One man’s wilderness (34 page)

Brother Jake must come up here and help me eat these groceries he sends. Here’s a box of Band-Aids in case I tangle with a bear. Some burn ointment for the bright days ahead. And a bottle of aspirins for a broken leg. How about that?

I finished my outgoing mail about the same time Babe finished the popcorn. Nice weather down at Lake Clark. The rivers were opening up. Airfield at Iliamna in bad shape and no mail from there in a week.

Babe was thinking seriously of building a log chicken house. From the number of questions about logs and putting them together, I suspect all I have to do is hint and I would have a job.

Babe reminded me that caribou season closes March 31st. When he came again, we might look for one.

I gave him clearance for takeoff, and off he went in a swirl of snow.

With all this gear I have been accumulating, that cache is a must. Spike’s cabin can’t take much more.

I heard a fly buzzing around. It landed on a log to soak up the sun. I hung the thermometer next to it. The mercury stopped climbing at seventy-six degrees. In the shade it read forty-two degrees.

I mended my snowshoes. They really needed attention. Wet snow ruins the webs in no time.

March 11th
. Plus fifteen degrees.

I am lakebound until my snowshoe webbings dry tight as a drum head. It is impossible to travel in the brush without them. I have given the webs a coating of polyurethane.

A good day to catch up on the woodpile.

March 12th
. Plus twenty-three degrees. Another few inches of snow during the night.

I have been curious to see how much ice there is on the lower lake. Packing my ice chisel and shovel, I headed for my experimental area. The top six inches of the lake ice seem to be the hardest. Farther down I made good time. Forty-four inches when I broke through. Eight inches more than the upper lake. Satisfied with what I had learned, I headed back to the cabin for lima beans and sourdough biscuits.

March 13th
. Plus sixteen. Snowing.

Today was the day to give that fancy can of Sears polyurethane varnish a workout. I kept the fireplace going and the door open for good ventilation. Everything that could take varnish got the full treatment—the counter, the table, the shelves, the window ledges, the wash bench. They all took on a shiny look. By midafternoon everything was dry, and I put things back where they belonged. Let those mission girls come now!

The lake is beginning to complain again after a long quiet spell.

March 15th
. Clear, calm, and minus twenty-eight degrees. Spring five days away, but this country doesn’t know it.

A good day to try out my G.I. mukluks and mittens. Nothing spectacular appeared during my trip along the slopes. No big game at all, a few spruce grouse and some ptarmigan. I saw the tracks of a lynx and porcupine tracks in the big cottonwood grove. I can do without porcupines. Their teeth ruin the handles of tools left in the wrong places.

The connecting stream is now open end to end.

I must give the mukluks and the mittens a high performance rating.

March 16th
. Clear and calm. Minus twenty-two degrees. A veil of overcast is robbing the sun of its power.

Last night at ten o’clock I saw streaks in the night sky to the north and the
northeast. I put on my cold-weather clothes and went out on the ice to watch the show. It was the best I have seen. A weaving curtain of green hung over the Glacier Creek country, spreading large one moment and shrinking small the next. Streaks of red, yellow, and green shot like searchlight beams to a point overhead. Clouds of colored light like brilliant fog patches blinked on and off. All alone in the subzero cold, with the heavens on fire and the ice cracking and crashing around me. A savage scene, and one to remember.

March 19th
. Plus twenty-seven degrees. Dancing flakes of snow beneath a gray sky.

I accomplished something today. At last all the camp robbers will take scraps from my fingers. Today the old veteran with the spots on his head decided to get into the act. He had been watching his two companions from his perch on the spruce-buck horns just above my head. His mind and body seemed willing to take the plunge toward the scrap I held out to him, but his feet wouldn’t let go of the perch. He gyrated and nearly lost his balance. Finally he dropped to my hand for a split second and left in panic with the meat scrap. It will be easier next time.

The waterhole isn’t closing in as fast as before. The ice-making season is just about over.

On one of my trips I had noticed a huge burl on a dead spruce tree. Today I would go back and salvage it. A king-sized one it was, measuring thirty inches by twenty-seven inches and about fourteen inches thick. I slabbed it with a four-inch cut next to the tree, then a three-inch cut. The cap would be about seven inches deep, and perhaps from that I could carve a bowl. Plenty of sawing, and while I sawed, the wind picked up. By one-thirty in the afternoon I was finished.

Two slabs on the packboard and in for lunch. Back again for the cap and the tools. Now the wind was howling and wailing through the boughs.

I removed the bark from my prize burl sections with the sharp block plane. The slabs will make interesting table tops. While I worked in the woodshed, the
three camp robbers came begging, and I had to get some meat scraps for them. They get so excited they can hardly wait their turn to come to my hand—sometimes two at once.

To celebrate the first day of spring tomorrow, I will take a jar of blueberries from my underground cooler box.

March 24th
. Dense fog and a plus four degrees.

A fox misses very little in his prowlings among the snow drifts. One has been in and out the brush near the big chunk of moose meat bait, and he knows exactly what he is doing. He watches the magpies as they whack away at the frozen meat with their bills. They hop away with hard-earned morsels and bury them in the snow. Back they come, beaks white to the eyes, to peck and twist away some more. And the fox patiently waits to make his rounds of their storage places, to gulp the bite-size pieces. Maybe that’s what the conversation of the magpies is all about when they find out what the red pirate has done.

The ptarmigan are talking on the slopes. Their voices sound like the croaking of frogs.

March 26th
. Plus twenty-four degrees. An inch of snow as dry as powder during the night.