Coyotegods: Trappers convention

I wasn't SOUNDLY beaten, but I was beaten, all right; I came to find out (belatedly) that the old boy who did the beating was himself beaten last year (and by a girl(!)) who taught him that crushing up the crust along with the apples made chewing pretty much unnecessary, and that was the edge, I suppose, even though it looked pretty nasty.

It was a busy Convention, though, at least for me; we got there at about 11:00 a.m. on Friday, and one of the first people that I saw when I walked in was Gerald, which was a pleasure as usual. For those of you that don't know him he's the flat-out nicest guy that you'd ever want to meet, and I would venture to say that he's as done as much (or more) to promote and enable predator calling than anyone else that I can call to mind. This year he volunteered to sponsor and chaperon the Camo Contest after Jim Schmidt got crossways with the ATA, threw a little hissy fit, and withdrew (not that he was much missed) and before and after that he was steady busy answering questions and shooting the breeze with all and sundry. He sat in on my seminar at 1:00 p.m. Friday, and between he and I there was enough interest that Cindy finally threatened us with some awful consequence if we didn't quit around 3:15 so that they could get on with some other events. By the time that the ATA Director's meeting started at 7:00 p.m I was whipped, and when we finally got that over with I skipped the poker game in favor of hitting the sack.

Saturday, in addition to the things that Dave mentioned, featured a couple of very interesting cat-trapping demos; apparently the Nevada boys have liberal rules and regs concerning equipment and trap checks, in addition to an unlimited take, so they're coming up with all sorts of interesting techniques, including visible steel trap sets with shingles glued to the trap pans, and they're stacking cats in piles. I managed to sit through one seminar featuring trap modifications in between running the ladies pan toss (which Miss Cheryl won, accounting for the only first place award that our mob collected) and getting whipped (again) in the musket toss and helping with the awards ceremony and the auction and politicking a little, and THAT night Gerald and I finished up my seminar at something like 10:00 p.m. for the hard-core elements who managed to stay that long.

Sunday Kurt Bonnewell and I team-taught a Trapper's Education course (which is a pre-requisite in Arizona for obtaining a Trapper's License) from 8:00 a.m. 'til about 1:00 p.m., and then we made the four-hour ride home in some pounding cloudbursts and fell asleep on the couch.

Attendance WAS down this year, but those damned gas prices are impacting everyone, and you could see from the auction that discretionary income is in short supply compared to other years. Fur prices are forecast to be up again this year, though, the ATA looks to be in good shape financially, and we have some plans in the works for trapper recruitment among the kiddies, so I'm hopeful that better times are ahead for the organization and for trapping in general.

We'll see; the next date of note is the ATA Fur Sale in Feb, and I expect that most of the usual suspects will be there once more, so we'll see what develops. In the meantime I'm sort of looking at bobcats with a bad eye this year; there's lots of them, and if the prices match or exceed last year's levels there's gonna be some money there, and it doesn't take a lot of money to get a trapper to set a trap in the first place.

John-Henry