Welcome to Rumpel Strip, Vermont. I'm Erica Heilman.

We're standing in a bog. I'm seeing at least three muskrat houses.

Are they all working together in some way or are they all every man for himself?

No, they're all separate.

All different situations.

These rats will mate, maybe with each other some but they're all their own little families.

That's Barry Forbes.

Barry lives on Route 116, 5 miles east of Middlebury, Vermont, 8 miles south of Bristol.

He says if you're trying to find the place, just slow down and his hounds will let you know

where he is.

He lives in a double wide trailer directly behind the house where he spent his entire childhood

and he's never been away from this place on this road for longer than 13 months when he was in Vietnam.

Across the road from his house is a mountain where he's been fishing and hunting and

trapping since he was seven years old.

March is Muskrat season here in Vermont and

Barry took me out and showed me a few muskrat houses. If you don't know what a

muskrat looks like it's bigger than a rat and smaller than a beaver,

and it has a long tail.

Muskrats live in lodges they make out of aquatic plants and cattails. Barry and I walked around up to our waist in a bog

talking about muskrats, but the truth is it was just an excuse to be around

him for a while and talk with him about his lifelong passion for hunting. Here's Barry Forbes.

So we didn't we didn't actually trap anything today we just we walked around in the bog and we looked at muskrat houses or

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