ranges. Bears and wolves are plenti- 
ful in the north country, but it’s 
too cold there for the big cats. 
Maybe their hair is too short. 
I happen to know a few men who 
have been pretty badly scratched by 
bears, but it was invariably their own 
carelessness that lead to these accidents. 
They cannot be called anything but 
accidents. Take a crusty old domesti- 
cated bull, for instance; devil the life 
out of him until he gets to a certain 
point and you will bid fair to get in- 
troduced to a hearse (if there’s enough 
of you left). The same law applies to 
grizzlies. The females with young are 
apt to be aggressive if suddenly con- 
fronted—so is a muskrat, fighting for 
its young. An old boar grizzly, just 
awakened from his winter’s nap, may 
be hungry enough to consider the edi- 
bility of even a skinny trapper. All 
trappers are skinny, after a winter in 
the mountains! 
RDINARILY a bear will get out 
of my way too fast to suit me, es- 
pecially if he has a good pelt. The 
same thing seems to effect all the wolves 
I ever trapped or hunted for—alto- 
gether too shy. Of course we have all 
read about so-and-so being killed. But 
believe me, you trappers and would-be 
trappers, don’t ever be afraid of wolves 
tackling you, especially when their 
hides are fetching fifteen or twenty dol- 
lars per. I say, let ’em come, the 
thicker the better! 
Cougars have a certain well-adver- 
tized fondness of following the way- 
farer after darkness has settled in the 
mountains. This little trick of Mr. 
Cougar has no doubt been the direct 
cause of gray hairs in a few instances 
but never, that we know of, has the 
party in the case been scratched. A 
“the 
cougar doesn’t regard man as 
fondest thing he is of,” as Cohen’s 
darkies would say. Of course it 
wouldn’t do to say that a cougar “hasn’t 
scratched yet,” like Bon Ami, but after 
my first winter in the woods I never 
lost any sleep over the fact of a cat or 
two being loose thereabouts. 
HE trapper working the high moun- 
tainous country of the west and 
north is invariably a-marten specialist, 
the other furs such as wolf, fox, fisher, 
lynx and cougar being more of a side- 
line. I never yet saw a mountain that 
was worth trapping to me if there were 
no marten ranging on it. Once a range 
of from four to five thousand feet eleva- 
tion yielded several hundred weasels to 
three of us, but the minute we found 
conclusively there were no marten 
thereabouts, we pulled out for the less 
strenuous work of trapping mink and 
wolves in the valleys. You’ve got to 
average uniformly high catches to pay 
for climbing mountains. 
Wolf trapping generally gives out 
when the snow gets deep, especially if 
it is soft and not crusted. These sly 
fellows find it easier hunting in the 
lower levels where there is much less 
snow. In some instances high lines 
yield quite a number of foxes, often 
good ones (cross or better) but the 
very best fox countries are the com- 
paratively level, slightly rolling lands 
east of the Canadian Rockies in the 
Athabasca and Peace River districts. 
ISHERS are mountain dwellers 
closely related to martens, but they 
are scarce in numbers even in a region 
trapped but little. Hence it does not 
pay to specialize on them, if martens 
are lacking. The three thousand foot 
foothills of the mountains are best for 
lynx and it never did pay to trap for 
cougars unless one has had a special 
market for the skin (to be used for 
mounting). But, enough of mountain 
trapping for the present. The proper 
methods of capturing the wild animals 
mentioned, as well as many others, will 
be found in a later installment of this 
series. 
The trapper of the plains, in this 
western country at least, is primarily 
a wolfer, although he often makes visits 
to muskrat ponds, mink streams and 
’coon hollows. But, if he can’t cope 
with the sly coyotes and gray wolves, 
he had better hang up his traps for 
the other animals have been trapped 
considerably and are generally too 
searce to furnish enough revenue them- 
selves. 
In the last sixteen months the writer 
has traveled ten thousand miles via 
motor car in Washington and Idaho, 
trapping and looking the country over. 
Marten I found to be practically a 
thing of the past. There were a few 
fairly good mink streams encountered. 
Muskrat trapping is very much over- 
done, but most everywhere we went the 
coyotes were thicker than I have ever 
known them to be. Patently there is a 
splendid opportunity for men who can 
adapt themselves to the pecuiar calling 
of the “wolfer.” It is a very interest- 
ing branch of trapping to say the least 
and the man who makes a success of it 
is to be complimented on both his 
science and the application of it. 
Gore TES consistently fool most trap- 
pers with a regularity which prom- 
ises they will be in the country when all 
other forms of fur-bearing animals 
have been destroyed. But you will find 
methods in this series, which if intelli- 
gently applied, will surely account for 
a goodly share of them. 
The mountain trapper is compelled to 
do most of his work on foot and when 
it comes to going from one place to an- 
other, the plains trapper is surely a 
lucky fellow. When a man can pick up 
a very passable car (one that is easily 
passed) for a couple of hundred dollars, 
he is surely a fool to walk! In bygone 
days the wolfer traveled horseback, or 
in a light wagon, but the modern flivver 
is certainly an improvement on these 
methods. Into it a man may throw 
several hundred pounds of truck—tent, 
stove, cooking utensils, traps, firearms, 
grub, etc., etc., step on the starter (if 
it isn’t the cranky kind) and be off to 
parts unknown. After a little practice 
he can teach his car to jump ditches, 
mud wallows, crawl fences, follow cow 
paths, negotiate sand, and, in short, 
act like an educated flivver should. 
Such an instrument of torture is surely 
the ideal companion for the plains 
trapper. 
There seems to be some argument 
amongst trappers as to the relative 
merits of flivver and go-devil (motor- 
cycle). Give me a flivver every time 
for general work. True it costs twice 
as much to run, but there is more than 
double the satisfaction for me. A fliv- 
ver will weather most any kind of 
storm while the go-devil doesn’t offer 
any sort of protection from rain, wind, 
sun or snow. Understand, the motor- 
cycle is all right, but the four-wheeled 
vehicle is better. We are considering 
the use of a side-car with the go-devil, 
too, for without this attachment the 
motorcycle would certainly be of little 
use to a trapper. 
THE trapping of marshes is exten- 
sively carried on in both late fall 
and early spring wherever trappers are 
found. It has its peculiar advantage 
in that a person may use a boat, canoe, 
or raft for transportation purposes; 
means, which in some instances, even 
beats the trapper’s flivver. 
In this western country, where the 
larger lakes do not freeze over at all, 
extensive trapping operations may ex- 
tend throughout the season. For ex- 
ample, Coeur d’Alene take in Idaho 
and Lake Washington in the State of 
that name are the base of operations 
for many trappers. On these larger 
lakes small power boats are employed 
and very few Coast trappers work 
without a launch of some sort. 
The animals usually taken in this 
branch of trapping are beavers, minks, 
otters, muskrats and racoons; the dif- 
ficulty being to locate a place where the 
animals are plentiful enough and the 
trappers scarce enough. Often there 
is hot dispute over who’s who and why. 
A man who traps in these regions 
mentioned must be prepared to stand a 
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