CHAPTER XXVII. 

 Handling Raw Furs and Other Notes. 



BOYS, as you are nearly all in from the trap line and the 

 trail, (May, 1910), I am going to take the opportunity to 

 give the younger trappers (and some of the older ones, 

 too) a drubbing. I would like to see every trapper get 

 all that his furs are worth and I would not like to see one-half 

 the value of your furs go, simply because you neglected to skin 

 and stretch your catch as it should be. 



During the past winter I was in town one day and met a fur 

 buyer and he asked me to go over and see his bunch of furs, 

 saying, "I am going to ship the furs tomorrow." I went with the 

 fur dealer and found that he had a lot of stuff, several hundred 

 dollars worth of furs, consisting of fox, coon, skunk, mink, and 

 muskrat, some wildcat. A good part of this bunch of furs had 

 been caught at least a month before it should have been. Of 

 this unprime fur I will have but little to say. I am sorry to know 

 that any trapper will throw away his time and money by trapping 

 furs before the fur is in reasonably prime condition. 



This dealer had many coon and skunk that had from one-half 

 to a pound of grease left on the skin. I asked the dealer if he 

 was going to ship those pelts with all that grease on. His reply 

 was, that he was going to ship the furs just as they were and 

 added that he did not pay anything for that fat, and only half 

 what the skins were worth if they had been handled right. I sug- 

 gested that he would have to pay express charges on that grease. 

 The dealer said that he .could not help that, signifying that he 

 had made that up in buying- the furs. I called the dealer's atten- 

 tion to a very good black skunk skin, that had been badly skinned 

 and stretched and asked what he paid for such a pelt. He said 

 that he did not remember, but he knew that he did not pay $3 



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