Page:Saunders - Beautiful Joe, 1893.djvu/196



OU had foxes up in Maine, I suppose, Mr. Wood, hadn't you?" asked Mr. Maxwell.

"Heaps of them. I always want to laugh when I think of our foxes, for they were so cute. Never a fox did I catch in a trap, though I'd set many a one. I'd take the carcass of some creature that had died, a sheep, for instance, and put it in a field near the woods, and the foxes would come and eat it. After they got accustomed to come and eat and no harm befell them, they would be unsuspecting. So just before a snowstorm, I'd take a trap and put it in this spot. I'd handle it with gloves, and I'd smoke it, and rub fir boughs on it to take away the human smell, and then the snow would come and cover it up, and yet those foxes would know it was a trap and walk all around it. It's a wonderful thing that sense of smell in animals, if it is a sense of smell. Joe here has got a good bit of it."

"What kind of traps were they, father?" asked Mr. Harry.

"Cruel ones—steel ones. They'd catch an animal by the leg and sometimes break the bone. The leg would bleed, and below the jaws of the trap it would freeze, there being no circulation of the blood. Those steel traps 187