Article in Trappers World this month reminded me of a old guy i worked with long ago, was my first job and it was helping the road dept. in the summer while i was out of highschool. Naturally that fall when trapping season started i showed up at the grocery store parking lot like always to sell what id caught to the traveling fur buyer who came through every 2 weeks. and there stood the old guy id worked with, Charlie Feltman!

He had jacked up a toyota corolla car and put buckshot mudder's on the back and a winch on the front, he had a trunk full of coon hides and 1 mink hide, he had no clue i was a trapper and had retired and just took up trapping at the ripe old age of 65! He had no clue what anything was worth and thought he was rich cause he had that mink hide and was shocked when i told him his big coons would bring as much as that mink would, lol.

Reading that article this afternoon reminded me of Charlie, it's a great read and funny trapping makes 64 year old men as excited as little kids when they discover it for the first time, those of us that plod along everyday on the line lose that sadly, it was a great reminder of how things use to be.

Trapping makes a kid out of me. btw I’m 77.

JTrapper, I can remember pretty much every time I sold fur and got to listen to these old fellows aggravate each other, measuring cats to see who had the longest one that week. Those were some fun times and much simpler than these days.

I was maybe 10 or 12 when a friend of my fathers brought a beaver into the kitchen, all I could think of was that huge beaver for months. That started a lifelong addiction, I wonder what he would be thinking now with all these crazy times!?

Leave it to you to take a old man on a tramp line

I went bear hunting with hounds in the U.P. when i was sixteen. One of the guys up there got to chatting with me about trapping and come to find out he lived about 30 miles from me. He was 71 and we decided he would go with me and trap some land i had that had bobcats on it way south of where i lived, had a old want to be mobile home you nearly froze in every night to stay in. He would trap all day and coon hunt with his hound every night, i hung with him for about 3 days then told him i had to get some sleep, lol. He said us young folks were soft, lol. He was tough as nails. His last name was Thorpe but he wasn't related to Johnny.

Great stories! Those times were special, lots of cold hard days with empty traps. Now look at us...our country our kids and we trappers are still going strong! It says something about what we like to do, where we like to go ...hang out. Being out in the woods, walking next to a creek, getting a chance to see/hear wildlife is important to me. We need to find young folks who might feel the same way and teach them where they can go and find the enjoyment/peace that we find in trapping.