In high school in the winter months, we trapped muskrat,
Tramping through heavy snow to seek their habitat.
Ice-cold brooks and streams our destination,
Looking for their signs of location.
Leg-hold traps placed in underwater-hole entrances,
Unlawful, but also the doors in lake-home expanses.
Either drowned or dispatched with a rounded stick,
To preserve the fur from holes and tears caustic.
Seventy-five cents for each dried-skin pelt bounty,
This was trapping in every northern tristate county.
A rural way of life not understood today,
Which now we realize cause many dismay.
Please no “ex post facto” prejudicial judgment,
That is the way life was then without chastisement.
Bill Kibildis
Sparta