58 
Forest and Stream 
lars and everything else in proportion. 
The law of supply and demand has much 
to do with the price of fur. When furs 
are plentiful a normal demand is readily 
supplied at a low figure, while if it is a 
scarce article, competition often forces 
the market to a temporary high level. 
The professional trapper never makes 
more than wages on the average, and it 
is what one makes, year in and year out, 
that determines one’s earning capacity. 
NOWLES and I had secured three 
dogs while in Edson. We made 
harness and a toboggan for them and 
broke them in fairly well before leaving 
town. Little did we dream how valuable 
those animals would be ere the winter 
was over. The average person has no 
idea of the work that an ordinary dog 
will do when once onto the game. 
We left Edson with close to two hun¬ 
dred pounds of grub, arriving at the 
Athabasca on the evening of January 
1st. Murphy had been visited by a 
streak of luck—he had killed a moose 
(we were all out of meat by that time), 
and had caught a very large silver fox. 
They had been practically living on 
meat while we were away and the grub 
we had brought back was truly appreci¬ 
ated. The fox that Murphy had trapped 
was one of the largest I have ever seen 
and but for the fact that it was slightly 
rubbed would have been perfect. 
The foxes of this country are the very 
first animals to become prime in the fall, 
and also the first to shed their winter 
coats. As a rule, their pelts are in good 
condition up till the mid¬ 
dle of March, but occa¬ 
sionally the hair will start 
to loosen on some of the 
foxes as early as January 
and sometimes before. 
This is generally due to a 
sort of itch, causing the 
animals to rub against 
trees and spoil the quality 
of the coat. 
We had an exception¬ 
ally fine catch on our 
traplines and caught al¬ 
most as much on this first 
trip after our return, as 
we had taken all winter 
previously. This is what 
one may expect in the 
trapping game—a streak 
of good luck and then a 
time w h e n everything 
seems to go wrong. 
There certainly seems to be something 
akin to luck in this particular occupa¬ 
tion, for even the best trapper of the 
north country never knows what he 
is going to get in his traps—once they 
are set out. To be sure, one must not 
depend to any great extent on luck, for 
if the trapper is careless about his busi¬ 
ness his traps will be in such a condi¬ 
tion that a dozen valuable foxes might 
tramp on them without endangering 
their pelts. 
A short time after our return to the 
trapline I had occasion to make a short 
trip down river from the Baptiste head¬ 
quarters. My partner was up on the 
north lines at the time. The farthest 
I intended going was but a mile or so 
from camp so I left my rifle at the cabin, 
thinking there was hardly any chance of 
seeing any animal worth shooting, 
but it is an oft repeated saying that 
whenever the hunter leaves his rifle in 
camp he is sure to see game! 
There was a high cutbank, about 
three-quarters of a mile below the cabin, 
where the river had eaten its way into 
a small mountain of sandstone. About 
fifty feet above the bed of this river, a 
ledge ran along the sandstone cliff. As 
I passed underneath I happened to 
glance up and saw a magnificent fox 
lying there in the pale sunshine. I 
gazed in astonishment at him—he was 
coal-black except on the hips and the 
tip of the tail. I was so close I could 
see his eyes distinctly and I am not sure 
but what he winked at me. At any 
event, I do know that he stretched him¬ 
self leisurely and trotted slowly away, 
leaving me the victim of the worst at¬ 
tack of “blues” I had ever experienced. 
It took me a long time to fully recover 
from the effects of this piece of care¬ 
lessness! It was an object lesson to me. 
The question of being prepared is just 
as important in the trapping game as in 
anything else. 
When we went up-river again we 
found the Rapeljes just about “on the 
rocks” as far as grub was concerned. 
We had known they were running shy 
of some things but did not realize they 
were so badly off. There is an Un¬ 
written Law in the North that no one 
must starve as long as a bite of food 
remains in the entire community. The 
Rapeljes were especially to be pitied be¬ 
cause there were two of their number 
practically helpless—the old Civil War 
veteran and the blind sister. We has¬ 
tened back to the head camp and 
brought a supply of everything we had 
back to the needy ones and then went on 
up the Baptiste. 
At Bear Creek cabin we spent a very 
miserable night on account of the ex¬ 
treme cold. We had not placed a stove 
in this camp but had constructed a small 
fireplace of sandstones. The only way 
we got any sleep whatever was to “fire” 
in shifts. It is hard to imagine how 
cold it can get in some parts of the 
world. The day we left the Rapeljes, 
enroute to Bear Creek, I froze one of 
my ears severely and it was swollen to | 
a most alarming size by night. Knowles I 
had fallen on a smooth glare of ice (we j 
traveled almost entirely on the frozen j 
Baptiste that trip) and had slightly dis- . 
located his hip, so that he was feeling 
more like the last thirty cents of a 
million dollars than a hardy trapper. 
One of the greatest lessons I have 
ever learned was taught me in the wil¬ 
derness. This was the lesson that pa¬ 
tience is a great virtue. It was hard to 
smile, or even look at things in a cheer¬ 
ful light, when cold, tired, hungry, and 
many weary miles from a comfortable 
cabin. At such times one is apt to think 
of all the luxuries he is missing and 
heartily curse the day he went into the 
wilderness. But the longest day is in¬ 
variably followed by darkness and with 
darkness comes sleep and rest. Some-: 
times, of course, as it happened the 
night we stopped at Bear Creek, the 
cold is so bitter that one has very little 
chance to rest comfortably. 
During the course of a single season’s 
trapping a man will walk a few thousand 
miles and needless to say, this is not al¬ 
ways under ideal conditions. When the 
snow is deep and one has a good trail 
broken, traveling on snowshoes is ideal 
and the trapper can make forced 
marches of a surprising distance. But 
directly after a heavy fall of snow, get¬ 
ting about by any means is a heart¬ 
breaking task. Especially 
is the trapper to be pitied 
when the snow is soft, for 
then it clings to his snow- 
shoes and makes of them 
leaden weights that drag 
his very spirit down into 
the smothering white 
blanket. To be a wilder¬ 
ness trapper one must 
have rare courage; when 
everything is going O.K. 
it surely is a fascinating 
game, but when Bad 
Luck has the upper hand 
life becomes almost un¬ 
bearable. But one must 
learn that it’s ALL IN 
THE DAY’S MARCH! 
HEN Knowles and I 
returned from the 
trip up-river we decided 
that it was up to us to make another “re¬ 
lief journey,” for by this time there was 
scarcely enough grub to last the Mur¬ 
phys and Rapeljes another week. The 
snow had been falling steadily for the 
past few days and on our last trip down 
from Fraser Mountain we had noticed 
that the height of land, which we had 
to cross on our way to town, looked dis- 
couragingly white in the distance. 
Fraser Mountain was north of the Bap¬ 
tiste headquarters and from . there one 
could see clear across the Baptiste and 
Athabasca valleys to the Moose Moun¬ 
tains, the height of land I mention. 
(Continued on page 86 ) 
