Donald “Duck” Besaw resembles an old hippie, minus the beard and long hair. At 70 years old, he and has done, and is still doing, what comes natural in life with no regrets. He is one of the reasons why the unincorporated Upper Michigan village of Shingleton has such an enduring and youthful spirit.

Shingleton is where logging trucks, snowmobiles, outdoor saunas and homemade pasties are as common as the earth-spun people who tell tall tales there. Robinson’s General Store and the Woodlands Restaurant make up the downtown district. Winter fills in other spaces as snowbanks reach the sky (420 inches in 1996), and people on cross-country skis or snowshoes are common sights. In fact, Shingleton has the only established wooden snowshoe factory, Iversons, in the United States.

If they ever establish a Trapper Hall of Fame, Besaw might just become the first inductee. He set his first trap as an 8 year old. Sixty-three winters later, he is still floating on snowshoes. In his prime, Besaw had little trouble ‘shoeing 12 miles each way to set his traps – he calls it striding. One day he went 40 miles.

Besaw carries 12 to 15 traps to hideaways in the Hiawatha National Forest, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and surrounding areas. They collectively weigh some 65 pounds. He carries them in a backpack modified from an old Army duffle bag. In his heyday, he could carry 150 pounds of beaver back out on his back. Bishop Baraga, Upper Michigan’s famous “snowshoe priest,” would have been proud of him.

As he’s aged, Besaw has had to taper his trap-setting activity. That means he only snowshoes 15 miles a day now for pelts of beaver, fisher, weasel, martin, muskrat, otter, coyote, bobcat, badger, opossum and fox.

A storyteller’s lure

Besaw is also a bit of a tall tale teller, so one has to sift through what he says to find the truth. “There’s the time I cut a large hole in the ice to set my traps in. That night it snowed a foot and I couldn’t find where I had made the hole. Well, I found the hole when I fell through it. The current quickly carried me under the ice and I struggled to find a way to the surface. Just lucky, I came upon a hole that I cut into the ice the winter before. I crawled out of it to safety.”

Besaw says he’s fallen through lake ice at least 20 times in his storied career. This has resulted from his needing to set his traps a few inches under the surface. In the spring time, he might trap along the bank, just above water level, before a rain. The rain the raises the level of the creek, submerging the traps.

Over the years, Besaw has developed his own beaver lure or scent during mating season that runs from January through February. “I once mixed up some lure that was heavy on female beaver urine. It was the best lure I ever made,” he explained. “I set out six traps and sprinkled some of my potion on each one. The next day I checked my traps and found six male beavers caught in them and six more waiting in line to get caught.”

In all seriousness, Besaw said he concocts his own “beaver castor” with vanilla and a few shots of whiskey “which keeps the potion from freezing. Then I mix the potion with stream mud and old leaves.”

It helps to know behavior. “In the spring of the year the 2-year-olds get kicked out of the beaver house so Mama can make room for more little ones,” Besaw says. “I study the beaver area, locate the runs or channels and prepare to set. When I set my traps I like to use pieces of popple (aspen) bark for bait. I call the bait ‘beaver ice cream.’ I place the lure on the bank about a half foot to 2 feet from the trap. Did ya know that after beaver eat bark off the popple stick they shred the rest of the stick and use it for bedding?”

Professional snowshoer

Besaw worked at the Iversons Wooden Snowshoe Factory in the late 1960s and has fine-tuned the art of snowshoeing during his trapping. “You don’t walk on snowshoes, you stride on them,” he says. He has several models for various sorties. He swears by wooden snowshoes because of their durability and, thanks to neoprene lacing, aversion to sticky snow. “I can walk through water and wet snow without anything sticking,” he says.

A pair of snowshoes, wooden duck and saw are eye-catching decorations hanging from the gable end of Besaw’s garage. But it’s the inside of the garage and house that reflects Shingleton’s colorful Upper Peninsula culture.

Inside his house and makeshift museum, I met his wife as she worked in the kitchen. “This is my wife, Janet,” he said, by way of introduction. “I bought her. There were lots of gals lined up, and the price on her was $250 more than the others. I wanted the best, so I paid the extra money.”

Besaw has 650 books and pamphlets on trapping and hunting. He has scrapbooks full of photos, newspaper clippings and notes recording bag limits of trout, a horseshoe championship press notice and the shot of him proudly holding a giant bobcat up for the camera. Another photo shows off the eight beavers, three muskrats and an otter that Besaw once harvested in a single day.

Besaw’s garage is filled with traps and thin boards called stretchers. Once he skins an animal, he stretches the skins over these boards to dry. “I can pull the tailbone out of a beaver with just my fingers,” he says. He then sells the hides to taxidermists or buyers. A buyer comes to a Shingleton area bar and restaurant known as The Bear Trap about three times a year to buy skins from various trappers.

Wild wisdom

Besaw knows animals, animal biology and animal behavior. And he can spit out his knowledge faster than he can talk. “I could never tell ya all I’ve learned in 63 years of trapping,” he says. “For example, you can tell if a beaver house is occupied in winter by the puffs of steam that come out the vent hole found atop the beaver house. If there’s no steam, there are no beaver.”

Besaw takes a breath and continues. “You probably know that coyotes poop and pee to mark their territory. But did you know that otters poop and even regurgitate to mark theirs?”

Turns out, Besaw is just warming up, running sentences together as fast as he can skin a beaver. “One time,” he claims, “I caught myself a Polish coyote. He tried to free himself by chewing his leg off. Only thing was, he chewed off the three legs that were already free.” Without taking another full breath, he says, “If I feel like dying, I make myself a kettle of partridge soup and I revive like nothin’.”

Which he must have needed after the following happened: “I once had a bear cub caught in my coyote trap. The cub climbed up a tree with another cub,” Besaw recalls. “I needed that trap and the only way I could get it was to climb up the tree and release the cub from it. While I was doing this, mama bear was nearby in a thicket, growling. I didn’t lose no time getting out of there.”

If you doubt that one, you’ll have to ask him if it’s a true story. He’d love the company. That’s Duck Besaw, future Trapper Hall of Famer and Shingleton, Michigan, resident.

Jerry Harpt is a retired schoolteacher and coach who now bides his time as a travel and outdoors writer. He’s an avid silent sports enthusiast who cross-country skis, hikes, bikes and kayaks.

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