Some of Your Blood Read Online Free

it, well it does not come off but it skins off and he gets away and the rest of the tail shrivels up and drops off later. A chipmunk can bite worse than a rat almost and you would not believe anything that size could get his mouth open that wide, and once you got him what have you got? He has no more juice than a stewed prune. A skunk is not worth your trouble, although they are easy to get because they are not afraid of nothing. A possum all you have to do is lift him clear of the ground. A coon you want to have a good club for and you do not do nothing but club him and keep it up till you are sure, if he ever gets his back against a tree or a rock and he is not dead yet you will think somebody threw a buzz saw at you spinning. George got a bobcat throwing a club once but never again. All cats got the same taste, you breathe outward through your nose and there’s a taste there like cat pee smell. For hours. You wouldn’t believe it but snakes taste all right, maybe a little fishy but there is nothing wrong with fish, the only thing is it is not warm. Birds are a waste of time they are mostly feathers, except a couple of times George saw wild turkey but he never did get near enough for even a big sling shot. Except ducks. Ducks are fine.
    When George got a little older, ten or eleven, he got good with traps. He never could pay for steel traps but he got so good with snares he did not need them. He could make a deadfall big enough to take a badger and that is saying something because a badger can dig straight down through a blacktop road if he has to unless your deadfall rock is big enough to kill him first crack, but this George was a strong boy. Your deadfall is nothing but a big flat rock tipped up and propped on a stick. Some people tie a long string to the stick and wait and watch all day till something goes under the rock after the bait, but that is for boy scouts. George liked to prop up the rock and then whittle the stick almost through, and tie the string to the notch. The string goes back under the rock around a peg sunk in the ground and then back a ways and you tie your bait to it. A fox or a possum will grab hold and pull, and the stick breaks and down comes the rock. For rabbits a carrot is the best bait because it is strong. For foxes or even a badger sometimes rabbit meat is good, but don’t ever use the kidneys or you will catch yourself some kind of damn cat.
    The nicest one of all is the figure-four, and George could make one faster than you can climb a yellow pine tree. All you do is find a nice young hardwood sapling, ash or hickory or even birch if you got to. You pace off the right distance, depends on the tree, and dig a hole. Then you find a branch thick as your thumb with a good V crotch on it. You cut it through right under the V and then you cut away one of the side branches leaving a spur. What you have now is a bushy branch with a hook like. You turn this upside down and bury the branchy part, stomping it good and putting heavy rocks in the hole and maybe a log on top, so just the upside-down hook is showing out of the ground. You cut a little notch in the shank part of the hook and whittle yourself a good strong double-pointed peg to fit into that notch and cross to the tip of the hook. It looks like a figure 4.
    Now you pull down your sapling to bend almost double and tie a piece of twine near the top and the other end of the twine to the double-pointed peg, and set the peg in the hook to make the figure 4. Real easy you let the bent tree pull up until the peg sets hard against the hook. Now, tied to this twine just above the figure 4 is another piece of twine, and tied to this is nothing in the world but a old number one guitar string, the kind with a little bitty brass stopper on one end looks like a hollow brass barrel. You have the end of the guitar string passed through this to make a loop. You lay this loop around the bait, and you tie the bait with a short cord to the double-ended peg