When I was a kid in grade school, I must have seen few movies about mountain men in the early frontier west- one movie that comes to mind specifically was Jeramiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford. Whatever the reason was during the time—it became my favorite movie and has remained so my whole life. I have watched that move dozens of time, “…. you cook good rabbit pilgrim.”
What was it about that movie? I remember checking out books from the school library on Kit Carson and other noted mountain men. My best friend at the time, Mark, and I resolved that we were going to go to Canada and be mountain men, we were going to hunt, fish and trap and live in cabins on the wild frontier- we needed gear and experience so we ran away… just kidding, dinner was ready so it would have to wait. However I held onto that dream and it served me in my passion for hunting and outdoors in the years to come and I felt that tug every year to be in the mountains. Hunting season to me was like Christmas time, I almost couldn’t wait- the joy, the excitement, the preparation. I read The Outdoor Life or other hunting stories and read books by Jack O’Connor and his adventures, I even dove into stories of Africa by Peter Capstick…. Heady stuff, and was rounded out by John Goddard with his adventures and goals in his life.
Around 2006 I had an opportunity to really learn how to trap from an individual- I was interested in bobcats specifically. So I ran a trap line catching bobcats, coyotes, and fox. There is a lot to trapping, it takes time to run the line, to set the traps, to understand the target, to read the country, to think like the target, to reset traps that were sprung by rabbits and to do this over and over again for the season. It’s not for everyone. It’s not for blood sport either, although some might think it is, it’s a management tool of the fish and game to control species- it’s based on science not emotion
My first catch however was a couple of years before. We lived in a typical subdivision neighborhood and had neighbors to the right and left, it was a quiet street. Our fine neighbors to the east of us had an old car that cats lived in and they just let them run all over the place. I was getting tired of having these “feral cats” run all over the place after seeing tracks all over after a snow storm during the Christmas time. Ok I had had enough and was going to do “something about it”, I had 2 muskrat spring steel traps and thought that would be perfect if I set them up along their travel path. Early one morning I placed these traps on the ground, buried them with a layer of snow and tied them off to the fence. I put some nice tuna fish and juice on the trap pan as an attractor (I would find tuna isn’t stinky enough). It would be perfect—I was fixated on catching me one or all of those cats. Bear Claw Chris Laferty would have been proud.
My oldest son Travis met me at the back door and was curious about what I was up to—and in normal dad fashion I just shh’d him, as it was early, and told him to never mind what I was doing and not to go outside that day. It had just snowed, so I didn’t think he would want to do anything like build a snow man or anything like that.
My wife and I got ready mid-morning and went Christmas shopping, we got a baby sitter to watch the kids and went out. When we returned there were 3 more cars in our drive way and one set of neighbors (luckily not the cat neighbors) and a certain amount of harried commotion. We wondered what in the world could be going on so we, with a little trepidation, walked in the house. There were 3 couples and a very distraught baby sitter, her hair was all a kimbo and there was Travis with a towel wrapped around his hand laying on the couch, bawling his eyes out. The other couples were friends with dire looks on their faces. My next door neighbor with a certain solemnity asked if I knew that were traps set in our back yard. Oh course faced with the horrible truth and consequences, I said “no that I did not”. At that point I think I was ready for Congress or at least the Presidency, because the lie just rolled off my tongue with a certain smoothness that I was a shoe in for public office.
Natalie looked at me and asked me what it was that I had done, of course, one lie had to flow from another and they flowed from the pinnacle or virtue to the precipice of fate…. I was in TROUBLE. I feigned innocence, I guffawed, I denied, I was shocked…. I knew I was toast—I had to get everyone out so that I could do some proper damage control. I looked at his fingers…. whew, all 6 were there on the one hand, the trap hadn’t done any permanent damage; it had only lacerated the skin a little – but overall he was fine. I was more worried about the baby sitter…. She was rocking back and forth, mumbling incoherently, she had that wild look in her eyes like that of being shell shocked.
So now the story starts to come out. After we left and within an hour or so of us being gone, curiosity did truly catch the cat, the cat in the baseball hat. Travis wondered what in the world could I have been up to and went to the back fence, following my tracks. The snow was disturbed around an opening in the fence, so he proceeds to poke and prod the snow with his fingers until, “SNAP” his hand is caught in the spring loaded trap. He panics and starts to wail like a stuck pig and the nice 13 year old baby sitter in her calm couch sitting position hears the murderous screams and runs out to the back yard, only to be greeted by a child that is tied to a metal implement on his hand that is tied to the fence and that he is totally panicking, so she decides that the best method of solving the problem is to also panic. She starts screaming and both are running back forth and of course trying to calmly talk about the weather. The neighbors hear the commotion and cooler heads eventually prevail. The baby sitter didn’t know what to do, she was in shock and didn’t know how to open the spring traps… the neighbors do and release the little screaming pig. They gather everyone up and get them in the house. Another set of friends show up and ergo our house is the epicenter of pandemonium. All with the inquiring questions of what in the world are the Dowdles up to (me of course), being at the top of the list. Five minutes later we show up and after an initial grilling and death ray stares into my soul I had to rush Natalie out of the house to take the baby sitter home or hospital- if only to persevere my own life. Needless to say, the babysitter, never worked for us again- I never did understand why?
Clearly I had not thought the trapping scenario out fully, what would my ever curious kid do should have been top of the list. What was he capable of, we were leaving and I left the traps fully set- now that was brilliant. At the time it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The biggest deficit of all was what I would have done if a cat actually was caught in the trap either with me home or especially with me not being home. Ok not my finest hour of decision making.
Now what of the cats, they continued to be the rotten little creatures that they were but in some ways they were embolden to be even a little more cavalier. They knew I no longer had the power over them, I even thought I saw them sitting on the yard berm as this whole debacle was unfolding and I thought I saw them laugh to each other and shake their heads, knowing that they won that battle, I had missed them as the trapping targets and rather Travis my own son had become my first catch……well it’s a start.