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Game Gathering Methods

Old CW4

Old CW4

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Sep 8, 2006
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870
How about some of you guys chiming in on ways to hunt or trap game without a lot of fancy modern methods/techniques? I was just thinking about my days as a pre teen and early teen in the backwoods of Arkansas just after WWII. We were dirt poor and I sometimes got one 50 round box of 22 shorts a month ($0.25 at the hardware store in town) for my $9.00 Sears Savage single shot rifle. Some of the methods I recall were:

- A forked stick for cottontail rabbits. We lived in thick woods country with mixed pines and hardwoods. There were lots of gum trees and virtually all were hollow inside. When walking through the woods and I 'jumped' a cottontail, they always took off directly away and usually to the nearest gum tree. Honest, guys/gals, they would climb up the inside of the gum trees! We farm boys always had a pocket knife so we immediately cut a limber branch five or six feet long from a handy tree and trimmed off the end 'fork' so it was an inch or so long on each side of the 'Y.' You stuck this up the inside of the tree until you felt it touch the rabbit, then twisted it into the fur and pulled Mr. bunny out of the tree. Rap his head into the tree root, hold him by the head and stick a finger into and through his fur right at the neck hollow. Rip down to the anus and you had a disembowled bunny. Scoop out the innards, strip off the rest of the fur and you had a rabbit for the pot.

- Quail. I got thousands over the years with a cardboard or wooden box. Prop the box up on a stick with a fairly long (30 feet or more) string attached. Sprinkle out some corn, chickenfeed, or whatever in a thin trail ending under the box and lay down in the high weeds/grass with the end of the string. When a quail or two ate their way under the box, yank the stick out and trap them. Reach down through the top of the box, wring their necks one at a time, and birds for the pot.

- Ducks and geese. We had a sizeable farm pond and the migrating water birds would set down in numbers in the spring and fall while on their way north or south. I was young and hardy so it was my job to get into the pond and under an old rusted out washtub (remember those?) with some holes I could see through. I would gradually work my way over to some of the birds, then reach out, grab their legs, and drag them under water to drown while I helped by wringing their necks under water. I came out later half froze from the cold water but with lots of meat for the pot.

- Bee trees. We actually has a season for bee trees in my part of western Arkansas in the old days. When walking/working in the woods, especially in summer when the weather was dry and the creeks were dried up to scattered holes, we kids always watched/listened for bees. They would come to the holes of water, dip in, then make a 'bee line' back to their hives. They only fly 10 or 12 feet high so it was easy to establish the 'bee line' and follow them back to the dead or hollow tree and the home hive. Once we'd located that, it was time to get the adults, lead them to the tree, wrap old curtains around your head and exposed skin, cut the tree and get 200 lbs or more of wild honey.

- Frogs. Got lots of bullfrogs with a trident spear made of a long tree limb and using a carbide lantern at night. Any of you remember carbide lamps? I had burn scars on my palm for years from lighting the damned things. Anyway, frog legs are delicious! Also did some fancy dancing avoiding the cottonmouths sometimes mistaken for frogs.

- Possums. They hang upside down on tree limbs and are easy to club in the early morning. Especially in the fall when the persimmons were ripe and they'd ate themselves into a stupor.

- Intoxicated deer. During summertime in the south and only occasional rains, the water would collect in hardwood stumps along with leaves, wild grapes, etc. You could smell a fermenting stump from a long ways off and the deer and other animals would go to them to drink. I don't know the alcohol content but deer especially would not infrequently be drunk as skunks from 'stump water.' They would stagger along, walk into trees, and fall down. Easy to club one with a hefty stick or rock and then there was lots of venison for the home pot. I can recall also seeing black bears drunk but I didn't mess with them.

Anyway, how about some words of wisdom regarding simple ways to gather food to include traps, deadfalls, snares, and so on.
 
I loving gigging frogs and flounder. I made a thread a while back about trapping crawfish in the spring and early summer. I run trot lines this time of year. Set some last night and have a nice 5 lb channel cat in the live well at the end of the dock right now that I got off a line this morning. We used to nail hooks on the side of logs where turtle like to sun. Approach them from the side opposite of the hooks and they slide off the side with the hooks and get hung up. This is illegal here now. If you want a big soft shell turtle, hang a bush hook a couple of inches out of the water, that is about all you will catch. We also used to trap quail, but that is illegal now also. Something else that you can't do now, but worked well was to dig a deep hole in front of a gopher tortoise hole, put a board with rounded ends across the hole. When the gopher came out of his hole, he would try to cross the board, the board would role and dump him into the hole. We also trapped lots of rabbits when we were kids. Dad made traps that are similar to the Havaheart traps they sell now.
 
One of the guys mentioned turtles. I have a vivid memory in mind about turtles, snapping turtles. The old man and I were in our back 80 acres, virgin timber, one day, cutting big pine trees for high-line poles and so on. He sent me back to the house to get a two quart mason jar of coal oil (kerosene) to lubricate the saw blade. As usual, I was barefoot and I had to cross a 'log bridge,' a big log dropped and dragged across a deep area of the swampy pasture I had to traverse back to the house. I filled a mason jar with kerosene and started back to where the old man was working. I was on the 'bridge log' when a really big turtle surfaced, stuck his long neck and huge head out and snapped at my bare foot. Whoa! I jumped back, scared of course, and got back on solid ground. Well, hell, I was thirteen, a macho young male, and scared of nothing, I thought. I set the jar of coal oil down and went back to the house. I put on my boots and got the double bit, what we called a 'Michigan' axe, from the wood pile behind the house. I went back down to the bridge log and tapped on it with my foot. Sure 'nuff,' here come Mr. Alligator Turtle. To make a long story short, he and I had it out. I finally managed to kill him with the axe and had to go get help to get him out of the water. Then we had turtle steaks, soup, and so on for a week or more. That old boy was something like three feet long and at least 100 lbs. There were more than a few folks around the area who had lost parts of their hands and/or feet to such 'monsters' and I sure didn't want to join their number. Anyway, we ate Mr. Turtle and he was tasty.

Someone asked about bathing, heating water, etc. All water was heated on the kitchen cookstove which had a three or four gallon reservoir built into the back by the stove pipe and more was heated on the kitchen wood fired stove top in kettles or buckets. The women folk usually bathed in the house with pails of hot water and sponges or cloths and we males during warmer weather in the creeks or ponds. The hazards in outdoor bathing were going to and coming from the water---rattlesnakes, copperheads, and cottonmouths. I don't mean to stress this because actual encounters were rare but they could happen and one had to always be on the lookout for poisonous reptiles.

Most of our wells were of the drilled type, about 10 to 12 inches in diameter and usually too deep for a well pump. To draw well water we used a valve bucket, three plus feet long with a valve at the bottom end and a pull ring at the other to release the water once it was drawn up. I pulled many, many thousands of gallons of water from our two drilled wells with such buckets, one in the house yard and one down yonder with the chickens, ducks, and livestock. The long, slender bucket's bottom valve opened when it contacted the water and sank. Then it was drawn up, lifted out of the well, and held over either a bucket for the house or the stock tank and water pans for the chickens and cattle/horses/mules.

We didn't tan hides but did stretch and dry furs, coon, martin, mink, and so on for the local market in winter time. As for food, we canned a lot and preserved pork during fall butchering by 'larding' down pork chops in five gallon ceramic pots and smoking combined with sugar and salt curing done with huge hypodermic needles. I used to have to cut firewood for both the scalding pots for Mr. hog and those to render down the lard, plus the smoke house to cure the hams and bacon. We probably ate better and even more healthy than most folks do today. The only chemicals involved in curing and smoking were sugar and salt. We hung peanuts on the back fence to dry and later shell, and cured tobacco in the oven combined with smoking and various fragrent herbs burned in the smoking fires. For other foods we had potatos, apples, dried peaches, persimmons, nuts, green beans, peas, corn and corn meal, fresh eggs, milk, and butter, fish, wild fowl, plants from the forest, you name it. Our diet was varied and healthy. Folks in the neighborhood who'd survived/avoided injury/accident lived active lives to their 80s and 90s and even beyond. I can't recall hearing about 'alzheimers' and senility until many year later. Such infirmities didn't seem to exist back then.

I don't recall anyone ever going hungry in the winter time. If someone ran short, the neighbors pitched in. No government welfare and government wouldn't have been welcome. In the case of severe illness or injury, you either made it or you didn't. If you didn't survive, a funeral and wake were held and the 'send off' was serious and bountiful at the same time with liquor, feasting, elegies, and so on.
 
Thank you CW4. Interesting stuff. Thanks for answering the questions.

I was pleased to read that you cured meat using only sugar and salt (and smoking). That is the way I'd like to do it too.... I don't see the need for nitrates etc. It is just a matter of reducing the free moisture really, and it doesn't matter if the colour isn't as red as a supermarket ham. I'd rather cope with bacteria and stale meat than chemicals. The old-timers seemed to do alright eating the stuff.

Feel free to post more !! Much appreciated.
 
Am I losing my mind? I swear there were several pages in this thread, and I posted as well, but now it's all gone. Am I thinking of a different thread?
 
During the Depression, the family sometimes didn't have any money for ammo. One of my late uncles used to catch cottontails by hand, according to two of his siblings. He was a great sprinter. Back in the Depression, he and the siblings would work their way around the low brush on the sides of plowed fields, parallel with the plowed rows. They would try to spook a cottontail out of the low brush on to the plowed area, running across the rows. Johnny was fast enough that he could get the small bunnies as they struggled to get across the plowed rows. Of course, if the bunnies were smart enough to turn and run lengthwise down a row, he couldn't catch them. They told me it was pretty funny watching Johnny pounce on/tackle bunnies, but they were good eating.

At Dirttime, one of the instructors talked about hanging a large treble hook baited with some entrails and/or hide from a bunny/squirrel. Many different predators or scavengers could be caught this way. Of course, it might be legal only in a true survival situation. And yes, he did eat a coyote he caught. And yes, it was truly one of the worst things he's eaten (and he's eaten a lot of unusual foods).

DancesWithKnives
 
G'day Old CW4

Old CW4 said:
Someone asked about bathing, heating water, etc. All water was heated on the kitchen cookstove which had a three or four gallon reservoir built into the back by the stove pipe and more was heated on the kitchen wood fired stove top in kettles or buckets.
Click to expand...
Now this brings back memories :thumbup:

As kids, all our cooking and hot water was provided for by a slow combustion stove with what Dad called a "wet back". Great in winter, not so good inside the house in Summer.

As a kid, for years I used a hatchet to prepare kindling for the stove. One of the reasons I still value a good hatchet as a versatile tool and don't fear them like many seem to.

Thanks for bringing back the memories :thumbup:




Kind regards
Mick
 
Mam o man do those stories sound familiar. I still use that box type trap made of sticks tho..only takes 3 peices of string and a little bait. and running lines at night with nothing more than a kerosene lantern... my brother sank the boat right out from under us one evening right about sundown with an old M-1 30 cal..one of those boa sized "stump moccasins" came right over the side and he let loose with a full 20 round mag..looked like a fountian in the park as it slowly went under and us chest deep in a 1000 acre swamp..still ribbing him about it to this day.
 
Nice posts, CW4.

Nice memories, as well. Thank you for letting me know of them.
 
this is a great thread.

i grew up in the 70's. we always lived in or near woods that were acceptable and had every kind of bread-box-sized critter in them.

my mom told me she didn't want to hear about me eating armadillo.

so i quit telling her.

....

we used to kill ground squirrels and such with just a thrown rock, or catch them out of their holes with just string around it in a lasso.

i'd zap prairie chickens with throwing sticks - it just seemed the right thing to do, i don't remember being taught that. we'd cook them on a fire in the middle of the cow pasture.

fish traps and nets caught all the crawdads that we could get. never ate frog when i was young - i think i liked them too much, we had some big bull frogs in Virginia.

snakes were just land-based fish to us. i think rattler was the best.

when we lived near the ocean, i crabbed and speared stingrays and caught fish with just a hook and line - still my favorite way to fish.

i thought it was just being a kid.

vec
 
Used to catch pheasants and ducks down by the railway tracks.Used a section of stove pipe with one end sewed up with wire, corn is spread around and in the pipe Mr bird can see through the pipe so walks in but cant get out because the one end is blocked birds do not walk backwards.
Dan'l
 
I have caught crawdad for bait and to eat by putting liver in the leg of nylons and tying a string to it and throwing it into the lake in the evening while fishing for catfish. Leave it awhile, drag it in quickly, and the crawfish are caught on the hose. I have heard that treble hooks with bread thrown into water will catch geese. I wouldn't advise it. Heard that buckeyes ground up in a bag and thrown into a fishing hole will bring them up and you can grab them. Never tried it. Using a long strand with thorns out of a thicket can be pushed and twisted in a rabbit hole to catch the fur and pull them out. Tie a long feather off a limb close to the ground. The wind will cause some movement while you squeal like a rabbit and bring a coyote in. Now here is a Loosearrow original, A few years ago I bought a Bushnell flashlight that had a strobe on it. It downright paralyzes the bullfrogs. Pick them up, lay them down and they just lay there. Really messes them up. After a bit, they finally hop off. The first time I did this I thought the frog was sick or had died. Regards
 
Soaproot (chloragalum spp,) bulbs were crushed and dropped in fishing pools which causes a temporary paralysis for ease of gather...
 
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