Thia is hard to put into words and I certainly wouldn't put it on fb because most people there wouldn't have a clue but its something being in sync with the natural world and man's relationship to critters. Hunting and trapping involve killing an animal, there is no denying that, but its not the actual act of dispatch that "excites" me but its finding my rightful place in the world as the apex predator and where we can (should) fit in the world. There's a connection there that modernism will never replace for some folks. If God allowed the Earth to continue without people, at least in North America, it would be some of the fur critters we chase that would "rule" after us, primarily the coyotes and raccoons in my opinion. They have the smarts and the flexibility to adapt to what would be next. We play chess with the animals, that's something that most people will never truly comprehend.

Law Dog- It wasn't trapping but just seeing the "emptiness" of people that others have mentioned that I felt hunting turkerys one late afternoon sitting on a side hill at Boyer's Bottom looking out over "Lake" Francis Case. I estimated that I could see about 30 square miles of water at that time and there wasn't a boat on it anywhere. And yet, I was less than ten miles south of a trans-continental highway where hundreds of people crossed the same reservoir every hour. It made me feel....small...in the overall sense of the physical world.

from the picture you posted;
Seeing that little CG emblem on a jacket is all I need to see.

some things there aint no words for but I other trappers know what you talking about when you don't say anything

all of thee above and more I love starting out a kids that's never been in the outdoors and seeing them grow and still love to trap when they become adults not all of them do but enough to get me trying just to know that some one else we be doing what I love after I'm gone

Three come to mind...
Every check with my boys, love spending time with them.
Breaking open a big long spring at a beaver dam, hearing the water rush over that dam.
Third was just last week...Thursday st 3:30AM I am walking my coyote line and I find myself out in middle of a mowed hay field, sets are empty but the sky is clear and the sky is spectacular. I shut off my headlight and stood there in awe as one of the most fantastic geminid meteor showers I've ever seen went on over my head. Long streaking slow burners that looked like they would smash into something. Best meteor shower I ever saw in my life. Coyotes were singing on the nearby farm. You can't buy an experience like that!
Jim

peace and quiet,peace and quiet.

Yep sometime for me it's just looking West. Knowing I've lived another day and watching the sun burn into the ground.. Many times while trapping, hunting or fishing. I've stopped for a moment just to look at the sky and pointed this out to my son.
It may be a different view for each of us depending on where we live. But we all live and work under the same sun and moon.


Mac

i miss very few sunrises

Mine is the trap shy dog. The old boy that likes to dig out and crap on sets. Spend two weeks trying to get him until finally there’s a weathered old dog, missing an eye, and two middle toes waiting for you. Check and mate. Love it.

Setting a trap for the first time with Grandaughter. She picked the spot the set up and the lure. Then roll up on this little kitten, let her go only seemed appropriate. Grandaughter was happy about that as well said Papa let it soak and get a better one.

and these are the reasons i started this and will figure this trapping out....

"There's a land where the mountains are nameless
And the rivers run God only knows where.
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair.
There are hardships that nobody reckons,
There are valleys unpeopled and still
There' a land, Oh it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back...and I will."

Robert Service, Spell of the Yukon.

A lot of the above. Another is not having a lot of time some days and being satisfied that I caught nothing(I have few traps out). Happens during deer season as well.

Wow, this post got deeper than I expected in a good way. Keep them coming! Great stuff

Little girls that love skunks even more than the boys.

For me it's making a set on a foggy morning and having a flock of trumpeter swans fly about 20' over you. Would love a picture of that but I know it would be next to impossible to do so, but the snapshot is in my mind.

To walk across a frost covered field and see a dark scar upon it that indicates you made a catch.

To see sunrises and sunsets that are beyond descriptions.

To walk the trapline when its snowing and hearing the snow sizzle past your ears, while the rest of the world seems so silent.

To walk a small stream, gurgling and burbling slowly, sounding like a far off conversation you just can't quite make out.

Wishing others could experience the things you do on the trap line. Sometimes it's just little things like the bubbling of a creek, a bird or squirrel so close you could reach out and touch it, or the majesty of a huge buck silhouetted against a cold Fall sky and seeing the steam from his breath. I've always admired this quote from Henry David Thoreau -

"You shall see men you never heard of, whose names you don't know, going away down through the meadows with long ducking-guns, with water-tight boots...on bleak wintry, distant shores, with guns at half-(This word is unacceptable on Trapperman); and they shall see teal...shelldrakes, whistlers, black ducks, ospreys, and many other wild and noble sights before night, such as they who sit in parlors never dream of."