Just after getting back from the Miss Maria, I was invited to live with a local couple, Mansfield and Loretta Matterface. I’ve been with them since. The timing was great, as the weather up here is getting fairly nasty for open-air camping. Loretta can spin together a mean soup and has resurrected many good stories about her working days as a line manager at the fish plant. Mansfield, who goes by “Mans”, is a lifelong fisherman- a skiff lobsterman who earned his pennies setting along the steep shores of Brunette Island, located 10 or so miles from Fortune. He also managed shorter careers as a side dragger and fish plant worker. Now retired from fishing, Mans is revered as the town’s master rabbit snarer.
Four-wheelers are very common in these parts, and seem to be the transportation of choice to get to the Post Office and anywhere beyond. Mans has the one thing that trumps a four-wheeler: an Argo. An argo is the Cadillac of off-road vehicles, and capable of amphibious travel. Having an Argo makes Mans something like royalty in the outdoorsman’s court. His prowess at trout fishing, moose hunting, terr hunting (a routine unique to Newfoundland, involving hunting the fishy-tasting common murre on the open ocean in skiffs) solidifies his status as royalty.
Lately, the wind has been keep Fortune’s boats at bay, and so I’ve been going into the woods with Mans. For an owner of an ATV deluxe, he’s surprisingly happy to go by foot. He’s taught me how to set wire rabbit snares: a loop of light-gauge wire about the size of an average man’s fist, not, “big enough to catch an elephant,” and stressing that I take my time, “no need to set in a rush, working like a cat handling a musket”. Rabbits have little runways in the moor-like country, which are visible to the keen or experienced eye. Much of interior Newfoundland is this moor-like country, something like a alpine swamp, beautiful at a distance, perfect for moose and rabbits and a damn pain for most anything else. Setting a snare along these runways, sizing it properly, and disguising it well sometimes leads to rabbit stew the next evening. Some people put rabbit near the bottom of their edibles list, but Mans feels otherwise, telling me that he finds it delicious, “a notch above squirrel”. I’d have to agree, especially with the latter. So far, Mans’ snares have outperformed mine 6-0. Until the wind settles, I’m an eager rabbit-snaring apprentice.
get 'em!
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