In our early teens both Tim and I went through a trapping phase. We acquired a whole bunch of traps and had a trap line in the winter along our creek in the woods and our neighbor’s creek. We were mainly trapping muskrats. We would take turns walking the trap line. This meant getting up around 5:30 on a cold dark snowy winter morning and walking 3 to 4 miles or so all before school. Having never been a great lover of winter, this was very difficult from me to do but the thought of making some money gave me the impetus to brave the cold ice and snow and skulk around in the pre dawn darkness. Although I have always despised snow, I have always liked to walk outside on it when it’s dark and cold. The sounds seem to be more acute under these conditions. I also always liked to hear “The sounds of silence” in the predawn still.  We were doing pretty good and soon had a lot of muskrat pelts to sell. Some guy showed us how to skin them and stretch them on boards to dry out the pelts before selling them. One year we received some nice skinning knives for our birthday, which made the job easier. Our “Holy Grail” of trapping was to trap a mink since these would really bring high prices for their pelts. In all the years we had our trap lines, we never did catch an elusive mink, just muskrats. However, we did catch one thing we never expected! This particular morning it was Tim’s turn to do the pre dawn trap line walk before school. During his walk he found a live fox in one of the traps! He walked (or probably ran) back to the house to grab one of our rifles. I of course was excited about the fox catch so I went back with him. We went back with the rifle, shot the fox, and dragged it back home. I remember it growling at us before we shot it. We skinned it and had a swell fox pelt (as you can see in the pic below). We were late for school that day and we still remember the excuse our mother wrote for us. It read, “Had animal in trap”.  We both thought that was really neat to be late for school and have such a neat excuse as that! The one thing that always puzzled me is that we kept the fox pelt rather than selling it, which would have no doubt brought a pretty good price. I guess we chose to have the trophy of a fox we caught and skinned. We kept it in our room for years. In the spring and summer we would also make money shooting woodchucks from our neighboring farmers. We would get 25 cents a woodchuck bounty which was pretty good money in those days! If you want to see our experiences with shooting woodchucks, check out the story “Woodchuck Warfare”.