In those days very long ago I was a schoolboy trapper. In Tolstoy’s delineation it covered my boyhood and youth, but I was always in the public school system in that time, so I’ll call myself a schoolboy. Plus there was an old book from the fifties that my father had given me called “Schoolboy Trapper” by Pat Sedlak which had once defined my father and that described me fairly well in those days.
There have been many schoolboy trappers in the past century throughout the small towns and countrysides and backcountries of America, but their percentages as a ratio of total schoolboys as a whole everywhere have declined decade by decade.
This is what it was like to be a boy and then a youth who was a trapper in the suburbs of Saint Paul:
There was a tough pair of schoolmates of mine who had taken a liking to me, Jim and Dave, and I looked up to them very much although I was a little frightened by them. They took to me, and when Dave, who still had an intact nuclear family, invited me to sleep over at his house, I had the excuse not to.
“I can’t,” I smiled. “Sorry. I have to check my muskrat traps early in the morning.”
My father and I had muskrat traps set out in the near country and we checked them early in the mornings on weekends and before his work and my school on weekdays in late October and November as the ice came and slowly thickened.
Dave laughed carefree and said, “You have to do what?” And so I had to explain to him, and he laughed really. Any normal boy would have felt embarrassed if someone laughed at them like he did at me, but I felt special and unique as my father would have wanted me to feel, and proud, but different and apart as I always have before and since.
Then in my youth – in Tolstoy’s sense of the term that is, high school – I roamed farther in search of bigger furbearers and more fur and greater income from the sale of the pelts. From three bucks for a muskrat to ten for a bandit coon and fifteen for a sleek mink and twenty-five for a cunning red fox.
I had access to a car (my mother’s) and a parcel of farmland down the highway and beyond the freeway in the oak savannah with some ponds and cornfields and alfalfa on it. I always thought it was 100 acres, until I grew up and moved to Cook County and bought my own acreage and knew the size of an acre. In reality it was maybe forty acres. But it always felt like my own Hundred-Acre Wood.
After I quit playing football, thankfully and finally, I had time after school to trap. For muskrats and mink and coon and fox. And I caught the occasional skunk or feral cat or farmer’s dog.
In the early mornings in the dark at school for the first period I would come early into class – ‘Film and Theater’ or ‘British Literature’ – and sit in the middle quietly. And my classmates would come in loudly and the girls to the back and one side of me would talk at me. Then a couple of my schoolmates would come and sit at their desks ahead of and alongside me and greet me with “Mr. Egan!” or “Aahh, Professor!” My nicknames were Mr. Egan or Professor in those days, and it always felt at odds with my being a trapper.
They’d ask something simple and silly and nearly ungrammatical, like, “Did you trap anything?” or, “Did you catch anything yesterday?”
I got a fox, I blushed, or, “I got two fox.” Or, “A big coon and five muskrats.”
Then they’d be amazed and shake my hand like young gentlemen congratulating one another.
That’s what it was like in those days when I was a trapper. But I was a schoolboy, too, and none of the girls that wanted to flirt with me found anything of value in any of it. And, really, is there any?
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