"As slow to take the hint as old Daddy Goss," came to be a local proverb.
One December while he was staying at the Murch farm he fell sick with a heavy cold, and while he lay in bed he fretted constantly about his traps.

At last he offered Billy Murch, who was then fourteen years old, half of all the animals that might be in them if he Would go out and fetch them home.

The line of traps, he said, began at a large pine-tree near the head of Stoss Pond and thence extended round about through the then unbroken forest for a distance of perhaps fifteen miles to a birch-bark camp on Lurvey's Stream that the old trapper had built to shelter himself from storms two years before.
Billy wanted to go but his mother would not consent to his going alone.
So he talked the matter over with the old Squire, who was a year older than Billy, and offered him half the profits if he would accompany him; and the result was that the two boys took the old man's flintlock gun and set off at daylight the following morning.

They were not to stop to skin any animals that they found in the traps, but were to make bunches of them and carry them home on their backs.

The old trapper would not trust them either to skin the catch or to reset the traps.