Before I jump ahead into the spring fishing and turkey hunting seasons I want to recap the trapping season, specifically beaver and otter.

My trapping roots go back to a time and place a long way from today and Pierce County. My first exposure was at age ten, trapping in Vernon County as my dad’s assistant. He was a muskrat trapper and I more or less stayed out of the way while he ran his trap line. After a two-year apprenticeship I struck out on my own and trapped a modest number of critters. I caught just enough to call myself a trapper which was a title that I was proud of.

Fast forward a lot of years and miles when I found out that I had two otter trapping tags. I’ve been after fishers for a few years now and there’s not much about that form of trapping that I can convert to water trapping. I knew there was some crossover between trapping otters and beavers, but my experience was very limited. To fill in the blanks I studied up via YouTube. The next thing was scrambling to find traps, jumping into my hip boots with both feet, and setting the traps.

After I got the “how to” part down it was a matter of “where to.” I was pretty jacked up when the first trap produced the first beaver. Even though my original motivation was to fill my otter tags, I quickly learned that bagging a beaver was much easier. Eventually I filled my otter tags making the trapping days even more special. I had all my traps pulled on Easter Sunday, ending the season which I considered a success as well as an awesome late winter diversion, but there was one more thing that I had to do.

I saved a large amount of beaver meat after skinning and processing my catches because it’s pretty good fisher bait and I wanted to make crockpot beaver which I heard tasted pretty good. I decided to cook it for myself to find out if the rumors were true, that beaver meat had the taste and texture similar to a hot beef sandwich. 

I set up our extra crockpot in the garage, added the beaver meat along with one can of French Onion Soup and one can of Beefy Mushroom Soup. After cooking for 10 hours on low, supper was ready. As expected, the meat literally fell off the bone without any prodding.  I made two sandwiches to try “the other dark meat” - one with barbecue sauce and the other with horseradish sauce. It didn’t taste exactly like a famous Gaslight hot beef sandwich, but it was pretty good. 

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