THE TRAPPER

To be a trapper requires something more than setting traps and baiting them. The old trapper returns from a season spent among mountains, rivers, and forests—ladened with valuable furs of every kind: beaver, bear, otter, fox, mink, wildcat, coon, opossum, etc. Remember the animal kingdom is infinite in variety; no two alike. A trap that will catch a beaver will not answer as a bear trap; a coon and a mink are as far removed from each other as a polished American and a native of Madagascar. A coon will not go within a rod of a chain, but have little if any keenness of scent for protection. A rat will not go near an object if the smell of human hands is on it.

Volumes of natural history would be inadequate to give the details of differentiation of the animal kingdom. The old trapper in his log cabin has never read a page of zoÖlogy, but is far more familiar with the ways of the furry folk than the scientists who write our books on natural history. The trapper is a graduate from the school of Association; he has studied the traits and pranks of the forest inhabitants by observation at close range. He knows just where the mink can be caught, and just how the trap must be baited and concealed; he has the same information about all the rest, and can apply it. Once when a child, we were enraptured until late bedtime by the stories of an old trapper: telling about “the different varmints.” Without drawing on his imagination, he could have added many chapters to the tales of “Uncle Remus.” The facts about our furry friends are far more interesting than fiction; the trapper knows about these facts.

The Psalmist calls Satan a fowler; one who sets traps for old and young as the fowler sets traps for fowls. How is it done? Leaves and weeds are carefully cleared away, and the trap is skillfully set by a trigger, so that the slightest touch will spring it. The ground is also cleared for several rods leading off in front of the trap; suitable food is scattered under the trap and all along the clean strip of ground. The birds excitedly follow the line of “food”—walking under the trap where it is scattered in abundance. In the scuffle, the trigger is soon touched; behold the trap falls, and they are caught; oh, how they beat their heads against the prison bars until they are covered with blood, but all is over. They are caught in the snare of the fowler.

Every animal and fowl will flee from the approach of danger; the trap must be hid, or in some way made to appear as something harmless; nature has endowed them to seek always self-preservation. With nothing but instinct to guide, they are easily caught by the skill and cunning of man, but never caught in the open; some, however, are more easily caught than others, but they must be trapped.

The Bible teaches that the Devil is a trapper; his snares are set everywhere—they are man traps; no spider ever spun a web more accurately for the moth than Satan’s traps to catch men. It requires certain bait and certain traps for each particular animal and bird, but the snares for men are legion. Man has a threefold nature: body, mind, and spirit; each of these have many avenues of approach. As the trapper gains his knowledge of the furry tribe by association, so the Trapper of men, by the application of supernatural powers, in close contact and intimate association through the past millenniums, has become intimately acquainted with man.

There are no facts touching his habitat, food, passions, ambitions, weaknesses, yearnings, etc.—whether in the realm of body, mind or spirit—but the cunning trapper of the pit is more minutely acquainted than man is acquainted with himself.

If guileless and unsuspecting men and women were the only victims, the situation would not be so serious; not that one soul is of more value than another, but the facts are: no one seems to be capable of discovering his hidden snares. The greatest and wisest—Alexanders, Anthonys, Napoleons, kings, sages and philosophers—have been captured by him at his will. What a shudder would go over the race if it could penetrate the veil of mystery and see the traps towards which we are moving; moving on to certain capture, but for Providential oversight and guidance. Domestic traps, political traps, social traps, business traps, religious traps; the location and bait are suited to individual likes and dislikes.

“My soul be on thy guard; ten thousand foes arise.”

Our country is just beginning to awake to a system of trapping now being carried on in every city and town, so gigantic and heinous that we are dazed and frightened at its boldness. The great White Slave Traffic is carried on by traps, pure and simple; as carefully planned and skillfully executed as the methods of an old trapper who remains in the primeval forest to supply the fur market. The feelers and tentacles of this human devil-fish are running out in the highways and hedges: the factories, mills, department stores. But the traffic is not confined to the poor, uneducated girls at the ribbon counter or waist factory; girls of culture and experience are caught, but the bait used is very different. When once caught, not one in ten thousand ever escapes.

A being less than a fallen archangel could never have instituted the White Slave Traffic. A man or woman not incarnated by the Devil or some of his minions could never promulgate a system so vile, so inhuman, so hellish, as the traffic of innocent flesh and blood, to be offered and burned on the altars of lust for gain. Compared with the White Slave Traffic, as it is prosecuted by the panderers and procurers, negro slavery, at its worst, the extermination of which the bloodiest war ever fought on this planet was waged, is like the vilest ribaldry ever sung in a den of vice to a Te Deum. Lest we forget—Satan is an expert trapper—the king of trappers.

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