One man’s wilderness (41 page)

My ladder project had priority today. I had a perfect pole that was well seasoned. I ripped it down the center and put my ladder together with the flat sides in. The steps were short logs with flat sides up and level, making a ladder a man could walk up instead of climb. I put it all together with nails and glue.

I sat on the beach munching on a cold sourdough-hotcake sandwich, and who should come along the open-water highway but a beaver, no more than forty feet away. He swam back and forth, staring at me. Then he disappeared as if he were jealous of a character who could pile up more chips than he did.

A butter-flecked sunset, with the temperature at fifty-seven degrees. I had all I could do to get out on the lake ice this evening, and was surprised to find it only twelve inches thick. Babe had said, “As long as it is safe for landing, leave the big wood block out that marks the waterhole. I can see it good from the air.”

The block is no longer on the ice.

I suppose the wood block would be the same as the oil drum on the ice. “When the ice is safe,” Babe said, “put the oil drum on the ice.” I did. Ten weeks later he came in and asked me, “Why the oil drum on the ice?” He has a good memory, but it isn’t very long.

May 27th
. Thirty-two degrees. Overcast and a strong wind up the take.

Hope Creek is pouring a big volume of water from its mouth. This turmoil
plus the wave action from around the point are rapidly eating away the ice. I could see the pool of open water growing before my eyes.

It began to snow big flakes, four inches on the ground before it stopped. Then a big blue spot turned on in the cloud cover, and the sun broke through. A beautiful sight. I hurried to Spike’s cabin and rushed the canoe out of retirement. Late last fall I had been happy to put it away, but now I was happy to slide over the water again, in the wide channel between the shore and the edge of the rotting ice. I just had to take some pictures of my cabin and the new addition from offshore.

May 28th
. Forty degrees. The mountains are white from the snow of yesterday.

An odds-and-ends day. I made a screen for my kitchen window. Now I can open the window at night and not be annoyed by the singing of mosquitoes. I washed the caribou calfskin in soap and water. It is a pretty little hide about as big as a bandanna. Next I wrapped a twelve-inch band of gas tin around each leg of the cache at a point eight inches from the top. I would like to see that juvenile delinquent of a squirrel, or any other climbers, bypass that barrier.

I grubbed out a path to the cache and packed it with beach gravel. Cleaned up some building chips and drove in a water gauge stake for measuring the lake level.

Much more open water now. Piles of ice pushed up a ridge across the lake as it moved down from the upper end.

May 29th
. A day of organization.

Sorting, transferring, storing gear away in the cache, winter clothes to box up. My big white sheepskin and the curled horns, the extra grub. There was room to spare when I finished packing everything up high. Not room enough for a large moose, but space left for another ram or a caribou. It is all stowed now and with the ladder down, not even a mouse can get in—that is, if I didn’t pack one up there.

I found out why I didn’t see too much of the squirrel this past winter. I
discovered many piles of spruce-cone flakes where he had eaten under the snow. Not many spruce trees have hollows in them, but I have seen tunnels into their root systems. I’m sure squirrels do this.

Come to think about it, I have seen mine snipping off green cones, letting them fall every which way. He must collect them later and store them in his tunnels. Then when snow covers the land, he keeps out of sight beneath it, hauls a cone out of storage and dines in snowlight.

Used up the last of my sheep meat today. It has been more than eight months since I packboarded that big ram down the mountain in two loads.

June 6th
. The great ice chunks are moving past at the rate of fifty feet a minute. The chime-like tinkle of the crumbling ice was a welcome sound.

Wind is building up and whitecaps toss on the dark green water. After six and a half months of ice, the lake is nearly free and the mountain peaks can look at themselves in the mirror again.

Cloud Country

July 2nd
. Still, with mist rising from the slopes of the mountains. Forty-five degrees.

I would go up high today. After yesterday, which was the day of the lost axe, I had to take a little trip. Much wasted time and I almost suffered a touch of cabin fever. It all started when I decided to trim out a dead spruce and buck it into lengths that I could pack to the woodshed.

The axe! It was gone from its rack in front of the cabin! What had I done with it?

I looked all over the place. No axe. After all the miles we had traveled together, building everything, I hated the thought of losing it. A man could no more afford to lose his axe out here than he could his wallet full of folding money in a strange city.

I tried to retrace my steps over the last several days. I went to where I had limbed out the last tree. Not there. I looked in the woodshed and turned the woodpile upside down. Not there either. Another search of the cabin. In an area only twelve feet by sixteen feet, it didn’t seem as though I could miss it. Under the mattress pad, on the floor under the bunk, in the corners, behind the closet, behind the book rack.

Suddenly the trail got warmer. The bunk post next to the clothes closet stirred my memory. There was the axe, behind the post and above the ground so I couldn’t see it from below. Why had I ever put it there in the first place?

I was so happy to feel its welcome heft once more. I ran my palms over its workworn handle, scoured the tree sap from it, filed its blades, honed them razor keen, and set it into a gas-can tin of water to swell the handle tight into the head.

It was a valuable lesson. This morning the double-bitted chip-maker is back in its rack. A place for everything, everything in its place. Whoever said that knew what he was talking about.