The Trapper And The Scrapper

THE TRAPPER AND THE SCRAPPER
By Ron Kruger
Tommy Strake was a trapper.
In the little town where I grew up back in the ‘50s, most everyone fished or hunted for sport, and many did both. But Tommy actually made his living off the land, I think.
There were a lot of rumors about Tommy, some of them told to me by my mother in the same tone she used about bats getting tangled in my hair if I stayed out past dark.
Most people avoided him, which I think he preferred, but he was a source of great wonder and curiosity to a youngster who loved everything about the outdoors and considered a trapper to be the kind of man that inspired Zane Gray and Jack London and Ernest Hemingway to write so well.
Tommy was a wiry and wrinkled guy with a voice that sounded like he tuned it with a wood rasp. A cigarette always dangled from his lip, and everybody knew he made whisky somewhere. All of his movements were slow and deliberate, even kind of graceful, and he had a hardy laugh that came suddenly and spontaneously from deep inside and reverberated through those tortured tonsils.
He lived not far from me, down an alley that I often took as a shortcut to Ronnie Tebbe’s house. I was on my way over there one day to check on some baby ground hogs we had captured and tried to raise.
The entrance to Tommy’s shed faced that alley. He never used it for his truck, and there was much speculation about what was in there, because usually it was locked tight. But this day the swinging doors were open wide. I just had to take a look.
I eased around the edge of the door, and there he stood, looking back at me. Startled, I ducked behind the door.
“Hey young feller,” he said with that booming voice and a big belly laugh. “Don’t hide behind the door. Com’on in here and say howdy.”
I eased back around the door, and his weather-beaten face greeted me with a big grin. He held a broken steel trap in a bony hand that had two badly bent fingers. The walls of his shed were lined with dried hides stretched on wire forms that he was holding onto until “the market got right.” Piles of steel traps hung in clusters in one corner, next to hip boot and chest waders. A long work bench was cluttered with various tools, coffee cans with spare parts and jars of putrid liquid.
I had a thousand questions, and he answered every one. I felt the luxurious fur of muskrats, minks, foxes, raccoons and even a coyote, which everyone said back then only existed out west. He showed me how the various traps worked and with a grin even let me smell the “natural allure” he used to cover his tracks and attract the various animals.
Tommy always wore a sly grin and had lots of stories about outdoor adventures that were so fantastic all I could reply was “wow,” which also made him smile.
“Could I go trappin’ with you sometime?” I asked.
“Well, its pretty rough business,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you tag along on some coon hunts this fall.”
I spent the rest of the summer trying not only to get my mother to let me stay out after dark, but to go coon hunting with the notorious Tommy Starke. Finally she paid him a visit. I don’t know what was said, but after that she gave me permission, along with a bunch of stipulations and precautions. I don’t remember what they were–I was excited and just  agreed to everything.
Come to think of it, one of them might have been to not climb any trees.
Tommy stopped his old truck along a bottomland field and let three eager hounds out on a moonless night. They took off into the woods and before long let out a mournful bay that still pleases me today, though I have no desire to hunt raccoons anymore.
“They’re treed,” he yelled, and we ran though the woods, carbide lamps hissing and tree branches whipping in my face.
Unfortunately, this coon had climbed a large evergreen. Tommy walked all around the tree, shining a flashlight, while the hounds went crazy with excitement. It was contagious.
“I can’t get a clear shot,” Tommy shouted over the dogs.
I must have gone crazy, too. “I’ll climb up there. That’ll probably make him move into the open where you can get a shot,” I said.
After some discussion, he decided to let me try. “But be careful,” he said.
Climbing trees was nothing for me. I traded my carbide lamp for the flashlight and started to climb. Every few branches, however, I would stop and pull the flashlight from my hip pocket to shine it around. Tommy had warned me that coons can get pretty mean.
After doing this a few times, I was three-quarters of the way up the tree, and when I switched on the flashlight again the biggest coon I’d ever seen was staring back at me–hissing like a demon.
“Are you alright, boy?” Tommy yelled.
The coon was so close, that even though my arm was bent, the flashlight was close to its face. Without thinking, and as fast as I’ve ever done anything, I punched the flashlight forward, straight into the animal’s snout, before Tommy even got all of “are you alright, boy” out.
It tumbled and crashed though the branches, right on top of the dogs, creating a ruckus I haven’t heard matched since.
I wrapped my arms around the tree and held on for dear life. I was pale and weak, but I didn’t want to let Tommy know the ordeal had scared the wits out of me.
He and the dogs were way too busy to notice. After a tornado of a battle that went all the way around the tree, they subdued the raccoon, but not before it left the two blue tick hounds with deep gashes, and the black-and-tan limping so badly he didn’t hunt again for weeks.
“You can come on down now,” he said.
“Well, I thought maybe you wanted me to look around up here some more in case there was another one.” That lie came almost as quickly as the flashlight punch.
When I reached the ground, Tommy patted me on the back with a big laugh and said: “You sure are a scrapper, boy.”
I never climbed a tree again, but I’ll never forget old Tommy Strake.
He was a trapper.