TORTURED, THAT WOMEN MAY SMILE.

Forest and Bird, Issue 26, 1 March 1932, Page 14

TORTURED, THAT WOMEN MAY SMILE.

(By Henry J. Carey, in Nature Magazine.)

Raison’s prolonged absence from camp caused no alarm at first. Trappers in the Canadian wilderness are used to such unexpected events. True, Raison was but a boy—a green hand just over from England—and Hudson’s Bay Company bear-traps are difficult and dangerous even for an experienced woodsman to set. But the lad, though he had been in some scrapes, had in general shown considerable quickness in acquiring the various skills of the Northern vayageur. After all, he had been away from headquarters only forty hours. As time wore on, however, a terrible suspicion wormed its way into the minds of his two companions. Not caring to voice their thoughts, they hurried off to the nearest bear-trap, which was about a mile up the creek. When they came to a soft place on the trail and saw only footprints of a man going and none returning, their presentiments seemed confirmed. Now they almost ran along the dim trail. In their haste it seemed to them that the trees and bushes caught at their clothing and tried to hold them back. At last they broke into a small open space. There was the bear-pen in which the trap had been set. Near it lay a pocket knife, with broken blade. Some one had evidently thrown the useless thing there. Just in front of the pen some creature had been digging desperately in the sand. Had Raison, crazy with thirst, been delving with the knife for a few precious drops of water? As they looked in at the door of the pen their most hideous fears were realised. There on its back, smeared with blood and sand, swollen almost beyond recognition by mosquito poison, and absolutely motionless, lay what remained of the boy Raison! The remorseless steel teeth of the 60-pound bear-trap, biting into the bone, held one leg above the ankle. A cloud of buzzing, shinyblue meat-flies rose, protesting, from the body as the trappers leaned over it. In another hour perhaps the crows and ravens would have been at it. They saw how he had hacked at the strong birch drag to which the trap chain was fastened, until his knife had snapped. Then evidently he had. given up in despair. Luckily his companions were men trained to quick thought and quick action. Upon examining their youthful pal, they found evidence that a spark of life still remained in the unconscious, pitiful wreck. Working together they quickly removed the heavy mass of metal from the tortured leg. One ran to the stream for cold water, while the other twisted birch-bark into a funnel, through which they allowed the water to trickle very gently into the parched throat. Next they bathed and washed his face and

hands. Soon, Heaven be praised! he opened his eyes. Now, as they held up his head, he was able slowly to drink. The blessed water, followed by tea and partridge broth, helped him to regain some strength. Finally they cut the boot from the poor swollen foot, bathed it and bound it up. Tenderly they lifted the limp boy upon an improvised stretcher, and thus they carried him to the canoe, and home to the fort.

Raison never trapped again. That was scarcely an experience that one would care to repeat. Few parents would wish to have a child of theirs risk it a second time, and doubtless Raison’s mother was overjoyed to see him once more in England, after his leg had healed. This story, by the way, is true. It has been condensed from the account of Martin Hunter, who was for years a seasoned woodsman and commissioned officer of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Literally millions of wild fur-bearing animals, in America alone, suffer every year from similar prolonged torture, hour by hour, and sometimes day by day, until relief from thirst, cold, pain, and the attacks of other animals, finally comes through death. Many interesting, beautiful or useful furred animals are threatened with extinction, largely on account of the men who catch them in steel traps, in order that American women, all ignorant of the suffering for which they are really responsible, may be fashionably clothed.

Every year, the prices of furs rise higher, and the trappers go farther and farther into the wilderness after the defenceless animals. Even the squirrels in Siberia, whose skins are too tender to be of the slightest use for durable furs, are killed in large numbers, so that women may wear squirrel coats for a short season, before they tear into pieces, as they do with even the small exertion of driving an automobile. Such wholesale slaughter, pain, and waste has perhaps never before disgraced a supposedly civilised nation! America now leads the world in the fur trade!

It is time to stop and think what we are doing; to think of the empty, lifeless woods to which we, and our children and grandchildren will have to go, when we have fled the noise of our machine-age cities, for a brief vacation in the wilderness! And, above all, to think of the slow torture, which civilised countries no longer inflict upon men, but which is now reserved for wild animals, with the pitiful excuse that these, whose senses are often keener than ours, do not feel pain as we do! The time is coming therefore when women of fashion and leaders among women will be ashamed to wear furs of wild animals caught in merciless steel traps; and when they will take a solemn pledge to wear only the furs of animals, wild or tame, that have been quickly and humanely killed.