Twenty Miles From A Match: Homesteading In Western Nevada

Chapter Eight

.~( Eight )~. A s there was an abundance of game in the country, it naturally followed that there were many predatory animals. There was usually a good market for the skins of coyotes and bobcats, besides the bounty of two and a half dollars per head. If Edson could learn to trap, that would be another source of income. That fall he put in a few weeks with an old trapper. We bought him a couple of dozen of number three steel traps, and he very proudly and confidently set them out. A few days later he came running in all big-eyed and excited to tell me that he had caught a coyote in one of his traps. Would I come quick and help him skin it? He would kill it immediately , and we would skin it while it was still warm. The only knife we had was a dull butcher knife-I never owned any other kind. Daddy had gone to town that morning with the only pocket knife we had in his pocket. I went with Edson to skin the coyote. He killed it with a club, while I turned my back and cried. Then we started on our first skinning job. First we cut it up the belly, which was not the correct way. I would cut and skin for awhile, making too many slices in the hide, then Edson, thinking he could do better than I, would take the knife and try his hand. CHAPTER EIGHT 63 All the time, one of us pulling as hard as possible on the hide. We made an awful mess of it. Finally after three hours of hard work we got the hide off. It was full of holes. There wasn't a six inch square on the whole skin that wasn't cut. It might have been worth a few dollars when we started, but it wasn't worth ten cents when we finished. We had learned something, however. We had learned that we didn't know how to skin coyotes. Edson went back to the trapper to learn the skilland it is a skill-of skinning, in which Edson became very efficient. He learned to skin one in three minutes and often used to laugh at the three hours it had taken us on our first try. He became very good at trapping, and the income from his hides was our greatest help in early homestead days. That first year he sold one hundred and fifty dollars worth of raw skins. We finished getting our wood down in November, and then we had to turn our attention to the school. We'd been wondering where we could get the money to buy the lumber needed for the schoolroom. Then a wonderful windfall came our way. A wealthy sheepman below us gave us a miner's cabin that was on his property so we could tear it down and use the lumber to build our schoolroom. It was slow work as this cabin was five miles away. Daddy and Edson would drive down, work all day, and bring home a wagonful of lumber. After it was all hauled, we had the building to do. We added the extra room on the north end of our cabin. Daddy had to do most of the work, for I wasn't much of a carpenter. The only nails I could ever hit with any accuracy were fingernails. He worked 64 TWENTY MILES FROM A MATCH slowly along, but soon had to stop to celebrate our first Thanksgiving. I had raised all eight of my little turkeys. When they were about three months old one of them got sick. It drooped around for days. I had given it grains of black pepper and all the home remedies I had ever heard of, but it looked like it was really going to die. I picked it up one day, and there seemed to be a rock in its craw the size of a walnut. I thought, "Well, the darn thing's going to die anyway. I'm going to open its craw and see what that is./I I plucked out a few breast feathers, got Daddy's razor, cut the outside skin of the craw, and then cut open the craw proper. There was the hard lump all right -as hard as a rock. It looked like grass matted down into...