Outfoxing the wolverine

Excerpt from Nunaga, by Duncan Pryde, a book about a Scotsman's life with Eskimos in the Canadian Arctic.

One day Palvik and I were checking traps along a trapline we were running together down the south coast of Kent Peninusla, north and east of Baychimo Harbour, and we discovered that a wolverine was working our line. This wolverine had followed the sled tracks we had made on our frist run down the line, and many traps we checked had been dug up by the sly spoiler and either srpung or exposed. In some cases we would find scraps of a fox in the trap to show that the wolverine had beat us us to the prize. A wolverine often seems to work a trapline not out of hunger, but just for fun. Sometimes it will simply take the fox out of the trap, drag it off thirty yards and bury it. Normally, however, it chews it up enough to ruin the pelt. A single wolverine could reduce our take of fur considerably.

But we had a few tricks of our own. We went back to our base camp for an old sawn-off shotgun Palvik had used before on wolverines. Back at the trapline, we dug a little pit in the snow near one of the traps that the wolverine had not yet visited, and buried the gun in the snow so that about two inches of the muzzle stuck out. Then we attached a string to the trigger of the shotgun and to a chunk of raw caribou meat, which we thawed out long enough to wrap around the mouth of the shotgun, where it froze tight. When we came back on our reverse trip down the trapline, we had our wolverine, minus its head.