The town I grew up in was small enough that to be 2.5 miles out meant you were living in the country. And we enjoyed country living. I’m not sure everything we did was a good thing, like the time my older brother decided we should do some trapping. I think he was about 12 and I was 7.
I do not know where he got the trap from. It wasn’t a bear trap but it could have done some damage to a body if you stuck your hand, foot, or limb in the jaws of it. Our house sat on an acre of property with the back half of it wooded. But that’s not where we went trapping. We went further into the woods and set our trap up by a small crick. Crick is what we called a small stream, in Georgia it’s called a branch.
Setting the trap didn’t take too long. I watched as my brother did the work, after all it was his idea and he was older. Baiting the trap was next and I can’t remember what we put in the thing. We really didn’t care what we caught we just wanted to trap something. I guess now PETA would stage a demonstration.
The waiting for some unfortunate creature to get caught in it was next. We would have to walk to the trap every day and check. It stayed empty for a good while until one day there was a raccoon in it. What excitement! We caught something- a raccoon. Then came the realization that we had an animal to deal with. I guess my brother knocked it in the head because it was quite dead when we carried it home. We tied the legs together and found a sturdy stick that we ran between the legs. We each took an end and proudly walked home. It wasn’t heavy but it was an ugly dead raccoon hanging upside down swinging between us.
As we walked my brother talked about making a coon’s skin cap, after all he had an actual coon to skin.
But we hadn’t figured on my mother. She was horrified. She was angry. And she was adamant that the coon had to be buried immediately, the trap had to be thrown out, and we were never to trap anything again. Let me tell you, when my mother decided on something it was a done deal.
I guess she didn’t fully embrace “country living” like we did.