Word: delia
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...wane, a victim of the fake fur, depressed pelt prices, new roads and population growth. Such is the lure of the Alaskan wilderness, though, that perhaps 110 professional trappers are still at large. TIME's San Francisco Bureau Chief Jesse Birnbaum visited one of them, Missouri-born Joe Delia, 40, a tall, rugged woodsman with hard, spatulate fingers, a laughing face and an abiding love for the outdoors. Birnbaum's report...
...DELIA arrived in Alaska in 1948, worked for a while in Ketchikan, then drifted over to the Skwentna region, where he built a cabin and started trapping. Skwentna is good mixed-fur country-mink, marten, lynx, wolf, otter, beaver, muskrat. Fifteen years ago, trappers got good money for these pelts. Minks, for example, brought about $36 each; today Joe Delia is lucky to average $10. Lynxes, on the other hand, have improved. You can get $60 apiece-when you find one: the reproduction cycle has made this animal scarce...
...Delia built a trap line through the Skwentna country, setting up little tent camps and cabins along the way at about ten-mile intervals. "I've got 75 miles of trap line here. I had 125. When I got married, I'd leave home and spend each night in a different cabin with my dog team. I'd be gone twelve days, makin' about two trips a month. But it was too much. As my responsibilities at home got more, I had to cut some of the line out, so I sold about 50 miles...
Before the advent of the snow machine, Joe used dog teams. But they were a problem. You had to feed them. Prior to statehood, which brought tight restrictions on fishing, Delia and a partner fed their dogs on salmon fished from the Skwentna River and Eight-Mile Creek. "We used to put fish nets in the rivers and cricks and get maybe 2,500 to 4,500 salmon, just to feed our teams. But then the state fish and game people stopped us from usin' the fish wheel. Then they stopped us from usin' nets, and then they...
...unlike baseball. You've got about seven, eight, or maybe nine years when you're hot and everything you do works and they're calling you for a job and the headhunters are crying for you, and then there's that long downhill slide." Delia Femina is still at the top of his form, but if he should ever get that sinking feeling, the royalties from his gossipy book might provide a retirement fund...