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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Crafty Animal Trapper Stays In The Hunt ‘I Can Catch Anything That Walks, Swims Or Flies’

As a poor Indiana teenager back in the 1930s, Bill Sullivan trapped rabbits, muskrats and other critters. He tracked expenses and sales in a tidy ledger.

Profits were spent on books and school clothes.

“I ran a 20-mile bicycle trap line,” he says as he opens that ledger on his kitchen table. “Got up at three in the morning.”

At 77, he’s still trapping.

“I can catch anything that walks, swims or flies. All I need is the time to do it.”

Sullivan’s skills are increasingly rare. The number of licensed trappers in Idaho and Washington has dropped by half in the past decade, despite rising populations in both states.

Urban lifestyles and a drop in fur prices are partly to blame. More and more people consider trapping cruel and outdated.

Still, there are others who see trapping as part of a proud heritage, or just plain necessary.

To them, Sullivan represents an ideal.

“He’s one of the very good ones,” says state conservation officer Don Carr. “There’s an ethic about him that’s refreshing. He’s a naturalist. He loves wildlife, understands wildlife.”

The best trappers, Carr says, are in contact with wildlife in a personal way. They can look at tracks in the snow and know not only what animals passed through, but what kinds of confrontations they had with each other.

“When I get out in the woods, my eyes are on the ground all the time,” Sullivan says. “I look at tracks, at scat. I walk soft-footed.”

Traps are hidden along roadsides for easy access from his truck. Especially now that he’s older, the idea of lugging a 50-pound beaver has no appeal.

Besides beaver, it’s legal to trap badger, fox, marten, mink and muskrat in Idaho. Trappers must use strategy: know how to choose the right traps, where to position them, how to bait them.

Sullivan makes many of his baits. A garage cupboard is filled with jars of pungent concoctions.

“I’ve never seen a beaver lure like I make,” he says. “I use beaver castor, granulated sugar and the cheapest rum I can buy.”

He pulls a baggie from the chest freezer. It contains kidney-shaped castor glands taken from beavers. He explains that the animals rub the oily substance on their fur.

Baiting is part of the challenge of trapping. The hard part starts after the animal is caught, Sullivan says.

“The fun’s all gone when you come in, in the evening, and the skinning and stretching starts.”

Open-heart surgery hasn’t stopped Sullivan from trapping and hunting. Nor did earlier nerve damage that led to spinal surgery in 1993. The numbness meant he couldn’t take long steps across a stream. “I’d get down on my knees and crawl across.”

His wife Janet, a hunter herself, understood the lure of the outdoors. The couple retired to this Priest Lake community in the 1970s, after he retired from 35 years as an inspector in a General Motors plant in Indiana.

Bill had the itch to trap again.

The extra income was welcome. In his best years, he made $4,000 to $5,000 from the sale of hides.

Now, he says, a fellow is lucky to make $1,000 during the trapping season. A coyote hide that sold for $150 a decade ago might fetch $15 now.

“Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there was a good price for fur,” he says. “I never bragged to anybody about how many animals I got. The only person who knows that is my buyer.”

That’s Roger Scheurer of Pacific Hide and Fur Depot in Spokane. Sullivan first went to Scheurer when he needed new traps to get back into the field.

Sullivan didn’t have any money. So he asked Scheurer to gamble that he’d bring back a valuable hide.

“I said ‘I’ll give you my best bobcat in exchange for six dozen traps now,”’ Sullivan recalls. “He said, ‘No, but I’ll give you five.”’ The two became fast friends.

“He’s very special to me,” Scheurer says. “He has qualities that would make him a good representative of anything he did: He’s honest, big-hearted, unselfish.”

There’s a misconception, Scheurer says, that the average trapper traps for the pleasure of killing animals.

“That just isn’t so. A guy like Bill, the main thing is that he’s out catching a beaver.

“It’s like a fisherman going fishing. He gets greater satisfaction if he catches a fish, maybe, but he mostly likes being out on the water.”

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Sullivan set hundreds of traps, in a line sometimes extending 60 miles. He kept track of their locations with surveyor’s ribbon and a palm-sized notebook.

“I was running from Peninsula Road all the way up to Granite Pass, up the other side of Nordman,” he says.

He went so far afield that his wife insisted he buy a two-way radio so they could stay in touch.

For awhile he also tended the trap line of a friend who was dying. Then, a couple of years ago, he lost Janet to cancer.

With pelt prices down, Sullivan no longer traps for fur. But trapping is more important than ever as a means of keeping busy. So he traps problem animals - coyotes that attack livestock, beavers that clog culverts.

He charges $25 or $30 to kill a nuisance animal, or accepts in payment the chance to hunt or trap on private land. He sells the hides to keep them from going to waste, he says.

Fewer people would frown on trapping if they saw the damage that animals can cause, Sullivan contends.

“If you’ve ever seen a mutilated lamb … the afterbirth attracts coyotes more than any one thing,” he says. “And they can take a calf right from the cow. At the same time, they may eat the cow’s insides out.

“People don’t see that stuff. They see that nice little coyote out there catching a mouse, and think he’s not that kind of critter.”

Sullivan concedes that the animals he traps are doing what comes naturally to them.

“Beavers have to chew trees,” he says. “If they don’t, their teeth will go through the roof of their mouths. But an irrigation ditch is not a place for a beaver dam.”

Trappers rarely relocate beavers any more. There are few places to put them and they often die after transplanting, Sullivan says.

He shakes his head over the U.S. Forest Service, which is looking more fondly upon beavers for the wetlands they create. Last summer the agency spent $3,000 to raise Green Hood Road and put in multiple culverts rather than ask Sullivan to get rid of the rascal that was flooding the road with its dams.

“People do funny things,” he says.

Sullivan says he traps as humanely as possible. That means killing animals quickly, or using the proper leghold traps so they won’t suffer or can be released unhurt.

He considers fur a renewable resource. He has no use for animal rights activists, who abhor what he does.

“I’ve got my share of hate mail,” he says. “That stuff doesn’t bother me at all.”

He understands why many people are squeamish about killing animals. He thinks they’re too removed from nature, unable to fend for themselves.

“When I was growing up,” he says, “Mom went out and wrung the chicken’s head when we wanted to have chicken and dumplings.”

Sullivan traps in North Idaho and Nevada, where a lady friend lives. He shares his knowledge with anyone who shows a keen interest. That includes Harry Converse of Priest River, who took up trapping as a retirement hobby.

Sullivan regrets that few young people want to know what he knows.

“All of us old folks are dying off,” he says. “What I’d really like to do is show some of the young guys a few things.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo Graphic: Decline in trapping