Post by Lady Trapper on Jan 15, 2007 16:17:39 GMT -5
A box of shiny new muskrat traps sits on a table. Bottles of scents and lures line one wall. Beaver and raccoon pelts hang amid the rafters. A pot of bobcat meat simmers on the stove.
If the Hawk Mountain Trading Co. has the cachet of a place owned by someone who knows how to live off the land, that’s because it is. Since she was a teen-ager growing up in nearby Glenville, Janet Hodge has grubbed a living from central West Virginia’s hills by trapping, hunting, fishing and gathering.
She’s a case study in contradictions — a college graduate with a burning desire to live off the land, a computer-savvy businesswoman who’s as happy fleshing out a fox pelt as she is writing a newsletter, a die-hard trapper who’s too busy to trap.
“I’ve always liked doing things a little differently,” she said as she prepared a hide for the drying rack.
That’s an understatement. Hodge started trapping muskrats at age 11, an age when most girls are more interested in Barbie than in killing critters and skinning them.
“My brother, Tim, who was 8 at the time, got me interested,” she recalled. “Being outside really made it for me. We ran our [trap] line before and after school, sometimes by flashlight. We thought we were so incredibly cool.”
Not only cool, but prosperous.
“The kids who trapped were some of the richest in school,” she added.
By the time Hodge finished high school, she had become confident enough in her survival skills to venture out on her own.
“I wanted to live like a pioneer,” she said. “I moved into a one-room log cabin with no heat or running water. I spent two years there. I dug roots, I trapped, I hunted and I fished. And I did it. I lived off the land.”
Marriage to a serviceman took her to Georgia, and she put aside trapping to begin raising her children. After the marriage broke up, she returned to West Virginia and earned a business degree from Glenville State College. She went to work for the Glenville Democrat and soon became the newspaper’s editor.
“Then my second marriage went bad,” she recalled. “Some people might have called the welfare office. But for me, it was back to the land.”
She moved to Smithville, Ritchie County, and began scouring the woods for medicinal roots — black cohosh, bloodroot, yellowroot, bethroot, wild ginger and May apple. It was hard, dirty, backbreaking work, but it paid the bills.
“If a person’s willing to work hard enough, he or she can make $50 to $75 a day digging black cohosh,” Hodge said. “All that stuff was out there, just waiting for someone to come along and dig it up.”
In 1994, a chance encounter led her back into trapping circles. Dale Barker, owner of the local trading company, delivered a load of hay to Hodge’s compound. He asked Hodge if she wanted to earn some money.
“He asked me if I could flesh coon,” she recalled. “In 1995, I fleshed between 1,000 and 2,000 coon hides and made enough money to buy a car.”
While preparing coonskins at Barker’s shop — the same shop she now owns — Hodge watched Barker buy pelts from local trappers and hunters.
Janet Hodge’s shop looks an awful lot like a frontier trading post.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is cool,’” she said.
About that time, Barker asked Hodge if she would serve as the grading secretary at the West Virginia Trappers Association’s annual fur auction. As Barker and others examined pelts and graded them according to quality, she recorded the results.
“That got me started at learning how to grade,” she said. “It also got me active in the Trappers Association.”
She almost immediately became Ritchie County’s representative on the association’s Board of Directors. She edited the WVTA’s newsletter and set up its Web site. She was appointed to the state organizer’s post.
Last September, the membership elected her president.
In 1999, she became the first woman ever to give a demonstration at the annual National Trappers Association Convention. That same year, she decided to give something back to the pastime by starting a statewide trapper education program.
“Basically, I begged the guys [at the annual auction] for pelts and things to show to kids,” she recalled. “At first, they gave me the greasiest and scruffiest hides they had. But within three years, they and some [trapping-supply] manufacturers were seeking me out to give me things to give to the kids.”
More than 350 youths have graduated from the course since then. Hodge said sponsors have been so generous that she can now give away trapping starter kits to the first 50 youngsters who sign up.
“The course has become very popular,” she said. “Some of the kids even come from families where neither the mom nor the dad is a trapper.”
Trapping seems to have become more attractive to adults, too. Since the market for wild-trapped West Virginia furs bottomed out in the early 1980s, the number of trappers has climbed slowly but steadily.
“Interest is increasing. I sold twice as many trapping supplies in 2006 as I did in 2005. Fur prices haven’t increased all that much, but the interest in trapping definitely has,” Hodge said.
Her efforts to further the pastime haven’t escaped notice. Last fall, Division of Natural Resources officials named Hodge the state’s Sportsperson of the Year. Though she appreciates the honor, she said it doesn’t mean she’s done anything special.
“Most people [in the trapping community] just consider me to be one of the guys,” she said. “I think that’s the way it is in other outdoor pastimes, too. There are hundreds of women in this state who deer hunt, turkey hunt, bear hunt and fish. There are even a few of us who run trap lines. It’s not a competition between females and males. It’s an opportunity to enjoy the outdoors and the resources they provide.”