Trapper From Paradise
River

Howard Lethbridge

Howard Lethbridge lived the hard life of a fur trapper. It was a beautiful, sunny day when I visited him in Cartwright, Labrador. It was late in August, but already you could feel that the fall weather was very near. It would soon be winter, the best time to trap for fur.

MY FATHER, PHILLIP LETHBRIDGE, trapped for forty years. I learned from my father. Of course, I started off very young. I wasn't quite ten years old the first time I made a short trip in the country. That trip was about two nights long, in November. It was cold then, with quite a lot of ice. There wasn't much snow but there was quite a lot of ice around. The frost comes in November down here, sometimes in October.

Father had his trapping line in from Paradise River, where we lived. We started right from the house. In a day, we walked four miles to our first cabin.

I was just a little over fourteen when I took off on my own, trapping. I trapped on my father's trap ground. He was just about giving it up. I did a lot of trapping alone, but some years I had a buddy, or perhaps one of my brothers.

We had our first trap a half hour walk from home. That's where we'd start setting traps, and we continued on up our trapline, with traps so far apart.

Around four hours was the average walk to where the cabin was. That's as much as you could make in a short day in the winter when tending your traps, setting your traps, and resetting.

We didn't start trapping until around the middle of October. That was when the season was open, and we'd trap until the first part of April, most of the time. After that, furs weren't much good because they would be shedding.