During the winter of my seventh-grade year, my dad thought that it’d be a good idea to teach me a little about trapping. It began with the usual water sets to catch pond-bank damaging muskrats and to trim the population of a few of those resourceful nuisances of the animal kingdom, raccoons.
While we didn’t own a pond, a neighbor was thankful to get some of the water rats removed to preserve his fishing hole.
Raccoons were another story. These inquisitive characters’ spring antics were a joy to watch but they’d soon be digging around flowers and vegetables. Garbage cans were constantly raided, and no sweetcorn patch was safe. They also seemed especially susceptible to distemper. Dad explained that knowing how to reduce the numbers a bit was part of living in the country.
Of course, I was all in. We put out a modest number of traps, and I learned quickly that dealing with the animals after they were taken was work. Due to dad’s job and my school, neither of us really had the time to properly prepare the hides, so dad found a local fur-buyer who didn’t mind skinning and stretching the pelts himself. The fur-house also had a market for the carcasses of the critters, which alleviated any waste of a resource.
If memory serves me correctly, that buyer would give me three silver quarters for a good muskrat and $2 for a large raccoon. On one particularly good night, we came home with six rats and three masked bandits. That was $10.50 that dad put in my own savings account. When adjusted for inflation, that amounts to more than $92 in today’s pennies!
While the money was certainly an important factor, the time spent with Dad was far more valuable. He taught me that there’s always work behind the money, that there’s a lot of responsibility in doing things correctly and that a commitment to understanding your own impact on the world is important.
On days Dad worked late, it was my job to pull on my coat and boots and tend the traps. My school friend Tommy would walk along during these evening inspections. The sets were designed to quickly dispatch the animals, so my job was to retrieve them and reset the traps.
On one particular twilight walk, we found an animal that was very much alive and waiting. It was covered in mud and would have been difficult to identify if it weren’t for the familiar odor. Peering through the yellow-tinged beam of the flashlight, Tommy glanced at the animal then at me, “Why are you trapping skunks?”
As we looked more closely at this weasel family’s smelliest cousin, the animal appeared to be completely black with only a topknot of white on its head. We just knew that this rare anti-albino had to be worth 50 dollars if a raccoon was bringing two!
We had no way to properly dispatch the animal so we started back to Tommy’s house to get permission to fetch his father’s old Stevens Favorite .22 rifle. As we walked out the door with Tommy carrying the rifle and a dozen cartridges in his pocket, his kid sister followed us outside.
While she was his kid sister, Alice had actually been my classmate since kindergarten and their family lived just a couple of football fields away.
“Can I come along?” she asked.
Tommy wasn’t eager for her company but before he refused, I piped up.
“If you want to, but we have to kill a skunk in a trap,” I explained.
All I got in return was a smile and a shrug. That didn’t surprise me. Alice was a bit of a tomboy, tossing baseballs, footballs and such. Growing up with an older brother and his friends that are that close to your age often has that influence. So, off we trudged. During the walk, we talked of the possible monetary windfall of the skunk’s valuable fur.
We arrived at the skunk’s location, though we could have actually found it blindfolded — from several miles. Tommy quickly took his shot. He looked at me and I looked at him, both with a “what now” expression.
We found a couple of long-forked tree branches and struggled to release the trap without getting too close. That done, we again looked at each other. How were we to get it back to the house?
As we discussed our options, I glanced over at Alice who had a thoughtful expression.
“I can carry it for you,” she said.
Tom looked in my direction and smiled. Problem solved. I wasn’t so sure about that.
Our quarter-mile walk back to their house was into the wind. We took advantage of it by staying 10 feet in front of Alice and the skunk, her holding it by the tip of the tail with her arm stretched straight out to her side.
As we arrived at the edge of the yard, I could see Dad’s old Plymouth coupe parked in the drive with my bike sticking out of the trunk. He was leaning on a fender tending his pipe when we spotted each other. He began to wave, but then he saw Alice.
Apparently, he’d been talking to Alice’s mom, judging by the gasp heard coming from near the house.
“Alice, drop that skunk right there,” Dad said calmly with a bit of a grin in his voice. The skunk hit the ground.
“Alice, you get into the garage right now!” came her mom’s much sterner command, though it also had something of a grin in it.
She followed with, “Tom, it’s supper time,” which had Tommy heading in to get cleaned up.
Dad had retrieved a shovel from an outbuilding and quickly dug a hole and buried the skunk where it had dropped.
We didn’t live far away, but the loaded bike indicated Dad didn’t want me riding the roads in the dark. He walked back to the car and used his briar to motion me to get in. When we arrived home, he turned the key and with a cough, the old car’s engine sputtered out. As I began to climb out, his hand landed on my leg, a silent command to sit tight.
Was I in trouble? I wasn’t sure — which I figured was a good thing.
He tapped the cherry-blend ashes out of the pipe and said simply, “Skunks aren’t worth the trouble.”
So much for the purported windfall. I shook my head in an “OK” gesture and again reached for the door handle. The hand returned to my leg and tightened — and I froze.
He sat there for a few more minutes, methodically reloading the bowl while a bead of sweat formed on my brow. He pulled his hand off my leg and reached to pick up his Zippo lighter; paused, and then looked at me carefully.
Those few moments seemed to drag like hours until he said thoughtfully, “If you don’t do anything else with your life, marry that girl.”
My look at him must have been hilarious because he just laughed and shook his head as he snapped the lighter shut, never firing the old pipe.
Christmas landed a couple of weeks later, and it went about as many family holidays do: too much food, lots of kids playing with new toys and stories of other Christmases and people I’d never know. One gift was never unwrapped, and I was the only person on earth to know about it — until nearly 16 years later.
My mother sold our old family house and, while doing the final cleaning, found a wrapped Christmas gift tucked away at the back of the top shelf in my old bedroom’s closet. There was no name on it but its location indicated that I was likely the one that hid it there. By this time, I was a game warden now living clear across the state.
During a visit to take one last look at my childhood home, she handed the palm-sized package to me, a cartoonish Rudoph looking up from the wrapping. I smiled and shook my head as an old memory started to dance.
“Who was supposed to get this?” she asked as I gently removed the paper.
I opened the small jewelry box which originated at a long-gone Five and Dime store. A single gold-plated initial hung on a chain. I handed to mom.
“S?” she asked with a questioning rise of one eyebrow.
“Skunk,” I said, as I wondered if that seventh-grade girl would have smiled at the gift she never got.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Maya Angelou
