Javan watched his father make the simple snare trap, using a length of fishing line and a special knot. The snare was set over the well used rabbit trail, just outside of the small hole that the animals used to enter and exit their warrens.


"Set the snare so that it hangs less than four inches but more than one inch from the ground. This could save your life someday, so pay attention." Jeff straightened out with a groan. "Now let's go check the other traps, if we're lucky we can bring your mom a healthy animal to study to check the over health of the population. Do you remember why its important to have healthy rabbits?"

The seven year old looked up at his daddy, eyes bright. "Because the rabbits are almost at the bottom of the food chain, all the predators around here eat them, so if the rabbits are sick the eagles, hawks, foxes and stuff won't have food." Jeff patted his son on the head and smiled.

"Good boy. Now, what's the Trapper's Code, Rule number one?" Javan thought a little more on this one, as he had only learned the code a few days before.

"A Trapper never takes more than his environment can provide, and if he does, he is no longer a Trapper, but a Poacher." Javan grinned as his father nodded, his eyes alight with pride. As they approached the first trap they heard the tell tale sounds of an animal that had not been properly caught. They found a small red fox with its leg caught in the snare intended to rabbits. Jeff approached slowly, taking off his jacket. As he got closer he tossed the jacket over the fox and then pounced on it, pinning it. With a quick flip of his wrist he freed the fox from the snare. "Are we taking it to momma?"

"Nope. it's early spring, son, and this one is heavy with milk, so her little ones won't last more than a few hours without her. Not every trapper will release an animal they caught by accident, but the good ones do." Jeff released the fox and the two watched it run off into the bushes. They checked seven other traps before heading home with seven dead rabbits. It had been a good day, and the pelts were of the highest quality that early spring had to offer. The rabbits they took were part of a greater problem in the area, so they were not as concerned with taking females. The year before the local produce farmer had lost almost ten thousand dollars worth of harvest to the rabbits.

"Momma  we caught seven rabbits today! And one of them is HUGE! It's even bigger than Topsy!" The little boy ran up to his mother and hugged her legs. Jean Huntley laughed and kissed her husband as he came in. She took the largest of the rabbits and looked it over. She whistled as she placed it on the scale. It weighed a whopping twenty six pounds, and it had several attributes that made her curious.

"Looks like its a cross between a domestic meat rabbit and a cottontail. Looks like someone has been releasing domestic rabbits, it would explain the population explosion, I mean just ten years ago our population was only about six thousand strong, but in the last five years it's shot up to over fifteen thousand, and that's just in this one hundred seventy-acre area." She passed the animals to her husband to be skinned and prepared for further study. Javan looked at the stove and saw the sauce pan that his grandmother had always used for making hot chocolate.

"Momma is that hot coco?" Javan was already begging his mother with his eyes, and he clapped when she poured some into his favorite cup, the one with the picture of him and the wolf puppies his mother had been studying at the local sanctuary. He drank it down quickly and went to help his father skin the rabbits. Even though he was only seven, he already knew how to handle the knives and tools his father used to separate the pelts from the meat.

Javan watched his father carefully as the man peeled the skin off the rabbit. The process seemed to take forever, but the boy knew it was really just a half minute per animal. His father slid the skinning knife deftly down the sides, cutting just the fat beneath the skin and over the muscles. When the hide came free, inside out, the man passed it to his son who put it on the stretching board.

"Remember, pull it tight or the skin will crease and crack. Once you have it pulled tight, take the scraper and remove all the fat. Be Careful! Your mother will kill me if you get another cut like the last one." By now the boy knew all of this. He was only seven and three quarters, but he had been helping his dad since he was four, and he had only cut himself once, and that was when the dog had come running into the tanning room after getting loose. He had dropped the knife and tried to catch it before it hit the floor, but when he grabbed it, he grabbed by the very sharp blade. It had taken forty stitches to close it, many of them internal stitches. He had taken it like a man and not even cried once. His father and mother had been worried of course, but they were also very proud that he had not shed a single tear. He was tough, he had to be, because if he was weak and something happened to his father while he was in the woods, he would be the only one to take care of his mother. Ever since his mother had lost his baby sister, long before she had been born, his mother had needed the extra support of both Javan and Jeffrey.

"Daddy?" He shuffled his feet a bit, as he adjusted the skin on the board. "When will you and momma try to have another baby?"

Jeff went rigid. The topic had been bound to come up eventually, and Javan wasn't like other seven year olds, he was sharper than any knife in the house, and as mature as any twenty year old, when it came to most things. He was a thinker, but he had a heart too. The Father thought about pushing the subject away but decided his son deserved to know the truth.

"Momma can't have anymore babies. When your sister died your mother got very sick, do you remember?" The boy nodded. "That sickness made scars in her womb." The man turned to one of the rabbits that hadn't gutted yet, a female, and used his knife to slice it open. He sorted through the organs and found what he was looking for. "See this here? This is what the doctors call a Uterus. These are the Ovaries. When a female is ready to have babies, the Ovaries release eggs, and when the eggs reaches the Uterus, they attach to the wall of it, and wait for the other part needed to make a baby."

"The sperm, momma already told me about this." Javan looked at his father, slightly confused as to why this was important.

"Yes, sperm. When your mother got sick it caused scars in the tubes that connect the Ovaries to the Uterus, called the Fallopian tubes." The man stretched the reproductive system out, pointing out the varies parts. "The scars blocked the tubes, and the surgery to fix it is very unreliable, it doesn't always work. But even if it did, her Uterus is also scarred, so the egg doesn't have a place to stick to."

"Oh." Javan looked at the floor a moment. "What if you adopted a baby? Or even an older kid, from the Collins Home?" Javan looked up. He didn't want to say it, but he was lonely. There were only forty kids in his school, and only two of them were his age. Those two were bullies though, they always picked fights with Javan, and even though he knew how to fight, he refused to hit back, so he was always coming home with a black eye or a bloody nose. But Javan had fought once, when those two bullies went to pick on the new girl, who was only five and just starting school. They had pushed her down and tried to steal her lunch. Javan had beaten them up so badly that the nurse called his parents. His mother found out why he had fought and the school administrator had suffered through a two hour argument about how it could be OK for two ten year olds to beat up a five year old, but not OK for a seven year old to beat up those same ten year olds while defending her. Javan had never heard anything about it again.

"Son, we have thought about it, but right now, we just don't have the money for that. It's not right that we should have to spend a huge amount of money to adopt a child, it should be free, but that's how it is. Now then, name all the organs in this pile and tell me what they do."