Among the many agricultural pursuits of the Mack family, Jim in particular had a bait business for the summer people, advertised with a roadside sign. I used to join him with my flashlight on rainy summer nights in Mrs. Mack s garden, hunting earthworms. One summer Jim decided to branch out into minnows. We rode our bikes to the hardware store in Shelburne, and came home with a fine fishtrap. This is an ingeniously constructed wire cage, with concave cones at either end, and two small openings.
Small fish get in, but they can t get out.
We put our new fishtrap in the brook behind my house. When we came back in a day or two, there were three or four minnows in it. Jim carried them in a plastic bag to an old bathtub behind the chicken coop at his house, and the fishtrap went back into the creek. To make a long story short, it was a long walk from my house to the stream where the trap was, longer for Jim. Profits from the bait business fell short of expectations.