10/05/2026
Musquash
I’ve been missing my dad. I didn’t realize how much until I glanced at the calendar and realized it was almost October. It will be two years ago on October 25th that he left us. Alzheimer’s imprisoned him, death released him.
October is a special time. It is a month of opening days: bow
season, duck season, goose season and pheasant season. I may have as many fond memories of my dad in October than the remaining eleven months combined. One of the most cherished opening days was not in October however, but the first Saturday in November in the 1970’s.
One day after exiting the school bus I spied my dad working on something behind the garage. He was standing beside an old galvanized tub perched above a roaring fire containing a bubbling inky black solution. A dowel rod spanned the length of the tub running through rings attached to small chains that disappeared into the pot. “Whatcha doing?” I asked. “Boiling traps,” he said with a smile. “Saturday is trapping season and we’re going,” whereupon I whooped and hollered and danced a jig. Dad was a self-employed small business man and he rarely had time off for leisure. This would be our first real project together and we were both excited.
Dad had secretly bought a couple dozen old traps from his nephew, Jim, who lived just down the road. He had walked the yard and picked up a five gallon bucket of walnuts and the flame and water was now dissolving them to “stain” the traps.
Lekwa Marsh, a 194 acre public hunting area with a mixture of grassland, timber and small marsh, was barely a mile from our house. It was absolutely loaded with muskrat houses that dad said no one ever trapped. The reason was that there was no boat ramp. 99.999% of the trappers we knew used their homemade low profile “pumpkin seed” duck boats to travel from house to house harvesting the water rats. That was also a challenge because we didn’t have a boat and we would need to carry everything in hand wearing chest waders. After an unusually wet year the water was high and staying dry would be risky business.
Rat trapping was pretty simple. Take a willow stick with a colored ribbon tied to the top for identification, run it through the ring of the trap chain and drive it into the mud next to the cattail abode of the little mud beaver and simply place the trap on the “slide”. After the muskrat climbed up one side to make some home repairs he would “slide” down the other side to get some more building materials while catching his foot in the trap. In the 1970’s millions upon millions of muskrats were taken by this method with pelt prices reaching historic highs of 8-$9.00 each! Dad knew we wouldn’t get rich but my savings account would take a significant bump.
Neither of us slept that Friday night and while you couldn’t legally start trapping until 8:00 am, Dad had us at the driveway at 6:30 am just in case someone else had the same idea we did. When eight bells tolled we were running for the water like it was the Klondike gold rush.
In no time at all we had set one trap to each house along the shore, “so many houses, so few traps”, we thought. As we ventured deeper our waders seemed to shrink. Finally we were bobbing on tiptoe at the last house. When the trap was set we turned and promptly stepped into a “run”, that labyrinth of tunnels the rats used to move from house to house. We frantically searched for higher ground while icy water spilled over the top of the waders, filling our boots with murky marsh water.
At midnight Dad shook me awake to make our first run. After nearly fifty years I can still remember the exhilaration of taking our first “ mush rat” as my Uncle Cal called them. The next several days were rinse and repeat- catch some rats,step in a run, get wet. On Wednesday morning I told Dad we should just check our traps in our swimming trunks. The experience would be the same but we would dry off faster. He wasn’t convinced.
On Friday we pulled the traps and Saturday morning we drove 45 minutes north to Kensett to Tostenson Fur Buyers, “Southern Minnesota’s and Northern Iowa’s top outlet for raw furs.” I imagined us to be just like the mountain men coming to the post to trade furs for blankets and gun powder.
Several years later we both got our duck boats and shared several decades of opening days together. In recent years I have occasionally trapped Hendrickson Marsh in Story County and Paul Errington Marsh in Polk County to take a few mud cats but more for the memories than the money, as the fur market is pretty dismal. It’s always enjoyable but never the same without dad.
