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As I said, up in the red pine plantation when I was very young and just beginning, I used snares made out of picture-hanging wire. That came quite easy to me, and the dying came quite easy to the cottontails, with no blood, and the harder they pulled the tighter the snare cinched. The hardest part for me was uncinching the wire from the neck of the rabbit, but maybe my father would just snip it, or we’d leave it on during the butchering and discard it with the carcass.
There’s a whole chapter about all of this in Watership Down. You can read it. It’s a good book. Hazel-rah.
The next year my father produced an old #1 Oneida jump trap. Either he found it in the woods or in the swap somewhere or he pulled it out of his box of trapping treasures – all those compact black mink traps or big square fox traps.
The jump trap is a special kind of leghold trap that would’ve been emergent technology a hundred years ago. The spring is located under the pan, beneath the jaws. When the animal steps on the pan, the trap springs (“jumps”) upward, closing the jaws higher up on the leg. The #1 Oneida was a small trap, usually for muskrats. Maybe mink. Or cottontail rabbits.
I was only ten or so. I had trouble setting the trap – depressing the springs – by hand or on my knees. A real trapper, in his hip boots out on the muskrat swamp, could just squeeze the trap in one hand and set the dog – that’s the trigger – with the other. I could use my foot by standing on it if I was in the basement, or in the garage. But in the middle of winter in the deep snow I didn’t have any solid ground to step on.
So, I started carrying around a little slab of wood in my trapping creel. It was just about 10” x 4”, and I could put it under the trap and stand on the spring and then set the trap.
Then I was able to find a spot in a little rabbit trail under the pines to lay the trap and sprinkle pine needles over it to camouflage and cover my scent, and then tie it off.
And I came back the next morning and there it was: a buck cottontail held by the long rear leg and bouncing around willy nilly.
Well. Hmmm…
This was a situation that I, personally, me myself hadn’t been in before. I mean, I knew what had to be done. I’d seen it done.
There wasn’t any stick around that I could use as a club. But I had my little slab of trap-setting wood.
So, I pounced on him and got him – and no, they don’t freeze when cornered – and dispatched him, and he sure was not easy to dispatch.
The next year I graduated to muskrats, and for Christmas I got my prized possession: half a dozen #1 Victor longspring legholds (old-school).
But in the winter, after muskrat season, I crawled up into the immature pines and practiced my trade on rabbits.
I was adding a new tactic to my repertoire: baiting. I snuck onto the neighbor’s cornfield and took three golden-yellow cobs of pig corn. Back in the pines, under a secluded spot just off the bobbed wire – on either side of which I was trespassing- I tied off and laid down a new #1 Victor long spring. Then I rubbed off half a cob of hard corn kernels around the trap. And backed out on my knees and hands.
And when I came crawling in the next morning I froze in surprise. A boy can freeze more than a rabbit. There’s a rooster ringneck squatting on the trap.
Now you all know this, this is common knowledge: but there ain’t no half measures when you’re subduing a rooster pheasant. Even if he is a one-legged rooster tethered on a three-foot chain. So, I went all in, and got him.
He was tough to dispatch, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. I’m just saying, I’m no cat killer (generally), but here’s the ugly truth: I tried ringing his neck (quite flexible), swinging his head (quite tiny) against a tree trunk, and sitting on him. Finally, when the fight was mostly out of him, I just stuffed him – the trap still connected to his leg for safe measure – in the aforementioned creel and snuck out of the woods and nonchalantly ran back to the cabin.
My grandfather was at the garage, and he saw some tail feathers sticking out from under my arm. He didn’t say anything. He never said anything. He was a mute. But I laid my trapping creel with the tail feathers sticking out at his feet just like my cocker spaniel lays the doves down at my feet, proud-like. And he wrang that pheasant’s neck till we were all out of our misery.
He had some strong hands.
We both had pretty strong vinegar.
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