Tommy Strake was a trap.

In the small town where I grew up in the 1950s, almost everyone fished or hunted for sport, and many did both. But Tommy actually made a living off the land, I think.

There were a lot of rumors about Tommy, some of them my mother told me in the same tone she used about bats getting into my hair if I stayed out past dark.

Most people avoided him, which I think he preferred, but it was a source of great wonder and curiosity for a young man who loved all things outdoors and considered a trapper to be the type of man Zane was inspired by. Gray, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway. write so well

Tommy was a wiry, wrinkled fellow with a voice that sounded as if he had honed it with a wood rasp. A cigarette always dangled from his lip, and everyone knew he made whiskey somewhere. Every movement of him was slow and deliberate, even a little funny, and he had a loud laugh that welled up suddenly and spontaneously from deep within and reverberated through those tortured tonsils.

He lived not far from me, in an alley that I often took as a shortcut to Ronnie Tebbe’s house. One day I was on my way there to check on some baby marmots we had caught and tried to breed.

The entrance to Tommy’s shed led into that alley. He never used it for his truck, and there was a lot of speculation about what was in there, because it was usually locked. But that day the swing doors were wide open. He just had to take a look.

I slid around the edge of the door, and there he was, looking at me. Surprised, I hid behind the door.

“Hello, young man,” he said in that booming voice and a big laugh. “Don’t hide behind the door. Come here and say hi.”

I went to the door and his weather-beaten face greeted me with a big smile. She held a broken steel trap in a bony hand that had two very crooked fingers. The walls of her shed were lined with dried skins stretched into wire shapes that she clung to until “the market got good.” Piles of steel traps hung in clusters in one corner, along with hip boots and wellingtons. A long workbench was littered with various tools, coffee cans with refills, and vials of putrid liquid.

I had a thousand questions, and he answered all of them. I felt the luxurious fur of muskrats, minks, foxes, raccoons, and even a coyote, which back then everyone said only existed in the west. He showed me how the various traps worked and with a smile he even let me smell the “natural charm” he used to cover his tracks and attract the various animals.

Tommy always had a mischievous smile and told many stories about outdoor adventures that were so fantastic that all he could say was “wow” which made him smile too.

“Could I go trapping with you sometime?” I asked.

“Well, it’s quite a difficult matter,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you join me on some raccoon hunts this fall.”

I spent the rest of the summer trying not only to get my mother to let me go out after dark, but also to go raccoon hunting with the famous Tommy Starke. Finally she paid him a visit. I don’t know what she said to herself, but then she gave me permission, along with a bunch of stipulations and precautions. I don’t remember what they were, I was excited and I accepted everything.

Come to think of it, one of them might have been not to climb any trees.

Tommy stopped his old truck in a lowland field and let three eager dogs out on a moonless night. They went into the woods and before long let out a melancholy bark that I still like today, even though I no longer want to hunt raccoons.

“They’re wooded,” he yelled, and we ran through the woods, carbide lamps whistling and tree branches whipping into my face.

Unfortunately, this raccoon had climbed a large evergreen tree. Tommy walked around the tree, shining a flashlight on it, while the hounds went wild with excitement. He was contagious.

“I can’t make a clear shot,” Tommy yelled over the dogs.

I must have gone crazy too. “I’ll go up there. That’ll probably get him moving out in the open where you can shoot,” I said.

After a bit of discussion, he decided to let me try. “But be careful,” she said.

Climbing trees was nothing to me. I traded my carbide lamp for the flashlight and started to climb. However, every few branches, I would stop and take the flashlight out of my back pocket to shine around. Tommy had warned me that raccoons can get pretty mean.

After doing this a few times, I was three-quarters of the way up the tree, and when I turned the flashlight back on, the biggest raccoon I’d ever seen was staring back at me, hissing like a demon.

“Are you alright, boy?” Tommy yelled.

The raccoon was so close, that even though my arm was bent, the flashlight was close to his face. Without thinking, and as fast as I’ve ever done anything, I punched the flashlight forward, right into the animal’s muzzle, before Tommy even said the full “You okay, boy?”

It fell and crashed through the branches, right on top of the dogs, creating an uproar I haven’t heard since.

I wrapped my arms around the tree and held on for dear life. I was pale and weak, but I didn’t want Tommy to know that the ordeal had scared me.

He and the dogs were too busy to notice. After a tornado from a battle went around the tree, they subdued the raccoon, but not before he left the two blue tick hounds with deep cuts, and the black and tan limping so badly that he didn’t hunt again. for weeks.

“You can go down now,” he said.

“Well, I thought maybe you wanted me to look around here some more in case there was another one.” That joins the cam almost as fast as the flashlight hit.

When I hit the ground, Tommy slapped me on the back with a big laugh and said, “You sure be a fighter, kid.”

I never climbed a tree again, but I’ll never forget old Tommy Strake.

He was a trapper.