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Show SLIM PICKINGS Chapter XXII Eking dollars out of the barrens was almost as hard as squeezing blood out of a turnip. Harder-we had blood but not turnips. Father granted credit frequently to homesteaders, and often he let them work out their grocery bills in jobs on our place, including the Experiment Farm. Some homesteaders with boyhood experience in backwoods regions trudged their traplines daily- One trapper, John Bangle, was a gaunt lay preacher from the Ozarks. One morning Mr. Bangle added the post office to his trapline hike. He perched a newly born coyote pup on the post office desk, a baby covered with the fleece of infancy. He had found the pup in a den among the sage. We guessed the conflict in the preacher's heart: pity for the tiny trembling baby and his need for the $5 bounty- The bounty probably won, for Mr. Bangle did not raise any coyotes. We vistied the preacher's home one Sunday. He had caught a bitch coyote. Rather than kill her immediately, he was keeping her briefly to collect urine to make a lure to sprinkle around his traps. He'd wired her jaws with their sharp teeth shut and tied her legs. |