Although it wasn’t necessary for me to ask Barney a second time for permission to marry his daughter, Gwen and I did a have a long conversation with him and Bertha about our wedding plans. Part of that conversation involved asking Barney whether he would be willing to help out with the wedding. “Sure,” Barney replied, “I’ll hold the ladder when you elope.” This wasn’t exactly the full-blown blessing for our proposed nuptials that we had hoped we might get, but, it was a start.
Over time Barney gradually accepted my presence in the life of his family, if for no other reason than I spent every weekend at his house beginning in July of 1962 and on into what seemed to Gwen and me an interminable time until the wedding date we had set as June 8, 1963. I would arrive at his house on Friday evening and leave on Sunday evening.
When I arrived on one of those weekends he had a surprise for me.
Barney was well aware of my deficiencies as far as being a hunter, trapper, fisherman and jack-of-all-trades was concerned. And, nowhere was I more sorely lacking than in the trapping area. He was not impressed when I told him about my success at trapping mice in the barn on the farm and setting snares for rabbits in the cedar swamp below our house. He set about to correct this flaw in my resume by announcing on Sunday night, as I was leaving, that I should bring some old clothes next weekend—we were going coyote trapping.
There was no longer a bounty on them, but Barney was not a fan of coyotes; he saw them as sly, cunning predators that did nothing other than prey on deer herds. When he got on his soapbox about coyotes, as he would with only the slightest provocation, he would say that when all the people are gone from the face of the earth there will still be one coyote running around.
When I arrived on the next Friday night, Barney was already involved in some sort of pre-trapping ritual that involved a fire pit beneath a cast iron black cauldron filled with a foul-smelling elixir made of water, hemlock bark, and something called logwood powder. To this day, I have no idea what logwood powder is other than that Barney got it from Herb Lenon, a trapping guru in Engadine. The traps we were going to use the next day were immersed in the boiling liquid to remove their shine and any human scent.
Before retiring for the night Barney had me help him pack a knapsack with several items including a canvas drop cloth, a wooden frame with a screen over it, rubber gloves, a garden trowel, a roll of waxed paper, and a small packet of something that Barney called scent. Scent, also acquired from Herb Lenon, would be used as bait for the traps. I asked what it was, and all I could deduce from Barney’s explanation was that it had something to do with dried reproductive glands of the animals we were going to trap. I could hardly sleep that night, wondering whatever we were going to do with the contents of that knapsack on the next day, and, more importantly, would I be up to Barney’s standards for becoming a trapper? Would I be able to someday say to Gwen: “Hon, let’s go for a ride over to Engadine; I have to get some scent and logwood powder from Herb Lenon?”
We arose at sunrise the next morning, ate the hearty breakfast that Gwen and Bertha prepared for us, and then loaded up Barney’s four-wheel drive Toyota pickup. We didn’t have very far to drive, but there was time for conversation. The topic of marriage never arose; instead we talked about the merits of fly-fishing with a muddler minnow as opposed to spin-casting with a Meppes Spinner as a preferred way to catch brook trout. I could see what Barney was up to here; he was going for a twofer. He was not only chipping away at my trapping deficiency, he was throwing in a little work on the fishing problem. Hunting and jack-of-all-trading would have to wait for another day.
It wasn’t long before we were bumping down a two-track “Forestry Road”, as Barney called it. We arrived at what looked like an abandoned gravel pit, and Barney announced that this was a good place to set a trap for a wily coyote. He slung the knapsack over his shoulders and headed down a trail into the woods. Now my serious training in trapping began. Wherever there happened to be a bare spot of dirt on the trail I was instructed to avoid stepping there so that I wouldn’t leave a track. “Geeze,” I thought to myself, “those coyotes must be awful smart to be able to see our tracks and know that we were carrying paraphernalia that would be used to bring about their demise.” Barney set me straight on this; he didn’t want any other trappers who might stumble upon our trail to discover where he was going to set the traps and come back later to steal whatever he had caught.
Apparently there is no honor among thieves.
Before too long, we stopped at what Barney determined was a spot where a coyote was likely to pass on its way to prey on a herd of deer. Now my education really began. First, he carefully spread the canvas drop cloth on the ground. Barney knelt on it, put on the rubber gloves, took the trowel in his hands and began to dig a hole in the ground. For reasons not clear to me, this couldn’t be just an ordinary hole in the ground; it had to be dug at a 45 degree angle and, of course, be large enough to accommodate the trap that Barney had carefully laid on the canvas. As he dug the hole, Barney carefully took each trowel full of dirt and sifted it through the screen device. He explained that the dirt would later be used to bury the trap, and care had to be taken to remove any pebbles or other objects that could jam the mechanism. I noted that everything involved in this operation was done with extreme care so as to not leave any human scent for wily coyote to sniff.
When he judged that the hole was of proper pitch, depth and dimensions the trap was set and carefully placed in the hole. He then sprinkled the mysterious scent powder over it, and covered it with waxed paper, another precaution taken so that dirt couldn’t jam the mechanism. Still wearing the rubber glove, Barney used the trowel to carefully place the filtered dirt on the waxed paper covering the trap. Last, he broke a limb from a nearby evergreen tree and used it as a broom to smooth the dirt over the trap. We were done.
Barney stood up and I helped him pack the equipment back into the knapsack. Feeling every bit a fully chartered member of the society of those who set traps for coyotes, I cleared my throat, and, as is the custom of men when they have completed a manly task, I spit—on the ground—the freshly smoothed ground that covered the trap.
To his credit, Barney didn’t get a gun out of the pickup and shoot me on the spot. He simply sighed, shrugged his shoulders, leaned over, dug out the trap, and loaded it in the truck. “Time to go home,” he said. We didn’t talk much on the way home. I didn’t think it was a good time to try to impress him with my qualifications as a future son-in-law.
Fortunately, his daughter Gwen, the love of my life, was an adamant foe of trapping; she and I were in agreement that it was cruel and unnecessary. She didn’t think that I was a bad person for doing what I did; in fact, she got a good laugh out of it.
It would be 30 years before Barney took me on another trapping excursion with him. It would have none of the drama of my first episode with him, but would be far more poignant.
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