One man’s wilderness (27 page)

From the ends of the drum I made a pair of ice creepers for slick ice and another pair with cleats for climbing in the crusted snow. I accomplished a rough surface on the creepers by driving the point of a spike through the metal in many places. The cleats were three-quarter-inch strips of oil drum folded at the center, and then flattened out a half inch from each end. They were fastened to a metal sole by small sheet-metal screws.

I made an ice chisel out of the wide chisel by fastening it on the end of an eight-foot peeled spruce pole. The pole was augered at the end and split so the chisel handle would lay into it from the side. Then I wrapped it with haywire to make it snug.

Babe had brought me a real glass window that I thought would be a bit of a luxury, but it kept steaming and frosting up and I replaced it with homemade thermopane. This I was able to do by fastening a sheet of thick Mylar plastic (which I got from Sears and which was the mystery package Babe had told me about back in September) with masking tape on each side of the mullions. This left an air space between the two sheets, and the small holes I had bored through the mullions made it really one air space instead of many trapped within the panes.

In the corner of the lower right-hand pane I made a small wooden frame
between the Mylar sheets, forming a tiny pane within a pane. Here again a few small holes were bored through the frame to make the air space one. Into this framed compartment I placed a bag of silica gel which absorbed all the moisture between the Mylar layers and kept the window clear. This small pane also had a flap of Mylar over it.

I made some improvements in my fireplace and even installed a fancy damper which brother Jake had sent to me. Many fires had blazed merrily away in the hearth with no smoke at all.

I picked many high-bush cranberries and had made several bottles of syrup for my hotcakes. This gave the maple syrup a rest now and then.

Last week I completed my logging operation on the far side of Hope Creek. I was thinking ahead to the cache project in the spring.

Just yesterday I took my last tour with the canoe. When I beached it, ice was already forming on the metal skin. Now it is stored in Spike’s cabin for the winter once more.

Stars and a pale half-moon are rising at four-thirty in the afternoon. The strong wind continues. A fire flickered in the fireplace almost all day. It is good company with its warmth and its wheezing. I like the cast of my big wolf track in its special place atop the log slab mantel.

November 29th
. A thin overcast and a minus two degrees. The wind died during the night.

Chipped through three inches of ice to fill my water bucket a few hundred yards offshore. Yesterday morning I checked the water temperature under the ice. Thirty degrees. No wonder the ice thickens at a rapid rate. Ice as far as I could see up country. In a short time I will have a safe highway for miles in each direction. Freeze-up has arrived.

November 30th
. Dead calm and zero degrees. Frost crystals are building up on the ice. It is like walking on a thick pile rug. The tufts of frost are packed tightly together and over an inch high. The lake ice has increased one inch in twenty-four hours.

The temperature dropped to minus three degrees at noon. I decided to take a trip to the lower end. It’s a pleasure to travel the ice. It took one hour to the gravel bank of the connecting stream—not quite as fast as paddling.

I saw big wolf tracks in the drifted snow. They broke through the packed snow where I stayed on top. I saw many more wolf tracks, then a magpie farther down—a bad sign. Blood on the snow. Moose calf tracks, and then about 100 yards farther on, the calf dead on the bank. Blood was frozen on his hind leg above the hock joint. Evidently one of the wolves had hamstrung him while the rest of the pack had held his attention. Had they done it just for sport? Or had they been teaching their young how to go about it? There were smaller tracks in among the larger ones. They had not fed on the carcass at all. Had they actually killed this young bull or did they just disable him and leave him to die? Suddenly the wolves lost a few points with me.

December 1st
. During the night the wind swept the ice free of the frost. I was anxious to be on my way down to the lower end again to check on the calf. If nothing else, it would be meat for my birds and animals.

I tied on my ice creepers and headed down the ice pushing my big sled. The wind drove against my back and squiggles of snow, like frosty snakes, raced over the ice before me.

The long hair on the calf was drifted full of snow, and I soon found that the meat was no good. I could pull hair out by the handfuls and the carcass smelled pretty ripe. I butchered it up into sections, loaded up the sled, and headed for home.

Quite a difference, going against the wind. One gust held me to a standstill. Without my ice creepers I never could have made it. I stowed the meat in the half fifty-gallon drum to freeze, and hung the head in a tree. The magpies soon took command, but there will be plenty for all.

Just before dark I cruised up to my stand on the edge of the log timber. I brushed the snow from a chunk under the spruce and just sat there to think and look and listen. Many sights I had seen there, and many storms. An hour
later the temperature took a nose dive and a strong wind started driving snow from down country.

December 2nd
. Minus twenty-two degrees and the continuous complaining sounds of the ice.

I opened up the waterhole. Six and one-half inches—an inch and a half in the last twenty-four hours. Out on the lake, the wind drove the cold right into bones. How many clothes would it take to shut out the cold? Shorts and T-shirt, Frisco jeans and wool shirt vest, red sweatshirt with hood, heavy Navy sweater and insulated coveralls. Then Navy cold-weather wool-lined overalls, watch cap, Navy wool-lined cold weather cap, two pairs of felt inner soles and one pair of cardboard inner soles in my pacs, two pairs of woolen socks, two pairs of woolen mittens, and my heavy woolen scarf. I took a hike up the lake and felt I was dressed about right except I needed more protection for my hands. I came back over the timber trail rather than face a wind that stabbed pain through my cheeks.

Back at the cabin I took a piece of my Glacier Creek ram skin and sewed it into a long tube, hair side in. I fastened a cord to each end so it would hang around my neck. Bare hands shoved into the ends—no wonder those sheep can survive up on the crags!

I filled my kerosene lamp this evening. I made sure the wick was well saturated, then touched a wooden match flame to it. It gives off a soft yellow light and is as quiet as the wilderness, a welcome change from the hissing of the Coleman lantern even though the Coleman throws a whiter, brighter glow. The old kerosene lamp seems to fit into the scheme of things out here—the cabin, the wilderness, and the cold.

I noticed a few air leaks in the cabin. There’s frost on the outside of the logs. I plugged up these places with oakum, and I also tacked on more oakum for the door to close against.

December 3rd
. My work on the cabin last evening paid off. It held the heat better last night.

The ice is now eight-and-a-half inches thick at the waterhole, an increase of two inches from yesterday.

It’s not too bad working in the woodshed at minus twenty-two degrees. I chopped off a chunk of moose hind quarter. The meat shattered like ice.

Even when they are not feeding, the magpies huddle around the moose head. A chickadee, fluffed to twice his normal size, sat motionless among the spruce needles. There was a ring of frost around his jet bright eye.

December 4th
. Not a breath. Minus thirty-two degrees. The ice groans like a huge wounded animal all through the day. Now that the ice is thicker the sound seems in a different pitch.

Nine-fifteen when Spike’s Peak across the lake caught the first rays of the sun.

At minus thirty degrees the moose meat saws like wood. Some prime meat dust for the chickadees, who are puffed up like little gray balloons today and sitting low in the branches to protect those spindly legs. The camp robbers arrived. They looked like giants with their inflated feathers.