‘What second trip?’ I asked.
Bando puffed his pipe, looked at me wistfully and said, ‘Are you ready to listen?’
‘Sure,’ I answered.
‘Well, here’s the rest of it. “. . . there was no trace of his camp on a second trip, and the warden believes that the young man returned to his home at the end of the summer.”
‘You know, Thoreau, I could scarcely drag myself away from the newspapers to come up here. You make a marvelous story.’
I said, ‘Put more wood on the fire, it is Christmas. No one will be searching these mountains until May Day.’
Bando asked for the willow whistles. I got them for him, and after running the scale several times, he said, ‘Let us serenade the ingenuity of the American newspaperman. Then let us serenade the conservationists who have protected the American wilderness, so that a boy can still be alone in this world of millions of people.’
I thought that was suitable, and we played ‘Holy Night.’ We tried ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas,’ but the whistles were too stiff and Bando too tired.
‘Thoreau, my body needs rest. Let’s give up,’ he said after two bad starts. I banked the fire and blew out the candle and slept in my clothes.
It was Christmas when we awoke. Breakfast was light—acorn pancakes, jam, and sassafras tea. Bando went for a walk, I lit the fire in the fireplace and spent the morning creating a feast from the wilderness.
I gave Bando his presents when he returned. He liked them. He was really pleased; I could tell by his eyebrows. They went up and down and in and out. Furthermore, I know he liked the presents because he wore them.
The onion soup was about to be served when I heard a voice shouting in the distance, ‘I know you are there! I know you are there! Where are you?’
‘Dad!’ I screamed, and dove right through the door onto my stomach. I all but fell down the mountain shouting, ‘Dad! Dad! Where are you?’ I found him resting in a snowdrift, looking at the cardinal pair that lived near the stream. He was smiling, stretched out on his back, not in exhaustion, but in joy.
‘Merry Christmas!’ he whooped. I ran toward him. He jumped to his feet, tackled me, thumped my chest, and rubbed snow in my face.
Then he stood up, lifted me from the snow by the pockets on my coat, and held me off the ground so that we were eye to eye. He sure smiled. He threw me down in the snow again and wrestled with me for a few minutes. Our formal greeting done, we strode up the mountain.
‘Well, son,’ he began. ‘I've been reading about you in the papers and I could no longer resist the temptation to visit you. I still can’t believe you did it.’
His arm went around me. He looked real good, and I was overjoyed to see him.
‘How did you find me?’ I asked eagerly.
‘I went to Mrs. Fielder, and she told me which mountain. At the stream I found your raft and ice-fishing holes. Then I looked for trails and footsteps. When I thought I was getting warm, I hollered.’
‘Am I that easy to find?’
‘You didn’t have to answer, and I’d probably have frozen in the snow.’ He was pleased and not angry at me at all. He said again, ‘I just didn’t think you’d do it. I was sure you’d be back the next day. When you weren’t, I bet on the next week; then the next month. How’s it going?’
‘Oh, it’s a wonderful life, Dad!’
When we walked into the tree, Bando was putting the final touches on the venison steak.
‘Dad, this is my friend, Professor Bando; he’s a teacher. He got lost one day last summer and stumbled onto my camp. He liked it so well that he came back for Christmas. Bando, meet my father.’
Bando turned the steak on the spit, rose, and shook my father’s hand.
‘I am pleased to meet the man who sired this boy,’ he said grandly. I could see that they liked each other and that it was going to be a splendid Christmas. Dad stretched out on the bed and looked around.
‘I thought maybe you’d pick a cave,’ he said. ‘The papers reported that they were looking for you in old sheds and houses, but I knew better than that. However, I never would have thought of the inside of a tree. What a beauty! Very clever, son, very, very clever. This is a comfortable bed.’
He noticed my food caches, stood and peered into them. ‘Got enough to last until spring?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘If I don’t keep getting hungry visitors all the time.’ I winked at him.
‘Well, I would wear out my welcome by a year if I could, but I have to get back to work soon after Christmas.’
‘How’s Mom and all the rest?’ I asked as I took down the turtle-shell plates and set them on the floor.
‘She’s marvelous. How she manages to feed and clothe those eight youngsters on what I bring her, I don’t know; but she does it. She sends her love, and says that she hopes you are eating well-balanced meals.’
The onion soup was simmering and ready. I gave Dad his.
‘First course,’ I said.
He breathed deeply of the odor and downed it boiling hot.
‘Son, this is better onion soup than the chef at the Waldorf can make.’
Bando sipped his, and I put mine in the snow to cool.
‘Your mother will stop worrying about your diet when she hears of this.’
Bando rinsed Dad’s soup bowl in the snow, and with great ceremony and elegance—he could really be elegant when the occasion arose—poured him a turtle shell of sassafras tea. Quoting a passage from one of Dickens’s food-eating scenes, he carved the blackened steak. It was pink and juicy inside. Cooked to perfection. We were all proud of it. Dad had to finish his tea before he could eat. I was short on bowls. Then I filled his shell. A mound of sort of fluffy mashed cattail tubers, mushrooms, and dogtooth violet bulbs, smothered in gravy thickened with acorn powder. Each plate had a pile of soaked and stewed honey locust beans—mixed with hickory nuts. The beans are so hard it took three days to soak them.
It was a glorious feast. Everyone was impressed, including me. When we were done, Bando went down to the stream and cut some old dried and hollow reeds. He came back and carefully made us each a flute with the tip of his penknife. He said the willow whistles were too old for such an occasion. We all played Christmas carols until dark. Bando wanted to try some complicated jazz tunes, but the late hour, the small fire dancing and throwing heat, and the snow insulating us from the winds made us all so sleepy that we were not capable of more than a last slow rendition of taps before we put ourselves on and under skins and blew out the light.
Before anyone was awake the next morning, I heard Frightful call hungrily. I had put her outside to sleep, as we were very crowded. I went out to find her. Her Christmas dinner had been a big piece of venison, but the night air had enlarged her appetite. I called her to my fist and we went into the meadow to rustle up breakfast for the guests. She was about to go after a rabbit, but I thought that wasn’t proper fare for a post-Christmas breakfast, so we went to the stream. Frightful caught herself a pheasant while I kicked a hole in the ice and did a little ice fishing. I caught about six trout and whistled Frightful to my hand. We returned to the hemlock. Dad and Bando were still asleep, with their feet in each other’s faces, but both looking very content.
I built the fire and was cooking the fish and making pancakes when Dad shot out of bed.
‘Wild boy!’ he shouted. ‘What a sanguine smell. What a purposeful fire. Breakfast in a tree. Son, I toil from sunup to sundown, and never have I lived so well!’
I served him. He choked a bit on the acorn pancakes—they are a little flat and hard—but Bando got out some of his blueberry jam and smothered the pancakes with an enormous portion. Dad went through the motions of eating this. The fish, however, he enjoyed, and he asked for more. We drank sassafras tea, sweetened with some of the sugar Bando had brought me, rubbed our turtle shells clean in the snow, and went out into the forest.
Dad had not met Frightful. When she wing
ed down out of the hemlock, he ducked and flattened out in the snow shouting, ‘Blast off.’
He was very cool toward Frightful until he learned that she was the best provider we had ever had in our family, and then he continually praised her beauty and admired her talents. He even tried to pet her, but Frightful was not to be won. She snagged him with her talons.
They stayed away from each other for the rest of Dad’s visit, although Dad never ceased to admire her from a safe distance.
Bando had to leave two or three days after Christmas. He had some papers to grade, and he started off reluctantly one morning, looking very unhappy about the way of life he had chosen. He shook hands all around and then turned to me and said, ‘I’ll save all the newspaper clippings for you, and if the reporters start getting too hot on your trail, I’ll call the New York papers and give them a bum steer.’ I could see he rather liked the idea, and departed a little happier.
Dad lingered on for a few more days, ice fishing, setting my traps and snares, and husking walnuts. He whittled some cooking spoons and forks.
On New Year’s Day he announced that he must go.
‘I told your mother I would only stay for Christmas. It’s a good thing she knows me or she might be worried.’
‘She won’t send the police out to look for you?’ I asked hurriedly. ‘Could she think you never found me?’
‘Oh, I told her I’d call her Christmas night if I didn’t.’ He poked around for another hour or two, trying to decide just how to leave. Finally he started down the mountain. He had hardly gone a hundred feet before he was back.
‘I've decided to leave by another route. Somebody might backtrack me and find you. And that would be too bad.’ He came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ve done very well, Sam.’ He grinned and walked off toward the gorge.
I watched him bound from rock to rock. He waved from the top of a large rock and leaped into the air. That was the last I saw of Dad for a long time.
in which
I Have a Good Look at Winter
and Find Spring in the Snow
With Christmas over, the winter became serious. The snows deepened, the wind blew, the temperatures dropped until the air snapped and talked. Never had humanity seemed so far away as it did in those cold still months of January, February, and March. I wandered the snowy crags, listening to the language of the birds by day and to the noises of the weather by night. The wind howled, the snow avalanched, and the air creaked.
I slept, ate, played my reed whistle, and talked to Frightful.
To be relaxed, warm, and part of the winter wilderness is an unforgettable experience. I was in excellent condition. Not a cold, not a sniffle, not a moment of fatigue. I enjoyed the feeling that I could eat, sleep and be warm, and outwit the storms that blasted the mountains and the subzero temperatures that numbed them.
It snowed on. I plowed through drifts and stamped paths until eventually it occurred to me that I had all the materials to make snowshoes for easier traveling.
Here are the snowshoe notes:
‘I made slats out of ash saplings, whittling them thin enough to bow. I soaked them in water to make them bend more easily, looped the two ends together, and wound them with hide.
‘With my penknife I made holes an inch apart all around the loop.
‘I strung deer hide crisscross through the loops. I made a loop of hide to hold my toe and straps to tie the shoes on.
‘When I first walked in these shoes, I tripped on my toes and fell, but by the end of the first day I could walk from the tree to the gorge in half the time.’
I lived close to the weather. It is surprising how you watch it when you live in it. Not a cloud passed unnoticed, not a wind blew untested. I knew the moods of the storms, where they came from, their shapes and colors. When the sun shone, I took Frightful to the meadow and we slid down the mountain on my snapping-turtle-shell sled. She really didn’t care much for this.
When the winds changed and the air smelled like snow, I would stay in my tree, because I had gotten lost in a blizzard one afternoon and had had to hole up in a rock ledge until I could see where I was going. That day the winds were so strong I could not push against them, so I crawled under the ledge; for hours I wondered if I would be able to dig out when the storm blew on. Fortunately I only had to push through about a foot of snow. However, that taught me to stay home when the air said ‘snow.’ Not that I was afraid of being caught far from home in a storm, for I could find food and shelter and make a fire anywhere, but I had become as attached to my hemlock house as a brooding bird to her nest. Caught out in the storms and weather, I had an urgent desire to return to my tree, even as The Baron Weasel returned to his den, and the deer to their copse. We all had our little ‘patch’ in the wilderness. We all fought to return there.
I usually came home at night with the nuthatch that roosted in a nearby sapling. I knew I was late if I tapped the tree and he came out. Sometimes when the weather was icy and miserable, I would hear him high in the tree near the edge of the meadow, yanking and yanking and flicking his tail, and then I would see him wing to bed early. I considered him a pretty good barometer, and if he went to his tree early, I went to mine early too. When you don’t have a newspaper or radio to give you weather bulletins, watch the birds and animals. They can tell when a storm is coming. I called the nuthatch ‘Barometer,’ and when he holed up, I holed up, lit my light, and sat by my fire whittling or learning new tunes on my reed whistle. I was now really into the teeth of winter, and quite fascinated by its activity. There is no such thing as a ‘still winter night.’ Not only are many animals running around in the creaking cold, but the trees cry out and limbs snap and fall, and the wind gets caught in a ravine and screams until it dies. One noisy night I put this down:
‘There is somebody in my bedroom. I can hear small exchanges of greetings and little feet moving up the wall. By the time I get to my light all is quiet.
‘Next Day
‘There was something in my room last night, a small tunnel leads out from my door into the snow. It is a marvelous tunnel, neatly packed, and it goes from a dried fern to a clump of moss. Then it turns and disappears. I would say mouse.
‘That Night
‘I kept an ember glowing and got a light fast before the visitor could get to the door. It was a mouse—a perfect little white-footed deer mouse with enormous black eyes and tidy white feet. Caught in the act of intruding, he decided not to retreat, but came toward me a few steps. I handed him a nut meat. He took it in his fragile paws, stuffed it in his cheek, flipped, and went out his secret tunnel. No doubt the tunnel leads right over to my store tree, and this fellow is having a fat winter.’
There were no raccoons or skunks about in the snow, but the mice, the weasels, the mink, the foxes, the shrews, the cottontail rabbits were all busier than Coney Island in July. Their tracks were all over the mountain, and their activities ranged from catching each other to hauling various materials back to their dens and burrows for more insulation.
By day the birds were a-wing. They got up late, after I did, and would call to each other before hunting. I would stir up my fire and think about how much food it must take to keep one little bird alive in that fierce cold. They must eat and eat and eat, I thought.
Once, however, I came upon a male cardinal sitting in a hawthorn bush. It was a miserable day, gray, damp, and somewhere around the zero mark. The cardinal wasn’t doing anything at all—just sitting on a twig, all fluffed up to keep himself warm. Now there’s a wise bird, I said to myself. He is conserving his energy, none of this flying around looking for food and wasting effort. As I watched him, he shifted his feet twice, standing on one and pulling the other up into his warm feathers. I had often wondered why birds’ feet didn’t freeze, and there was my answer. He even sat down on both of them and let his warm feathers cover them like socks.
‘January 8
‘I took Frightful out today. We w
ent over to the meadow to catch a rabbit for her; as we passed one of the hemlocks near the edge of the grove, she pulled her feathers to her body and looked alarmed. I tried to find out what had frightened her, but saw nothing.
‘On the way back we passed the same tree and I noticed an owl pellet cast in the snow. I looked up. There were lots of limbs and darkness, but I could not see the owl. I walked around the tree; Frightful stared at one spot until I thought her head would swivel off. I looked, and there it was, looking like a broken limb—a great horned owl. I must say I was excited to have such a neighbor. I hit the tree with a stick and he flew off. Those great wings—they must have been five feet across—beat the wind, but there was no sound. The owl steered down the mountain through the tree limbs, and somewhere not far away he vanished in the needles and limbs.
‘It is really very special to have a horned owl. I guess I feel this way because he is such a wilderness bird. He needs lots of forest and big trees, and so his presence means that the Gribley farm is a beautiful place indeed.’
One week the weather gave a little to the sun, and snow melted and limbs dumped their loads and popped up into the air. I thought I’d try to make an igloo. I was cutting big blocks of snow and putting them in a circle. Frightful was dozing with her face in the sun, and the tree sparrows were raiding the hemlock cones. I worked and hummed, and did not notice the gray sheet of cloud that was sneaking up the mountain from the northwest. It covered the sun suddenly. I realized the air was damp enough to wring. I could stay as warm as a bug if I didn’t get wet, so I looked at the drab mess in the sky, whistled for Frightful, and started back to the tree. We holed up just as Barometer was yanking his way home, and it was none too soon. It drizzled, it misted, it sprinkled, and finally it froze. The deer-hide door grew stiff with ice as darkness came, and it rattled like a piece of tin when the wind hit it.
My Side of the Mountain Page 9