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In the late fall of 1963, when I was fourteen, here on the farm, enjoying the most outdoorsy year of my life, Grandpa Grossmann instructed me and my cousin Terry in the basics of fur trapping. Gramp was sixty-one years old and had had a heart attack some years earlier but had never stopped smoking tobacco, so, in a cautious compromise, he reserved for himself the best part of the “big crick,” the easiest parts of marsh to get to, and assigned us boys each a stretch of the rest of the water. Terry tells me now that he thinks we each set twenty or thirty traps.
Muskrats and mink were what we wanted. Beaver and otter were also in the creek, as they are now, but we were interested only in the smaller animals, and we staked our #1, single-spring traps underwater just off the creek bank in a way such that, most times, a rat (or, one night that winter, a mink) would spring the trap and, in attempting to swim away, would tangle the trap chain around a second forked-dogwood stake, which caused the animal, if all went well, to drown without a lot of misery.
One icy almost-dawn, I cautiously stepped down the creek slope to inspect a certain trap-set and saw a dark form underwater near the second stake, the drowning stake. It looked to me as though I had caught a good-sized muskrat.
I was wearing hip boots. Clumsy, uninsulated, stiff-in-the-cold hunters’ waders. In my gloved left hand I carried a gunny sack; in my right, a heavy hickory club I had sawn from a living tree. The club was crude, about as long as my lower leg and, at the smaller end, a little thicker than the grip end of a baseball bat. I stepped into the water, took two cautious steps toward the stake, and felt the mud of the creek bottom clutch my feet.
I pushed my club under the big, drowned muskrat to lift it and move it to where I could get ahold of it, but the creek geysered up in front of me—exploded! This, I then realized, was not a muskrat after all, it was not a drowned anything, but rather a healthy, unhappy, entirely alive raccoon! He hissed and lunged and snarled. I, unable to retreat, matched his fury and desperation with my own. The entire confrontation was completed in a few seconds’ time.
I wasn’t planning to reminisce about that long-ago, unpleasant riparian rendezvous, but I hope you will forgive me, for I happened to be reminded of it several times in the past several days, when a hissing, snarling man, seemingly trapped, received widespread attention in the nation’s news.
♦
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