by John Kulish
There, in the enameled pan, floated the story of my life: pine needles, spruce and hemlock needles, twigs, leaves, and bark. It had taken twenty years as a woodsman to collect that panful of forest debris.
Most people rightfully think the professional woodsman, the man who hunts, traps, and guides for a living, moved west from New Hampshire with Horace Greeley. But, even though born a hundred years too late, while still a boy, I knew I belonged in the woods. By the time I was twelve, nearby rivers, brooks, bogs, and marshes were my home away from home. Matching wits with muskrats made more sense than struggling with fractions. From March to November, my boots and pants were caked with mud, and the rich redolence of stagnant bog water and animal musk surrounded me. I was the delight of every dog in town.
During my years in high school, from October until May, I went to school for but four days each week. The books I wanted to read were all in nature’s library. It took several years to figure out her cataloging system, but once learned, I began to search out the rare volumes on her shelves and to learn to read her kind of printer’s ink. Before long, I realized that if I persevered, sooner or later, a first edition might open before my wondering eyes. During four decades I made quite a collection of first editions. They cover all the native animals, many of the birds, the trees, and the plants, but, like any collector, I have favorites. Mine is the river otter, a volume so precious I have yet to share all its pages with anyone.
The old Yankee adage, “Give a boy a dog and a gun and you have the makings of a lazy man,” has its Lithuanian counterpart. To my immigrant parents, the fulfillment of the American dream for their sons was a steady job in a furniture factory. Those were still the days when a man gladly worked sixty hours, with no coffee breaks, for ten dollars a week. For me, my parents’ dream was a nightmare. During the rush periods of several summers I did work twelve to fourteen hours daily at a machine, and hated it. Insatiable, heartless, cast iron and steel, it threatened to hamstring my personality. How can anyone appreciate the sun’s daily vault into the heavens, or calculate the progress of its steady march from a factory window?
The outdoors, the air, the wind, the clouds, the rain, the sleet, the snow, and the cold all mattered to me. I wanted to feel them an day, every day. I wanted to smell fir trees, bog water, and wild flowers. I wanted to watch a fox catch grasshoppers, see a doe nurse her fawn, spy on a hunting mink, and keep vigil on playing otter. I wanted to hear hawks whistle, partridges drum, brooks chuckle over stones washed down by some ancient glacier, and ice booming in deepening February cold. I wanted to follow the baying of a good hound. I wanted to be part of the winter, its clarity, its isolation, its rigorous demands. Each night, as I fell asleep, I wanted to be impatient for the morning, instead of dreading it as a quarry slave.
Purpose grew with muscles and bones. A boy’s hope became a man’s ambition: to learn all I could about the natural world I lived in and about the furred and feathered creatures that inhabited it with me. What makes a deer a deer, a mink a mink, a bobcat a bobcat, an otter an otter?
What I wanted to know would take my lifetime. It needed to be learned firsthand, in personal encounters with the animals and birds themselves. Just as the “proper study of mankind is man,” so the only way to study wild animals is in their own element, without their being aware of your presence. To learn for myself what no books could teach me, my hands must hold and examine not one, but many, of the same species. The truth must be discovered by my heart as well as by my head. No endowment or foundation could be expected to support my practical yet unconventional research, but then, neither would I have to report to a doubting board of directors.
But how would this be possible? I must have food and shelter. Caves are damp, and rock tripe and birch polypores do not appeal to me. I wanted a home, a wife, and children. Still, I wanted to get my education from the forest, the marshes, the rivers, and from the wild creatures that flew, swam, and hunted there. Obviously, I could earn my “woods degree” only if the animals would pay my tuition.
My primary and secondary schooling in woodcraft, canoeing, hunting, fishing, and trapping progressed concurrently with the duller, conventional courses taught inside brick buildings. But my “Bachelor of Animals” took much longer than the usual four years. By the time nature awarded me my “master’s,” familiar mountains had grown taller and steeper.
Having worked for her before on a part-time basis, I knew exactly what I could expect from nature as my future employer. Demanding, immutable, unappeasing, yes; but also beautiful, pure, honest, exciting, and, best of all, completely trustworthy. Certain conditions always equal certain results. That is nature’s greatest strength. There is no taskmaster or teacher like her. Once learned, her lessons are never forgotten. She demands that you observe, listen, think, compare, work, and remember. In turn, your hands, your feet, your brain, your heart, will bear blisters. Nature makes no concessions. She neither arbitrates nor bargains. A tough boss, she makes all the rules and none of the adjustments. For me, the one about a minimum wage proved the most rigorous.
For thirty years, we lived close to the bone, so close the marrow was often in jeopardy. We proved conclusively, and sometimes reluctantly, the economic theory that it is easier to live within a smaller income than within a larger one. In a vast, old house, heated with saw-it-yourself beaver-pond wood, one rarely develops a taste for satin sheets. But self-imposed economic discipline, invoked for a principle, usually pays compound interest as well as unexpected bonuses. The most obvious being a firm, flat belly. Dedication is low in calories. So is wild game.
We lived off the land. The big, dirt-floored cellar of our Victorian mausoleum smelled of stored potatoes, beets, carrots, and cabbage. Braced wooden shelves held row upon row of wild blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries, as well as vegetables and pickles. A freezer bulged with venison, hare, grouse, wild ducks, and horned pout. After her first week in school, when asked how she liked it, our older daughter, Johanna, replied, “Oh, I like Miss Wallace fine, but I don’t like hot lunches. One whole week and we haven’t had deer meat once!” Thanksgivings, as many as fourteen immigrant and first-generation Americans sat down to individual stuffed partridge, garnished with wild bog cranberries. Laughingly, my wife commented on how fitting it was that three hundred plus years after the initial feast, a first-generation American, married to an immigrant, provided for his family like a Pilgrim.
The months from October to May were the most important to me. During the frozen days of the longest shadows, the animals I pursued shared a common denominator with me—that of survival. The struggle to stay alive was as pitiless for them as it was for me. October meant ruffed grouse, woodcock, and ducks for the freezer, as well as scouting for fur. Each lake, pond, river, and brook in my district had to be surveyed. Where would the mink and the otter be? On which watershed should I begin? Where could I use a canoe? Where would I have to walk? Like a capable general, I drew my battle lines, while reconnoitering from dawn to dusk. Strategies were studied and restudied before D-Day dawned on November first.
During the next four weeks, an imminent freeze-up hung over my head like the sword of Damocles. Each morning, hours before daylight, my pack, loaded with traps weighing as much as seven pounds apiece, was hoisted onto my back. A shotgun in hand, I strode through the woods, “stringing steel,” until long after dark. I never sat down to rest. There wasn’t time. I stopped only to end the jetlike burst for freedom of a partridge or a duck, sometimes to watch a startled deer. I learned to rest while standing, but I was usually too wet with sweat to stop long.
My pack rarely lightened, for whenever I removed a trap, sooner or later, a twenty-pound otter took its place. One or two hours after dark, the soaked pack basket would be swung off my shoulders and into the back of my little truck. At home several mink and otter waited to be skun and stretched. The nights were too short. So were the days. There were never enough hours to do all that needed to be done: the cumbrous loads to be carried, the ru
gged miles to be hiked, the swamps to be waded, the rivers and lakes to be paddled. They were all part of a day’s work, work that was fulfilling, exciting, and right for me.
My purpose was not just to catch a water animal and to stretch its pelt onto a board prior to selling it to a fur dealer. My aim was to learn as much as I could about every wild creature. So its domain became my domain. Did it have a permanent home address? Or was it a nomad? What did it do in the spring, the summer, the fall, and the winter? Where did it hunt? What did it eat? When did it kill? Did it fight with its relatives? With other creatures? When did it travel? Did it communicate with its peers? If so, how? Over the years, I learned to think like the animals. Their weaknesses became my strengths; their strengths, my weaknesses.
My motives, my modus operandi, my complete emotional, intellectual, and physical involvement alienated me from some part-time hunters and trappers, from braggarts, and from my mother-in-law. Game wardens without in-depth knowledge of animal habits, never could quite understand how it was possible for me to check an otter trap from a canoe thirty yards away. As a “woods scientist” and a “pay-as-you-learn naturalist,” publicity was anathema to me. I avoided it as I would U.S. Route No. 1. My goal remained a simple one: to earn my living and my learning from the woods. It did not include becoming a millionaire.
In the woods, I was always hungry because eating took too much time. Besides, frozen apples, oranges, or sandwiches aren’t worth the dental agony involved. But I seldom got discouraged—only angry at myself whenever I made a bad decision. How could I get discouraged? I belonged in the woods; they belonged to me. The mountains and the valleys for miles around were as familiar and as dear as were the rooms in my home. The animals were all related to ones I had already met. To me, there was no mystery in where a cat, a mink, or an otter would go. If one of them eluded me today, it would only delay our eventual face-to-face encounter tomorrow, or the day after.
While in the woods, I frequently discussed my problems with myself. Looking up at a ledge, I’d say out loud so that the wind could bear witness, “Well, Tom, you may have pulled the wool over my eyes today, but tomorrow is another day. I know you hate my guts, and I don’t blame you. But I’m giving you fair warning. I know where you’ll be, and I’m coming after you.” Before daylight the next morning I was back where we had left off.
I had no more illusions about my chosen field than any competent captain of industry has about his. Like him, I acquired the wisdom to roll with the punches, and to plan a counterattack while still on my hands and knees. For mine was a battle of wits and of legs. Whenever the balance of power dipped in favor of my brains, it soon jerked back in favor of my quarry’s sheer physical power. No man can outrun a cat or a deer or outswim an otter. Even a special man with special knowledge has his hands full trying to outwit an animal. Four legs are still better than two, especially in mountain climbing; and any wild animal’s senses are far keener than ours. They still use a built-in system we dropped when we jumped, or fell, out of the trees before the Garden of Eden.
No matter how tired I was, nor how much I hurt, I never gave up. This was my field. I understood it. I understood myself. I believed in myself because I believed in what I was doing. I knew I could prevail, even though sometimes, it might take longer than others. What if things went wrong today? I had tomorrow: So did the animals.
2. Tools of a Woodsman’s Trade
A professional woodsman’s basic tools are few and simple: a short-barreled shotgun, a canoe, a compass, a jackknife that fits into the palm of his hand, snowshoes, all-wool underwear (in case he has to sleep in a snowdrift), a pack basket that bears the curve of his back, and boots with long laces.
To a professional hunter and trapper his boots are what a scalpel is to a surgeon or a saw is to a carpenter. Their make and condition tell you all you need to know about a hunter plying his trade. His boots are an outdoorsman’s trademark. Just as any old saw is not found in the village artisan’s tool box, so just any old kind of boots are not found drying on the hearthstone of a true woodsman.
I earned my living with my mind, my aim, and my feet. Day after day, month after month, year after year, I walked, climbed, ran, and jumped from daylight until dark. Whether it rained, snowed, sleeted, or shone, I waded brooks, crossed rivers, leapfrogged through swamps, wallowed in snow, slipped over ice, and sloshed through slush. A day that began with my snowshoes skimming over frozen crust could end up ankle-deep in water and thigh-deep in wet snow. To cover ground efficiently, a professional woodsman’s feet must be as warm and limber as a centipede’s.
Because we rarely have two consecutive days of identical weather, New England climate taxes a woodsman’s footgear even more than it does his disposition. There have been days in the woods when I could have used everything from hip boots to sneakers.
Even when on the original producer, leather is not completely waterproof. Furthermore, leather has an appetite and finds wet snow irresistible. All-rubber boots were designed for standing in sewers, while insulated boots must have been fashioned with the Abominable Snowman in mind. There is only a single type of boot with which one is able to snowshoe thousands of miles, ford countless streams, wade through bog after bog, and forget he has feet.
Invented fifty years ago by a Maine manufacturer-outdoorsman, the rubber-bottomed, leather-topped hunting pac is still the best all-round boot for any woodsman who walks from October to May. (If you plan to spend your outdoor hours zooming over snowdrifts in a snowmobile, it won’t be your feet that will trouble you.) Laced up from the instep, “rubber bottoms, leather tops” give solid support to a shock-absorbing ankle and lower leg. Most important to professional and amateur alike, they are amphibious.
Several times during a single day, I had to choose between crossing a knee-deep stream or hiking many miles cross-country to a better ford. I never hesitated. One, two, three quick tiptoe strides took me across, where I flopped down on my stomach and arched my legs skyward as though in a swan dive. Extra-long rawhide laces, wrapped snugly several turns around the top of my twelve-inch-high boots, prevented water from seeping in. For the rest of the day, my knees might be a little damp, but I didn’t walk on my knees.
Those same long rawhide laces have many times spared me a night in a snowdrift. For some unfathomable reason, the leather straps that join the sandals to a snowshoe usually break just before dark, a dozen miles from a plowed road. A quick, temporary repair can be made with a jackknife and a piece of boot lace. After punching a hole through the end of each of the two broken straps, hold them together, worm the stolen strip of rawhide through the holes, and tie a snug square knot. I am sure every Cree Indian brave kept his squaw busy fall and winter chewing caribou leather thongs.
When worn with a removable felt innersole, “rubber bottoms, leather tops” are warm enough to withstand the worst a New England winter can offer. Each night the felts should be dried out. This may present a problem: wives are apt to react to fetid felts on a mantelpiece.
Light, flexible, waterproof, tough, versatile—and to top it off, these boots are economical. This factor alone endears them to the Yankee character. Even though I wore out two pair each year, because the worn-out bottoms could be stripped off and the leather bottoms returned for rebottoming as many as three times, my always ailing, pay-as-you-learn budget survived.
A powerful feeling stirs whenever I think about the Cree Indian who first designed the type of snowshoe I wear. He and I could have been blood brothers. Like him, on long, narrow snowshoes, for thousands of miles, I followed animal tracks, tracks that told me where the animal went, what it did, where it hunted, what it ate, where it defecated, how long it slept, when it mated, how long the marriage lasted, how it avoided its enemies; sometimes how it died.
One cannot learn animal habits from the seat of a speeding snowmobile, because the gasoline engine is still not the key that unlocks the secrets of the wild. Snowshoes and grit are.
There are few equally good ways
to tune your physical fiddle as on the strings of snowshoes, especially when more miles than hours lie ahead. Under normal conditions, it is exercise which gladdens a woodsman’s heart. On two strips of magic carpet, he can sprint over swampy terrain, impassable on foot or by canoe, once the snow and ice are gone. With ideal conditions underfoot and overhead, snowshoeing can be as lively as downhill skiing, and as rigorous as doing it cross-country.
Snowshoes come in a variety of styles, crafted to fit the local conditions. Almost every American Indian tribe uses its own individual design. For the New Hampshire open forest, under-growth, and mountainsides, my preference is for a pair that is five feet long, ten inches wide, with definitely turned-up toes. Oftentimes, they substitute as short skis.
For four months a year I practically lived on snowshoes. Up mountains, down steep grades, across ledges, over frozen bogs, in and out of blowdowns, I averaged at least a dozen miles a day, every day, in all kinds of snow; and in all kinds of weather. Sometimes, miles away from the nearest plowed road, a sudden midday thaw would catch me unawares while still following a cat track. Past experience would turn my snowshoes back toward civilization. After the first four or five miles in that kind of going, my stockings felt wet. That night, when my boots came off, heavy woolen stockings stuck to my feet where red splotches had soaked through and dried. The five-hour struggle with spring snow had ground skin from winter-developed calluses on bony feet. If only I could have let the bobcats sleep, unmolested, for a few days, while my boots sat behind the kitchen stove.
The snowshoes got a rest because I had two pair, used on alternate days. But there was no rest for me. Next day, with or without the partial comfort of bandages, I was back in the woods. It was my livelihood. Even working only half-time, my snowshoes didn’t always finish out the season with me. Sometimes, I had to borrow a pair. My own hung on a hook in tatters.