Pennsylvania Game News - February 2014 - 7

Fox
"Did he eat the bait?" Dave asked.
I couldn't recall if the chunk
of fish I'd put in the hole was still
there. When I went back to remake
the set after school, sure enough,
the bait was gone. The deer tracks
were still in the dirt, but there were
other tracks there, too, that I hadn't
noticed earlier that morning. They
looked like fox tracks.
Scenarios ran through my mind,
but I concluded that the fox sprung
the trap, stole the bait and the deer
just happened to walk right through
my dirt pattern shortly afterwards.
Dave sounded bummed when I told
him later that night. On the bright
side, I had a fox actually visit my set.
It was only the second time I'd had a
close call with one. The first time occurred a year earlier. I'd set traps after
Christmas break and a blizzard hit the
next day. My sets were buried under a
foot of snow, but a fox found one and
dug it up. Somehow it never even
sprung the trap, just pushed it up out
of its bed and onto a small pile of
packed down snow. It even left a calling card on the trap without setting
it off or getting caught. I checked
that set every day for the next two
months, until the close of the season,
but the fox never returned.
I was always in awe of fresh fox
tracks. When I was a kid, I followed
them long distances in the snow,
hoping to eventually jump one just
to see what it looked like. This was
before I even learned to trap. I was
FEBRUARY 2014

11 or 12 years old with lots of time
on my hands, and an equal amount
of curiosity about all things wild.
No matter how far I went, though, I
never kicked up a fox. The tracks just
went on and on, and I wondered if
they ever stopped.
By the time I got serious about trying to trap one, in my mind I'd built
them up as being almost impossible
to catch, which only made them an
even more worthwhile pursuit. From
all the trapping books and magazine
articles I'd read, catching a red fox
seemed a rite of passage. You couldn't
truly call yourself a trapper until you
had one to your credit. So when I
found tracks in my dirt-hole pattern
or a flipped trap, it was heartbreaking. I'd had my shot and blew it.
How long would I have to wait for
it to come around again for another
chance?
The next morning, day four of my
trapline, I checked my traps in the
river bottom first. A small front had
passed through the night before and I
figured it would get the coons moving. Sure enough, I found a big coon
in a crossing log set. The log had
been covered with coon droppings
and a noticeable trail ran the length
of it. It was a big old moss-covered
log that spanned the width of the
stream about 3 feet above the water.
The rest of the 'line was quiet.
That raccoon catch was a good
way to start the day. It gave me
something to think about at school
and made the day go quicker. During
study hall, I went to the library and
checked out old trapping magazines.
An article by Charles Dobbins caught
my attention. It was a method piece
7
Pennsylvania Game News - February 2014

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