My Season Trapping on Esperanto Creek: A Compilation of True Life Tales of Alaska

By Harold Chapman

4 Short stories by Alaskan author, bush pilot and mechanic.My Season of Trapping on Esperanto Creek Esperanto Creek was 14 miles from our main cabin, and the hike in took 11 hours with a 65-pound pack on my back. I pushed through bogged muskeg and over hills that carried no trail. I found the cabin just as Dad had described it: no glass in the windows, no door, part of the roof caved in, and the floor covered with two feet of spruce cones. The place was not abandoned--squirrels had lived there for the past 30 years. I spent a day shoveling it out; then turned my attention to repairing the roof and making a stove. Alaskan Family Snowshoe 'Line Trapping was not an easy way to make a living. Dad was often gone for more than a week at a time. He sometimes walked more than 2,000 miles over the course of a winter. Just a pair of wooden snowshoes, an ax, and a backpack. Walk, don't ride. Savor each minute gradually instead of rushing as fast as you can to get to the next trap. Trapping on foot is hard work. Sometimes it is spooky, like when you're coming in late at night and it's 50 below and dropping. And the stars, they're unnaturally close. Then you see something else.... Esperanto Revisited Now, I come back, after being out in the big world, and it doesn't all seem quite as big as it used to be. Maybe the whole down under country seems a little small, for there just doesn't seem to be much left over. Everybody used it up. Now this land here in the North is being eyed by all the rest of the folks. And they are worried. The air rains mercury, frogs are born with one eye. The water isn't all the same down in L.A. You think about these things, as you fly along, and wonder. Wonder how long these valleys will stay so pristine. And shed a tear, now and then. Or just grin, for it is all so damn beautiful.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1497407427
• ISBN13: 9781497407428
• Release Date: March 2014
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 58 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.1" x 5.0"