The Grasshopper Trap

 

By Patrick F. McManus

McManus was a humor writer for outdoor life, hunting and fishing magazines. His stories featured improbable predicaments and childhood tales and strange characters, including himself. Often hilarious and always amusing, reading his stories is trip, in more ways than one. 

The title story, The Grasshopper Trap, features one of his most iconic characters, Rancid Crabtree, grizzled old woodsman and idler. Desiring to acquire more bait for fishing, school age Pat and his friend Crazy Eddie Muldoon are on a fruitless hunt to catch grasshoppers. Eddie, who has an inventive mind, dreams up the grasshopper trap and Rancid, who also wants to do some trout fishing, thinks the idea just might work. And it might have, if Rancid had known his left hand from his right. 

List of the stories in The Grasshopper Trap:

• The Skunk Ladder
• How to Go Splat! 
• The Human Fuel Pump
• 'Twas a Dark and Dreary Night
• Trailer Trials
• The Grasshopper Trap
• Get Lost!
• Never Cry Snake!
• Metamorphosis and Other Outdoor Phenomena Wives Don't Understand
• The Swamp
• A Hunker Is Not a Squat
• Why Wives on Christmas Mourn
• The Hunting Lesson
• First Knife
• Nincompoopery and Other Group Terms
• Bad Company
• The Case of the Missed Deer
• Character Flaws
• Mean Tents
• Crick Ritual
• Hunting Camp Etiquette
• Stone Soup
• Gunrunning
• The Wager
• Letters From Camp
• Sweet Sweet Sixteen
• Down and Way Out in Brazil
• Strange Encounters of the Bird Kind
• The Outing
• I, the Hunted