Lifelong trapper recalls life where the wild things are
By Eugene Scheel, Published: October 24
Check out yesterday’s Washington Post for the sepia-toned memories of wistful trapper Tom Frye who literally scraped his livelihood off the backs of the animals foolish enough to walk into his traps. I don’t know why the Post decided we need another such article at this moment in our collective lives, maybe because the AP article mentioned in passing that trapping was controversial?
“There’s not many of us left,” Tom Frye said as we talked recently at his Furnace Mountain home, above Taylorstown. For 50 years, he has trapped raccoon, skunk, mink, muskrat and beaver, from Loudoun County south to Prince William and Orange counties.
“I started out when I was 5, maybe 4, in 1940. We lived next to Bush Hall’s livery stable on West Loudoun Street [Leesburg], and this time of year, mice and rats would come out of the hay into our house. Then I started trapping muskrat in Town Branch and Dry Mill Run. I caught my first mink in the Town Branch; they were pretty much everywhere — up around Lincoln, in those streams there a lot.”
Let me get this straight – the Post is asking us to feel wistful about the lost art of trapping without ever feeling responsible for the lost species that were trapped? But obviously it was this paragraph that got my attention…
Frye’s prowess as a trapper caught the ear of Loudoun game warden T.A. Daniels when beavers began menacing wetlands. “We didn’t start seeing any beaver until the late ’60s. Just like the deer, there just wasn’t any here. They migrated from the [Potomac] river up those feeder streams.
“The mother will kick the young ones out when they’re about a year old, and they go to find a new territory upstream. They build a dam, and then they build a house [upstream from the dam]. Any time beaver hear running water, they try to stop it.
“They had cut down a half-acre of corn near Aldie [at Oak Hill Farm] and built a cornstalk home aside a stream coming into Little River,” he said. Frye laid large traps, as adult beavers weigh up to 60 pounds. “I think I caught four or five the first night. All I could carry. Caught one or two after that.”
Menacing wetlands! What an idea! No wonder something had to be done! Thank goodness you were there Tom with your beaver-crushing devices to preserve our wetlands from these fiendish aquatic rodents. Whew! Maybe with all your spare time now you can help stop all that money from menacing our banks and those children from menacing our schools?
Oh, and Bonus Points Post for hi–jacking Maurice Sendak’s beloved title.
