Cache Lake Country Read online

  During the winter the lakes are our highways, but at this time of the year no man who thinks much of his dogs or horses takes them on the old ice. In logging operations years ago I saw many fine horses go through in the spring and the way the teamsters fought to get them out showed how much they loved the animals. Neither man nor beast can last long in ice-cold water so the job had to be done in a hurry if it was to be done at all and nobody shirked. They would slash the harness with an axe and use ropes and chains, risking their lives trying to pull the animals out.

  Every once in a while we like to go ice fishing, and although it is pretty late the Chief was over not long ago and we went out on the heavy ice in the cove north of the cabin where a little brook comes in, and cut two holes through thirty inches of ice. All we had was a couple of short saplings with six feet of line and bass hooks baited with small chunks of fat pork. We got a dozen speckled trout, which you seldom get in winter fishing anywhere else but in the north, and a four-pound lake trout, as well as several pickerel.

  Part of the fun is finding a sheltered place in the woods on the shore and cooking the fish right then and there. They never taste so sweet and in the winter the flesh is very firm and white. Over on Shining Tree Lake the Chief has a little fish house on runners that he skids out on the ice where he can fish sheltered from the biting wind.

  During a spell of weather Hank and the Chief came over, as they often do, to work with me for company’s sake on small indoor jobs that go so well with easy talking. Hank made himself a new moosehide sheath for his hunting knife, fastening the side with copper rivets, which don’t take the edge off the blade. I worked on a bread knife made of an old hacksaw blade of the heavy duty type used in machine shops. It is about an inch wide and thick enough not to bend when you slice. But the smaller blade used in a hand frame will also work very well.

  The handle is made of two sections of maple or birch the insides of which are slotted just enough for a tight fit when the blade is laid between them in plenty of waterproof glue. I then riveted the end of the handle, using the hole provided in the saw and then fastened the inside end of the handle with two small brass screws, one on each side of the blade. A brass ferule or a lashing of copper or brass wire over the screws is a good idea for extra strength. I put an edge on my blade with a coarse stone, making sure to have it sharp without cutting down on the size of the teeth. That knife slices hot bread as nicely as you please without tearing it.

  While I’m on the subject of saws, an old friend of mine carries a thin bucksaw blade coiled in a round tin box with a couple of bolts and wing nuts to go with it. When he wants a bucksaw all he has to do is to pull out the blade and cut a limber sapling. After slotting the ends and making holes for the bolts he bends the sapling bow to the blade and is ready to go to work.

  All this time the Chief was busy repairing a runner on my sled. I always admire the way he makes use of what comes to hand when he needs a special tool. That time he wanted to make a hole of exactly the right size for the thong that lashes the runner to the body legs. He got just what he wanted by filing sharp grooves in the four flat sides of the point on a six-inch finishing nail. I don’t know any finer sight than to watch a man with skill in his hands shaping wood to his needs.

  One night while the Chief and Hank were with me I began rummaging through the old chest under my bunk where I keep all my treasured things. Near the bottom I found a little varnished birch log about six inches long and two thick. It is split in half, hinged, and the center hollowed out to hold a set of jackstraws carved from birch. Nicest work of its kind I ever saw. An old woodsman made them for my mother away back before I was born. There are forty pieces in the set including an axe, hammer, guitar, ladder, plow, sawhorse, a peavey like lumberjacks use on the rivers, and two balls in a cage. Not one of them is over five inches long and the handles are no bigger than a toothpick, yet every detail is perfeet, even to the teeth in the bucksaw blade. Scratched on the bark of the log box in a dim scrawl is the inscription: Bûchette de Noël—1880 which means “Christmas Log.”

  Every once in a while in the woods, especially toward spring, a man starts craving various kinds of foods that he knows there is not a chance in the world of getting. Mostly it is for something sweet, because working in the woods you burn up energy rapidly, which brings on a natural craving for sugar. In the city you are just as likely as not to be hankering for venison steak, broiled trout fresh from the water, or maybe a bowl of fresh-picked raspberries.

  The Chief, Hank, and I have a “hankering meal” every so often, and you would be surprised what a lot of fun you can have in just talking about what you would eat if you could get your wish. One night Hank happened to mention that he would give almost anything for a good plate of fried oysters with tartar sauce. That started us going! The Chief, who always enters into it with a twinkle in his eyes, said he would give a lot for a slab of roast beef which he always orders in the little eating place out at the settlement. By that time I was drooling with the thought of a big plate of vanilla ice cream with hot butterscotch sauce poured over it. That sort of talk always whets our appetites, and we ended up with a fine supper of some of the trout we caught through the ice, hot biscuits, and Indian pudding made from a recipe I worked out myself. This is how I make it:

  I take four cups of evaporated milk, which I heat to the scalding point and then stir in a half cup of corn meal, white or yellow, mixed with two tablespoons of flour; two-thirds cup dark molasses; a half cup of venison suet cut very fine; a half teaspoonful of ginger and the same amount of cinnamon, and a teaspoonful of salt. This mixture I cook on the stove a half hour or so until it gets thick, and then I turn it into a baking pan for the oven. I pour over the top of the pudding a cup of cold milk, just letting it stay on the top and not stirring in. This I set in the oven and let it cook from two to three hours. Served hot with chunks of maple sugar it is a grand dish. If you have some cream to pour over it, all the better.

  The morning after we finished sugaring we were sitting by the stove smoking and drinking a second cup of coffee when Wolf began scratching a flea behind his ear. The steady thumping of his leg on the floor caught Hank’s ear and he remarked that it sounded like a drum. That is the way Hank gets ideas and I knew then what he had in mind. Sure enough, before long he rubbed a little bacon fat on the bucksaw blade and went down by the lake to look over a big hollow cedar that fell in the big wind last fall. When he came back he had a nice piece of cedar about twenty inches long and ten wide. As the Chief knows a lot about such things, Hank asked him how the Indians made their drums and the old man was glad to help. He took my long chisel and mallet and showed Hank just how to chip down and smooth the inside of the hollow log. When he finished the wall was not more than an even three-quarters of an inch thick all around. The thinner the wall, the better the boom. Almost any hollow dry log will make a drum. Cedar or basswood are just right, and remembering the old hollow trees in my grandfather’s orchard, I asked the Chief how about a piece of apple wood? He said it ought to be fine.

  Hank cut off the ends of his drum log nice and square so it would sit up straight and also make it easier to stretch the heads on evenly. After that he rounded and smoothed the outside edge on both ends of the log with a file and sandpaper so the heads would not chafe through. Chief Tibeash gave Hank pieces of untanned deer hide, that is rawhide, for the drum heads. They are put on wet, for as the skin dries and shrinks it gets tighter than a greenhorn’s nerves when he meets a bear.

  The Chief said a man he took fishing last year told him his boy had used an old piece of automobile tube for a head and had made a pretty good drum by stretching it over the ends of a water pail with the bottom cut out. All you need to beat a drum is a stick with a ball-shaped wad of cotton cloth wound tightly around the end. Then tie on a final covering of soft leather cut from an old glove. Drums are old and wonderful instruments.

  When the drum was dry the Chief tried it out. At first he was just thumping easy like, but in
a minute a faraway look came into his gray eyes. Somehow you felt he was looking back out of time. His lips tightened, and the beat of the drum grew louder and louder until the cabin was filled with the throbbing rhythm of an Indian war dance. It was a strange, wild sound and we couldn’t take our eyes off his wrinkled brown hands which seemed hardly to move. Suddenly he stopped, the faraway look faded away and then he was the old Chief Tibeash we had always known. I asked him who taught him to beat a drum like that and he just shook his head.

  “No man taught me,” he answered. “It is the way my people made their drums talk many, many years before I was born. It has been sleeping up here.” He touched his head and I understood what he meant. Just born in him, it was.

  Hank wanted to paint some Indian designs on the side of his drum so the next morning the Chief and I snowshoed over to Hank’s cabin where he had some special kind of color he was set on using.

  As we traveled up over the long rise that lies just west of Beaver Tail Lake, we picked up the trail of a snowshoe rabbit going in our general direction. At first the tracks went along in a straight line, but suddenly we saw that it had made a wild jump to one side and then started running in long leaps, zigzagging as it went. It’s easy for a woodsman to read that story. And sure enough the tracks ended at a spot where the snow had been tossed about for several feet. At one place we made out the dim outline of large wing tips, and found a little tuft of white fur. An owl, probably a big snowy owl, or perhaps one of those Labrador horned marauders, had been hunting. Savage birds those fellows are, and some of them have a wingspread of five feet and more. I have even seen them swoop down at Wolf, but they know better than to get too close to his sharp white fangs. Well, that’s the way nature is, and I guess it is all part of a plan of life.

  Because this is the time of year when your footgear gets soaked in the damp snow, the best thing to do with wet moccasins when you come in is to take a flat chip or the back of your knife and scrape out all the moisture you can, then stuff them with bent birch twigs to hold them open for drying. Keep them back from the stove so they won’t get hard. Slow drying is best for leather of any kind. I have seen many moccasins and snowshoes ruined by drying them too close to the fire.

  The Chief tells me he has seen quite a few moose tracks sharp and clear in the snow along the lake shore near his cabin. Moose are queer critters. They seem to enjoy a touch of civilization and like as not you will find more moose a few miles out of a settlement up in this country than you will in the deep woods miles from anywhere. That reminds me of the days when I was prospecting and used to go to a mining town every once in a while for supplies. There was a fellow who lived a few miles out of the camp who found a bull moose calf which he fed and tamed and later broke to harness. He used to drive into town with that moose hauling him in a buggy and it just about stopped everything when he arrived. That was all right at first, but after about two years the attention went to the fellow’s head. He got to be quite a show-off, making it a practice to drive in on Saturday nights and to hitch the moose to the rail of the board sidewalk. Then he would just sit around smoking a big cigar and enjoy the stares of the miners, for there is always a crowd in a mining camp on Saturday night.

  It is all part of a plan of life

  After a while some of the boys got sick of this showing off and one fall day they hatched themselves a plot. One of them was a moose hunter and on a Saturday night he went back in the woods not far off the road where this fellow drove by with the moose. It just happened that when our friend was driving home a cow moose began calling from the woods near the road. It was a quiet evening and the air was sharp, so the sound carried clean and clear.

  What happened after that we heard from the man who had owned the moose. It seemed that he was going along right smart and everything was fine until that moosecall came. Then something happened—he wasn’t sure just what —but all of a sudden he found himself lying under a spruce by the roadside and his moose was going into the bush, buggy and all, at a terrible rate. He never saw that moose again, although he did trace down what was left of the buggy, piece by piece, but for a year or more after that hunters said that they saw a moose with some tattered harness on it roaming the woods.

  It is about time I got busy on my small canoe, the one I generally cache on Shining Tree Lake. Nothing much wrong, but it needs some touching up. There’s a gouge on the bottom where I struck a rock coming down the rapids last fall. I sent away for a can of that good waterproof glue they use in boat yards and I’ll set a thin piece of wood in the cut to bring it flush. Sometimes I use the soft wood that you buy in cans, for when it hardens it takes a good finish. It is best for a deep cut, where you can tamp it tight. I finish it off with paint or varnish when it’s bone dry.

  When the Indians build birch bark canoes they make the seams tight with a pitch made of one part grease and ten parts spruce gum. Bacon fat will do for the grease and pure spruce gum warmed in hot water can be used to patch a small hole in a pinch. But it’s not a bad idea to carry a small can of white lead in your pack for just such emergencies.

  If the canvas on a canoe tears and you don’t get at it right away the water works in under it and starts trouble, so when you make repairs be sure the canvas around the tear is glued securely to the wood. Once in a while a cut is so bad you have to make a patch of canvas or other cloth to cover the hole after it has been filled in with white lead or gum. Patches of that kind may be rough and ought to be replaced when there is a chance to do a good job.

  A moose with tattered harness

  Taking good care of a canoe has a lot to do with its life. You never see a good woodsman drive a canoe ashore bow on, which puts a sudden strain on the keel, especially if you are carrying a heavy load. Of course when the water is rough there are times when you have no choice about landing, but the right way is to come in broadside to the shore. A canoe should be turned on its side on shore and laid in a shady place where it won’t get too much sun.

  I have owned several birch bark canoes and they are fine craft, but they spring a leak when you least expect it and are easily damaged. The seams and rough edges make for a lot of friction, and bark canoes are not as easy to handle in a wind as other types.

  I have often watched Indians making their birch bark canoes. They soak the birch bark in water for a day to get it soft so it will bend without splitting, and then sew it together with watap threads made from the roots of cedar and spruce gathered in the spring. They soak the ash ribs, too, and form them to the shape they want by holding them down with rocks. Not many are made these days.

  With the lake at my door, taking a bath in the woods in summer is a simple and pleasant event, but in winter when you usually have to climb into a washtub, it can be a major operation. But I have a simpler method and I recommend it above all others for cleanliness and refreshment.

  Years ago a Finnish miner who told me about using fireflies for light in mines, showed me how the people in his country take steam baths the year round. So when I came to Cache Lake I built a little log shack about four feet square and seven feet high with the sides chinked tight and a small ventilating hole on one side close to the roof. The bathhouse is set over a shallow pit and the floor is a light movable grating made by nailing saplings a few inches apart on two cleats. An old piece of canvas serves as a door.

  When you want a steam bath you build a big fire close to the shack and throw in good-sized stones to heat until they are just about red hot. The rocks are then shoveled into the bathhouse pit and the floor grating dropped into place. For a bath you take a pail of water into the shack and pour it, a dipperful at a time, on the hot rocks and in a few seconds you are bathed in clouds of hot vapor.

  After about fifteen minutes of that treatment you could wrestle with a bear and win. We take steam baths all winter no matter what the temperature without any bad effects. When I step out of the bath shack I take a quick rub down with snow and then make a run for the cabin. I had always believed that going in
to cold air after a hot bath was dangerous, but my Finnish friend convinced me there was nothing to that theory as long as you rub down with cold water or snow right after the steaming.

  Steam baths are nothing new in the north country, for the Indian medicine men used the same method for treating sickness. The Chief says they built small birch bark lodges for steam treatments and the old medicine men made a great mystery of the magic healing power of the white vapor. The idea of taking a steam bath just for the sake of cleanliness was new to the Chief, but when I built my shack he gave up his washtub and took to steam with great enjoyment.

  The moon is almost full. One night when I went out to sniff the weather I saw something that pleased me. Near the place where I buried the bones of the smoked fish we had for dinner I saw a skunk ambling along. I suppose people might wonder what thrill there is in seeing a skunk. Well, it’s because they are a sign that spring is on the way. It is not here, mind you, but coming, maybe next month, maybe later, according to the way winter gives up. When the skunks wake up from their long sleep it is a good sign. The Indians sometimes call it Skoo-kum Pesim, the Skunk Month, and no disrespect intended. I’m fond of the little critters, for you can depend on a skunk to mind his own business as long as you mind yours, which is fair enough.