Pennsylvania Game News - July 2011 - 5

along this stretch was flat and smooth and very slippery. One always watched his or her footing when hiking along the Slippery Rocks. It was in the vicinity of the old mill dam that I set my first trap. Just as had been suggested in The Trapper’s Companion, I made a cubby hole set, placing some flat stones together to form a cubby-hole with a trap at the entrance and a sardine at the far end as bait. I have to say that as I recall at that time a can of sardines in some kind of oil cost five cents. So I always used sardines as trapping bait, and because I liked them, whatever was left over at the end of the line, I usually ate myself. At the upstream end of the Slippery Rocks there was a long sloping waterfall we called the Step Falls, because the bedrock had been eroded into a series of shallow steps. The total drop in the falls from its highest point to its lowest, probably a hundred feet or more downstream, was 15 or 20 feet. At the top of those falls and off to one side, I made another cubby hole set and continued up the creek bed until I had five sets strung out close to a mile or more along Mallory Run with one trap left. Knowing that Dad had told me I had to check my traps every morning without fail, and still be back home to help with the milking at 6 o’clock, I figured that the trapline was just about as long as I wanted to handle. So I headed back downstream with the intent of setting the remaining trap below the old mill dam. Probably 100 yards or more downstream from the mill dam, and maybe 50 feet from the creek into the field, there appeared to be the remnants of an old
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wagon road that led from the mill through the field to the creek, then across the creek and along the edge of the woods on the far side. Just before the wagon road crossed the creek there was a low rise in the land with a pile of brush on top. I set my last trap at the foot of this rise, perhaps 20 feet from the side of the creek, with a sardine held a foot or more above the trap in the split-end of a stick. To my unpracticed eye, the set didn’t appear as neat as the cubby hole sets I had made farther up the creek, but with a shrug of my shoulders, I figured it would have to do and turned my footsteps homeward. To those who have never set a line of traps, that first night is as intense or more so than the night before deer season. I went to bed early with the alarm set for 5 o’clock, and the intent to fall asleep right away. Instead, in my mind I reviewed every set I had made that day, going over every detail and visualizing a wily raccoon or mink as it worked along the stream searching out crayfish or minnows until it smelled the sardine and entered the cubby hole set. Then I wondered if my No. 1½ Victor traps would even hold a coon, or if the mink would back off and not enter the cubby hole set. Perhaps I’d have been better off had I limited my trapline to the hedgerows around the farm, but Dad said that with using sardines for bait, I’d catch every cat in the neighborhood and the neighbors would be upset. Besides, I dreaded the prospect of skinning
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Pennsylvania Game News - July 2011

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