NEITHER LAND NOR WATER

In the trapping trade it’s mostly cut and dried as to how you pursue fur. There are land trappers and there are water trappers. But there’s another type of setting that you might just be missing out on. The kind of terrain that is just as dry as it is wet, and that if you looked over you’d soon see opportunity and more.

IS IT DRY OR WET?

Way back in the early years that I first trapped one of those weedy farm ponds that every operation once had. It was backed into a half-mile section of semi-wet grass dotted with scrub willows, and while it had dry times, it always provided a handful of muskrats or weasels, and even a wandering mink — a real prize for any 10-year-old. Working the boggy ground provided a wonderful trapping education and still draws me just as much as it did all of those decades ago. The kind of terrain that is as much liquid ground as it is stiff water. I’m talking about the overgrown ponds that have filled in with weeds, or the spongy spots where a brook has its start, or acres of wet grass that occasionally becomes a series of ponds. You know these places — the ones you have driven past mostly because it doesn’t look like