot he fished and trapped, as that would have made life much easier. Mink sets work year by year. They go active early and others come on late. The patterns never change and I could have been a whiz at it too, except for the cattail duff set as I tried that and all I caught was cattails.
It is all the same in reading electronic sign or reading trail. I come by it natural as Uncle caught the 4 legged and I deal with the two.
Nuff Said
agtG
