Metuchen Edison History Features

Recollections of

Boyhood Days

In Old Metuchen

By

David Trumbull Marshall

Published by The Case Publishing Co., Flushing NY 1930

(Second Edition)- (c) 1930

The Night Herons.

It is hard for one who has never done any hunting or fishing to realize the eagerness with which a real hunter or trapper pursues his game.

When I was a boy it never occurred to me that a muskrat suffered when his foot was caught in a trap.

I did feel rather badly when I found one of my traps with nothing but a foot in it. The muskrat had gnawed off his foot to get away.

We hear so many people bragging of their catch of fish and telling of the good time they had.

Everybody had a good time but the fish.

When I was a boy there was a tree in a swamp in J. B. Smith's place at Menlo Park in which a number of quawks or Night Herons used to roost.

These birds roost during the day and fly about after dark.

Many and many a time I have started the birds out of that tree.

I never could get near enough to shoot one of them, or if I did, I could not see them until after they had started.

A quawk is brown, like the bark of a tree.

I schemed and schemed to contrive some way to kill or catch a quawk, one of which I had never seen near by.

I got hold of a small snake and fastened it to the limb of a tree and over it set a steel trap.

The birds were too foxy by far to be caught by such a transparent fraud.

I never did see a quawk close by until about twenty years ago when one fell during a storm in the lot in front of my house at Hollis, L. I.

I remember when I was a very little boy that there was an eel under the bank of the small brook which flowed by our house.

Over and over again I poked that eel out of the same place in the brook and used to lie awake nights trying to concoct some scheme to catch him. I never did catch him. I reckon he is there yet.

Some day I am going to Metuchen and see.

I think I am a born hunter.

My very little brother and I used to catch field mice by sinking a crockery pitcher in the ground in the runs of these mice.

We caught a few and got the whole of two cents apiece for the skins from Dud Bartlett. He said he wanted to make a tobacco pouch for his father.

Mole skins are not much bigger.

It must take some bushels of moles to furnish the skins for a coat.

However any one who can catch moles enough to make a coat passes me.

I have had regular mole traps set on our lawn all summer and never caught a mole.

In my whole life long I never caught half a dozen altogether.

The lawn may be criss-crossed with their runs. It is very seldom one sees the ground bulging up and is able to turn Mr. Mole out with a spade.

I and my boy friends used to spend days making bows and arrows and shooting at birds.

I don't remember ever hitting any of the birds.

One winter my younger brother and I went to hunt rabbits the first day that law was up. We got seven.

I had an old musket. My brother had nothing but his bare hands.

There had been a light fall of snow, making tracking easy.

I shot four rabbits. My brother caught three with his hands.

One catches rabbits with the bare hands only when one can track them to some hole or drain-pipe.