NEW MILFORD, Pa. — Russ Carman and his boy follow the serpentine course of the stream, their thigh boots squishing in the frigid mud, the brittle, shoulder-high swamp grass hissing as they brush past.
Gnarled gray tree stumps jut from the bank, along with the skeletons of dead pines. The bright, quiet air bears only drifting cattail seeds and the faint call of a chickadee. Single file, the two pass the spot where Carman caught his first mink 41 years before.
Nearby they pause and put down their packs, which are baskets woven out of ash splints. Carman, who is a bearded 6-foot-4 and carries a tin of Skoal in his pocket, takes out a square body-grip animal trap and two wood stakes. His son, Jason, 11, watches.
Carman sets the trap's trigger, two metal wires reminiscent of light bulb filaments. He reaches into the cold, clear water and places the device upright like a door frame in the muskrat "run" in the bottom of the creek. Then he anchors the trap with the stakes: "Guaranteed, a muskrat there tomorrow," he says. "Guaranteed."
He is a predator, he has said earlier, as surely as the mink that kills the muskrat, and the owl that kills the mink. And this wind-blown 15-acre swamp in Susquehanna County is his "habitat."
Russ Carman, 50, is a fur trapper, a member of an ancient and, lately, much vilified association whose numbers have dwindled over the decades as times have changed, fur demand has fallen and trapping protests have grown.
Carman, though, is more than a simple trapper. In the years since he started trapping at age 9 in the woods and hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, just south of the New York border, he has made it his life. He built a business selling trapping equipment and concocting and selling trap lures and baits.
But he has also become a kind of trapping philosopher, writing and arguing for its place in the environment and defending it against those who would see its end.
A born-again Christian, he holds to the biblical concept of human dominion over the beasts, but sees himself more as a wildlife steward helping to maintain a woodland balance and holding a certain "communion" with nature.
Carman said he respects the animals he traps, reveres the wilderness where they live - and where he enjoys the solitude - and is unashamed to say: "I am a fur trapper."
