“When I grow up,” grumbled the kid, “I’m gonna live in the city.”
His bare feet skittered over the frigid linoleum and he slid behind the big wood-burning cookstove in the kitchen. A calico cat blinked one eye from atop the woodbox as the kid ran a finger over her head and touched the pink nose.
“Time is it?” he yawned, turning his hindside to the stove.
“Four,” said his mother, “And you’re going to get General Wesco branded on your bottom if you don’t move.”
“How cold’s it?” he chattered.
“Zero. Just right for hog killing.”
“Oh, boy!” Heat ran in the blood now. Sleep had dulled the knowledge that today was Saturday, that it was hog-killin’ time on the farm, that feeding and trapline running had to be done so that, at sun-up, the butchering could start.
Feet flew into overalls, into extra socks. Laco boots (with the five-bladed knife pocket on the side) on feet. Coat, gloves, ear-flap cap. “Too hot in here,” he complained.
His mother opened the door and handed him the lighted lantern. “If you catch any skunks,” she threatened, “don’t you dare take them out of the trap.”
“They’re 35 cents now,” he cried blowing his breath to see it billow smoke. “Hope I catch a dozen.” He grabbed his hatchet, looking longingly at the .22 in the corner of the porch.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, and he left the porch in a leap, lantern swinging wedges of light across the snow.
The timber, a quarter mile distant, loomed up and at its edge, the boy stopped at his first trap; a box trap, the trigger thrown. His heart thumped; rabbits were 14 cents now. But the lantern showed where the door had wedged. The rabbit left hair when he escaped.
The boy whittled a sliver off the door, tested it. “Betcha she’ll catch the next one,” he said, and was off into the woods.
A great flapping of wings stopped him, heart in throat, for a moment. Then he saw the great-horned owl, flowing across the open field, to stop in a lone hickory nut tree and offer a protest; a coyote, disturbed, yipped; in the depth of the timber, a friend answered.
Cautiously now, lantern extended, hatchet at ready; a body never knew when he’d get attacked in these wild woods.
Indians, even, might be hiding here, come back from the caves along the crick to retake their homeland.
The skrunch of boots on snow was deafening.
How could a body ever sneak up on the enemy in boots?
Moccasins, that’s what he needed. He’d tan the next rabbit skins and make a set. There’d been a pattern in the last issue of Boy’s Life.
The rock fence loomed up, and there were three No. 2 steel traps set along it. The first one, thrown. Mouse, probably. The next one wasn’t in its set and the chain had been dragged into a hole in the rocks. A tentative tug on the chain produced a like reaction on the other end. The boy sniffed? “Ain’t no skunk, for sure.” And he hauled out the trap. A rabbit squealed. A quick thump of the hatchet behind the ears. “Fourteen cents,” he said, and went for the next trap.
He smelled it long before he got there, and the light of the lantern showed it to him; not just a little old civet cat, but a real skunk, its black and white plume waving above its back in a threatening manner, back humped like a halloween cat, eyes sparks in the night.
“Gosh,” he said. “A bigg’n. Might bring a premium,” and visions came of a 50-cent pelt. But that’d have to be split with the hired hand, ‘cause ma and pa wouldn’t let him skin the skunks. But why? The hired hand always got the skunks out of the trap and skinned without much smell. Why couldn’t he?
The .22 would have made it simple. Now, he had to figure a way to kill the skunk before it sprayed him…
