Cache Lake Country

by John J. Rowlands

  The rounded white mounds rising above the level of the snow-covered pond mark the location of the beaver houses where, surrounded by water and locked fast in heavy ice, they live happily, safe from the cold and their enemies. Some of those houses, built of small logs, saplings, twigs, and mud, are ten feet across. Down in the mud on the bottom they have stored for the winter a fine food supply of juicy green poplar logs and other choice wood. The beaver enters his house through a sloping tunnel that starts near the bottom well below the ice and leads up to his living quarters above the water level. They are clean animals and have a drying-off shelf, so to speak, where they drain off water before going up to the sleeping room lined with nice dry grass and leaves of water plants. In the winter they try to keep an air hole open somewhere in the pond, but if the hole freezes over they can breathe all right with the small amount of air that leaks into their houses.

  A beaver is a critter that uses his head in more ways than one. Some folks say they know how to drop a tree where they want it to fall, but I don’t believe that is so. They just keep on gnawing right around the trunk until it comes down. I have always wanted to see what a beaver does at the moment a good-sized tree falls.

  Snow Buntings . . . fly up and strike the weed-tops

  On the way up we came into a clearing which is full of flowers and weeds in the summer and saw what we expected, snow buntings feeding on the seeds of dead weeds. They fly up and strike the tops of the weeds to knock the seeds out, then settle down in the snow to eat them. They are pretty little birds, white feathers below and brown mixed with white on top. The wings and tail are tipped with black. When they fly they circle and dip in a pattern as perfect as a lot of airplanes following a leader in formation. You see them flying in the worst blizzards, and they seem to enjoy it. Sometimes we see horned larks, too. They have little feathers that stand up on their heads and look like horns. If there are weeds to feed on, they don’t mind snow or cold either.

  Once the sun cleared the hills the glare on the snow was so bright that we had to put on our snow goggles. Snow blindness is something you have to watch for, especially late in winter when the glare is hard on a man’s eyes. That’s why we use snow goggles. Something like spectacles, they are, but instead of glass you look through very thin slits.

  We make our blinders of wood or bone, but all you really need to see how they work is some good stiff cardboard. If you have a pair of old spectacles handy, lay them on the cardboard and trace the shape. Then cut along the line, leaving the eyepieces solid and the nosepiece wide. Next with the point of a sharp knife cut thin slits across the middle of the eyepieces, but not right to the edges. If you have done a good job the slits should be exactly opposite your eyes, and you can then smooth them by running a strip of very fine sandpaper gently back and forth so the edges won’t be fuzzy. Now tie the snow glasses on with string to reach around your head. Don’t use wire earpieces; they freeze to your skin in cold weather. Try those glasses on bright snow, ice, or shining water, or even dazzling sand on a beach or desert, and see if you don’t think they’re fine to beat the glare. Fitting a little visor over the slits and painting the outside flat black helps to keep out reflected glare.

  If you like the idea carve yourself a pair of goggles out of soft pine wood. Make the slit as thin as paper and curve the goggles to fit your forehead, hollowing out the eyepieces so your eyelashes won’t rub. Snow blindness doesn’t always come from the glare of the sun on ice or snow, but from the steady whiteness of everything, even when the sun is hidden by thin clouds. Men have been known to go snow blind while stormbound in a tent. You can suffer from this misery any time of the year, but to my mind the glare of the sun on crusted snow from February on into the spring break-up is the worst.

  If you get snow blindness when you are alone on the trail you’re in a fix and no mistake, so the wise thing is to put on snow goggles or dark glasses, which serve the same purpose. And speaking of dark glasses, some of them can do your eyes a lot of damage, so you want to get the best, which are made of good optical glass.

  Snow blindness, I can tell you from experience, is painful, and about all you can do is try to shield your eyes from the light as much as possible. If you are at home it is a good thing to keep your cabin or tent dark. A solution of granular boracic acid in water helps to ease the pain, and I always have some with me in my first-aid kit. It is also good for small cuts and insect bites. One thing to make sure of is that you don’t try to use your eyes for reading or close work while you are suffering from snow blindness. That only makes it worse.

  Once when he had left his goggles at home I saw the Chief cut a slit in a piece of birch bark and tie it across his eyes, which did a pretty good job in the emergency. He made a little notch for the bridge of his nose and that’s all there was to it. He’s a wonderful old man and there’s never a day I don’t learn from him how well off a man can be if he makes use of all the things that nature provides. I never saw the time when the Chief could not use what he had at hand to make what he needed.

  To get back to our picnic, by noon we had worked up right hearty appetites, so we cleared a spot in the sun by a big spruce and built a warming fire and had our victuals. I never thought venison steak could taste so good. It had been hanging frozen since last fall, and, broiled over the glowing coals at the edge of the fire, it was that tender we didn’t need a knife to cut it. I had some boiled potatoes all ready to fry with onion rings and baking powder biscuits that I had baked that morning. They were touched with the frost, but that made no difference; in fact I think they tasted better for it. What with some strawberry jam that Hank’s sister sent up for Christmas, and plenty of steaming tea, we did ourselves pretty well. Then when the Chief had sliced some chips from his plug of tobacco and got his pipe fired up and smelling right fragrant, we hit the trail for Otter Stream. There were lots of wolf tracks around, so we figured they were after the deer which are in their yards in the heavy spruce.

  While we were looking over the beaver pond we talked about other creatures living under the ice. For one thing, I happen to know there are some very nice brook trout in that cold water. There are lots of other things too, including frogs and turtles asleep in the bottom mud. The fish don’t lack for food now. Lots of the small critters that live in the water keep going in the winter, and the fish think they’re pretty good eating.

  Most insects die off in the fall, leaving their eggs to carry on their kind, but it’s surprising how many stay alive through the winter. Some of the spiders, for example, don’t sleep so soundly and on a warm day you can see them occasionally out on the snow. The fishing worms we dig in the spring have burrowed down below the frost line and are snoozing the winter away. The ants are in snug underground homes well supplied with food. You would hardly believe that so delicate a thing as a butterfly could live through very cold weather, but several kinds find shelter under logs or in rock crevices or sometimes in the cracks of old buildings. That is why once in a while during an extra warm day in a January thaw you may see a small butterfly flying about. And sometimes we see those black and tan wooly bear caterpillars roaming about over the snow. Of course most butterflies and moths do not come out until spring. They winter as pupa or eggs and when the warm spring days come they break out of their cocoons as beautiful winged insects or hatch out of the eggs as caterpillars.

  Now that the snow is deep, a big crew is hard at work cutting timber some twenty miles north of Cache Lake. It is the nearest thing to an old-time lumber operation you will find these days. Most of the lumberjacks know their way about, but once in a while one of them gets lost. There was a fellow named Sam—I forget his last name—who was working with a crew up in the country west of Hawk Lake some years ago. One February day when quitting time came the men in Sam’s crew piled on a sled heading for camp, but Sam had forgotten his axe, so he jumped off and went back over the brow of a ridge to pick it up, figuring that the boys had seen him leave the sled. He wasn’t away more than a few minutes, but
when he came back the sled had gone. Then Sam’s troubles began. First of all, the country was new to him, and furthermore it was laced with sled tracks where they had been hauling logs. He picked out one track he was sure belonged to the sled that he should have been on, and started out, shouting once in a while in the hope that they would hear and wait for him.

  Finally Sam decided he was on the wrong trail, so he backtracked and picked out another line of runner marks and followed them for a while. He walked and walked, staggering through the deep snow, but he saw no sign of the camp. All the while he was yelling his head off, but never an answer came. Sam was in a fix and no mistake, for by that time night had settled down and the sky was overcast. Even if the night had been clear and he could have seen the North Star it would not have done him any good, for he had no idea where he was.

  Sam let panic grab hold of him

  By that time Sam was scared plumb to death and did the worst thing a man can do when he’s lost—he let panic grab hold of him. He remembered stories about wolves trailing a man and there were plenty of them around that section, for he could hear them howling. Lumberjacks believed the rattle of a piece of trace chain would keep them away and Sam wished he had one, but he should have known better about wolves attacking a man. Worse than that, the temperature had dropped away below zero and Sam had used his last match to light his pipe just before quitting time. There he was, no way of making a fire and the weather sharpening every hour. Then he started to run. First he would follow one sled track and when another crossed it he would take that one without knowing he had changed direction, for there hadn’t been any snow for several days and most of the tracks looked pretty fresh. Every once in a while he would fall, and finally he was so tired he wanted to lie down and go to sleep, but he knew better than to do that, and somehow he kept going.

  Well, to get to the end of the story, early in the morning when it was still dark, Sam staggered into a camp. He thought he had made his own, but found out he was in another twelve miles away. His feet were frostbitten, two of his fingers were frozen, and they had quite a time getting him straightened out. Essence of ginger helped, they tell me. Most men would have died, but Sam was strong and rugged and that’s the only thing that carried him through.

  Getting lost is something that can happen to anybody and it’s important that a man know how to find his way around and keep track of the landmarks wherever he goes all the time. I’m so used to keeping a landmark in sight that when I go to a city the first thing I do is spot a tall building or maybe a monument or tree in a park to keep me located. That’s what any woodsman would do because he depends upon observing everything as he goes along and building a chain of reference points by which he locates himself.

  Everybody who goes into strange country should carry a compass. To be sure, most woodsmen never use them and that’s all right if you know your territory. The Chief doesn’t need a compass in any country, but the old Indian was born and bred in the wilderness and everything he sees as he travels trails and waterways is part of a picture of the country as a whole. And if he meets a man on the trail he is not backward about getting all the information he can about conditions ahead.

  Many a man who owns a compass doesn’t really understand how to use it. We all know that the needle points to the magnetic North, which is different from the true North. Thus there is a variation to take into account if you want to follow an accurate course. This variation is either east or west of true North according to your position on the continent and it changes every year. Before starting into the woods find out the compass variation for that location and ask how it should be used in your readings. This is very important when you are laying out a course on a map. If, however, you simply want to reach some landmark you take a compass sight and follow it without bothering about the variation. Check the compass direction every few minutes to make sure you are on the course, for your landmark may be out of sight much of the time.

  When I go through strange country I always note which way the streams flow, where the hills are, and if I have to skirt around the end of a lake I make sure to locate a landmark on the other side that I will be able to see when I get there. I keep as near the shore as I can, but once in a while you have to go back into the woods to avoid beaver works or a swamp. Such detours may take you out of sight of the lake, and in twisting and turning you can quickly lose all sense of direction. That is a time when a compass helps. Sometimes I break off branches of bushes, leaving them dangling, which shows the way I have come. It’s surprising how quickly the eye will note a limb hanging in an unnatural position.

  In using a compass a man is apt to forget that the needle is deflected by iron or steel, so it is important when making a reading to put it on the ground or on a stump a few feet away and read the directions from a distance; otherwise your axe or your pocketknife or any other piece of metal such as a frying pan, may throw it off and send you in the wrong direction.

  The greatest mistake a man can make is to get suspicious of his compass and decide that it is not taking him on the right course. Unless a compass is so badly out of order that it won’t swing freely on its pivot it is better to follow its direction than run the risk of getting lost.

  With most things in life I do not believe in looking backwards, but a hindsight when you are working through new country is sometimes the best way of getting ahead, especially if you are not sure that you are going in the right direction and may have to turn back. It is a good thing to look back every little while and pick out a landmark, for trails have a way of blinding out in the middle of nowhere. And you are usually surprised to see that the country behind looks entirely different from that which lies ahead. I remember taking a man on a canoe trip once and on the way back we followed the same route by which we had gone in, yet he insisted we were in new territory until I showed him that by looking back he would see the land as he viewed it when we came up the river. He never forgot that experience.

  Blazes or other marks of travel are signs to watch for. I recall a young fellow going into a black spruce swamp and he thought he was doing the right thing when he blazed a tree every once in a while on the side of the trunk facing him as he walked along. When he turned around to come home the blaze marks were all on the opposite sides of the trees and if, when he started out, he hadn’t located himself a dead pine on a hill for a landmark he might have been lost. That was I when I was young and green!

  One of the foolish mistakes that a man makes—and it happens often—is to leave camp without telling his friends that he is going and in what direction. If you get lost that doubles your trouble, for nobody knows where to look for you.

  My grandfather, who was a seafaring man, used to say that any man who went out in a boat without a supply of fresh water was a fool. The same thing holds good in the woods in a different way. You can nearly always get water in the north woods, but a man who starts out without matches in his pocket in something that will keep them dry, and a strong knife, or maybe a hand axe, may be trailing trouble. As a matter of fact, if you are moving about where food is scarce or in a season when there are no berries, it is a good idea to have a snack of something in your pocket.

  Knowing something about distance and how to measure it is a great help in wilderness travel, for there are times when it is vital to know how far it is from one place to another. After you have lived in the woods for a while you learn to judge distance fairly accurately and can measure it by keeping track of the number of paces it takes to get to a certain place. My pace is thirty inches and I have learned to measure distance by counting my paces without finding it tiring. You can also get a rough check on the distance you cover by timing yourself. Unless you are carrying a heavy pack you can walk along a good trail at an average of from two and a half to three miles an hour. Traveling on a familiar trail in easy country an old-timer might do a shade better. But on a long trip the tendency is to slow down as you tire toward the end of it.

  Once when I wanted to make a roug
h map of a section of country I made myself a measuring wheel from an old barrel hoop and mounted it between the forks of a light sapling. Knowing its circumference, all I had to do was to roll the wheel over the ground, counting its revolutions every time a nail on one of the spokes snapped a little strip of wood fastened to the forks. I still have that wheel and in winter I sometimes hook it to the back of the dog sled to measure a trip. Some day I’m going to get a counter and hook it to the wheel so it will register distance automatically.

  If you have no compass, wind and sun can help to keep directions straight. And there are other signs in nature which are generally good, but which should never be relied upon alone as accurate because they vary with the country. The Chief told me when I came in here young that a man always ought to know the way of the “main wind,” by which he meant the prevailing wind, wherever he is. At Cache Lake, it is the west wind. So knowing the winds can help as long as you keep in mind that winds have a way of changing.

  When you can see it, the sun is a good guide, for you know without fail it moves in the general direction of east to west. But there are plenty of times when you don’t see the sun for days. At night when it is clear there is the North Star to guide you, and that friendly sign, which marks the true North, never changes position. You have probably heard before that a watch makes a good compass. When the sun is shining you point the hour hand—the little one—to the sun, and South will be halfway between the hour hand and the figure twelve.

  When you get down to hardpan, the whole business of living in the wilderness, finding your way about, and avoiding the dangers, is much a matter of common sense and getting the habit of observing everything closely. If you have common sense, which is the same thing as good judgment, you don’t often get into trouble, and every time you do get into trouble you learn something about common sense the hard way.