by John Kulish
Like my snowshoes, my compass was my daily companion. It was often my lifeline. Even in familiar country, with the sun overhead to point the way, I reached up to feel the instrument’s round reassurance in my shirt pocket. There, it shared honors with a folded topographic map of the immediate area. In strange country, a map and a compass go together. A compass without a map is like a man without a woman: he can go in a straight line, but rarely in the right direction.
Many sportsmen question my unequivocal reliance on a compass. “How come, John? We never use one.”
With a straight face I answer, “I wouldn’t need one either, if I never left a road.”
Even for an experienced woodsman, being caught in a blizzard in deep woods can be an uncanny experience. Trees, sky, landmarks disappear. Only you and the storm remain. Unexpected snowshoe tracks become visible ahead. “Must be another hunter out.” It takes a few minutes to realize there probably isn’t another soul outdoors in this tempest in the state of New Hampshire. “Must be a game warden . . . but how come? Wardens seldom get out of their cars . . . Funny, he has snowshoes like mine, long and skinny . . . Look, mine fit right into the tracks!” Because you are worn out, it takes a few moments for the truth to penetrate: those are your own tracks. You’ve been moving in circles.
Your belly is empty. It’s getting dark. Your shotgun weighs twice what it did at daybreak. You’ve already wasted a half-hour. Out comes your compass. You are through fooling around.
To a professional hunter, a shotgun is a tool that must be carried for thousands of miles in all kinds of weather, over all types of terrain. There are no hired gun bearers on snowshoe safaris. Therefore, the weapon must be light, with the shortest legal barrel obtainable. It must be of top quality. Even the best guns break under constant, hard usage. A gun’s outward appearance reveals its role in a hunter’s life. Toward the end of the winter, a professional woodsman’s gun looks like a war souvenir, a relic from the Battle of Guadalcanal. The barrel, often without blueing, is dented and scratched from wild trips down ice-covered ledges. Chipped and battered, the stock and forearm have taken the brunt while its owner bumped into boulders and grabbed onto trees while hurtling down mountainsides. Blistered, cracked, the varnish is gone, a victim of too many ice, sleet, and snow storms. But the action, the working parts, tell the real story. Spotless, they are always oiled and in perfect working order.
To any man who matches his wits with the woods for a living, his jackknife and his trail axe are among his most precious possessions. His wife soon learns they are sacred ground. But there is something in the feminine psyche that cannot understand a man’s feelings about razor-sharp, honed edges, and that even the toughest woodsman is sentimental about his knife and axe. My wife discovered the power of this emotion when my little jackknife, never more than a hand’s reach away for thirty-five years, inadvertently accompanied a pair of trousers to the cleaner’s. The owner of the establishment still talks about being awakened at four o’clock in the morning by the telephone to hear a woman’s voice ask if he was interested in helping to prevent a divorce.
That little blade has skun the gamut from a two-ounce weasel to a 400-pound black bear.
Even more important than the tools a woodsman can buy, are the inborn aptitudes which the man alone can recognize and develop. The most vital of these is a magnetic attraction to the woods so powerful it borders on becoming an obsession. It makes him oblivious to barbs from friends and relatives, as well as to pleas from Conformity, who, tomahawk raised, pants on his heels, eager to add another scalp to her already trophy-studded belt. It even makes him oblivious to the weather. In New Hampshire, this alone is a test of character. Cold, ice, gales, sleet, snow, rain, all are secondary. The passion for knowing, no matter what the price, overpowers all else.
Size means nothing—except for the man’s heart. That should be extra big, a twelve-cylinder engine fired by high-octane grit. I have yet to see a big, burly man who had endurance that kept him going hours after he should have collapsed. The tough ones were spare men. Some looked slight, one or two even frail. But their muscles were made of juniper, their lungs of nylon. They picked a pace and kept it: rough, easy, dry, wet, slippery, rocky, icy, level, steep. As such men move, one cannot hear their breathing. They never pant, nor do they sit down to rest. Their eyes are always moving. They see everything worth seeing and something more besides. Following a true woodsman in his own element makes it easy to see how an Indian moved and why. He sets down his worn hunting pacs like a starving fox sneaking up on a fat field mouse.
Grit is an invaluable quality for any man, but particularly for one who grapples with nature. It is grit that keeps him going when his feet are bloody. It is grit that refuses to accept defeat long after common sense has surrendered. It is grit that plunges him voluntarily into a backwoods river in near-zero temperatures.
With each passing hour, ice threatened to cut my economic lifeline. During the night, yesterday’s storm clouds, hiking across the mountains, had grown weary of their load and dumped five inches of snow onto the frozen ground. Already, week-old ice covered the stream’s edges. Now, in sudden, bitter cold, I could almost hear the main current freezing.
Yesterday, a trap’s six-foot-long chain had been fastened to a stout piece of driftwood near shore. Both the driftwood log and trap were gone. Out in the middle, the log bobbed with the current. Obviously, it was moored to something. Previous experience sent me back into the woods where I cut down a tall, slender, dead spruce, and trimmed off the branches. With the pole I tried to reach out, to catch hold, and to haul in the drift-wood. The log did not budge.
How easily a canoe would resolve the problem! But my canoe lay hidden in underbrush on another watershed twenty miles away.
My pack was unshouldered, my boots unlaced, my clothes stripped off. After a last, locating look, I sucked my lungs full of air and dove into liquid ice. With my eyes open, I spurted at an angle down toward the bottom.
I saw the chain first, then a drowned otter. It had wound the chain around and around an exposed tree root. With fingers that didn’t seem to belong to me, I unwound the chain while my lungs begged for air. I lunged to the surface and, dragging the trap, swam back to shore. The snow felt strangely warm to my feet. Like a dog, I shook myself. Blessing my 100 percent all-wool underwear, I pulled on my clothes, relaced my boots, put the otter and trap into the pack, picked up my shotgun, and headed downriver.
At the time, I thought nothing of it; it was part of a day’s work. But suppose someone had wandered into that isolated area that near-zero morning. What would he have thought to suddenly see a man standing, stark naked, in five inches of snow?
In the woods, playing a melodious second fiddle to grit, is a sense of humor. Without it, no man can work long for nature, for the odds are too one-sided. To a man miles away from civilization, a minor incident can become a complete catastrophe. A broken firing pin, a sudden late November squall that catches him in the middle of a mile-wide lake in an overloaded canoe, a dead bobcat that falls into the crotch of a towering tree on its downward arc, necessitating a fifteen-mile round-trip hike to borrow a rusty axe from a suspicious farmer, followed by a day of hand chopping to down an ash tree four feet in diameter. How could he do it if he couldn’t laugh at his own helplessness? To survive, a woodsman must have the ability to lay, spent, on a snowdrift, his body soaked with sweat, his legs like boiled spaghetti, and chuckle, with only his hounds and the stars to hear him, over a day-long comedy of errors that netted him only further insight and a belated belly laugh.
In addition to the tools he can buy, and the innate peculiarities he must possess, there is a third factor, usually a question of pure luck, that is an absolute requisite for a woodsman’s success. It is the acquisition of a resourceful wife. It goes without saying she must be a financial wizard. She also needs to have the diligence of an Iroquois squaw, the strength of a Percheron, the courage of a crusader, the disposition of an angel, and the thick hide of an
elephant.
She needs to be a woman who can laugh when an acquaintance persists, “But what does your husband do for a living?” A woman who, when the larder is empty of staples, climbs into a shed loft, grabs a bushel basket brimming with porcupine heads, some ripening since October, and trundles them to the home of a selectman-judge, to collect the fifty cents per head bounty. A woman who, while chairmanning a PTA policy committee meeting, can ignore the sudden green faces of her colleagues when the piercing pungency of mink musk seeps up from the cellar where her trapper husband is skinning out next week’s groceries. A woman who can laugh when a cauldron, filled with traps steeped in a rank, inky mixture of hemlock twigs and cedar shavings, bubbles over onto the burnished surface of her wood-stove and thence onto a kitchen floor.
A woodsman’s wife needs to know how to handle the other end of a crosscut saw, and can, in a pinch, buck up an evening’s supply of wood, dangling earrings flying in rhythm with the saw’s motion. She needs to keep dinner warm for hours, for she never knows when her husband will get home. She needs to be a woman who, when she runs her husband’s most cherished compass through the wringer of a washing machine, has the good sense to dull the final agony by feeding him wild duck with wine sauce, followed by hot apple pie, before confessing to her crime.
I can’t take full credit for my good fortune because, when the time came to choose my thirteenth rib, a benevolent Creator gave a diffident backwoodsman a shove in the right direction. Tall and straight, she looked full into my face and grinned.
“Hello, how’s the duck hunting?”
Those five words hauled down my loner’s flag forever.
In the intervening decades, full of learning, living, and loving, I have never once doubted the wisdom of either choice, my work or my woman, even while punching another hole into my belt and wondering where the next mortgage payment was coming from.
Fortunately, God looks after, not only fools and little children, but his mavericks as well. Any man who chooses to support a wife, two daughters, and assorted hound dogs by hunting and trapping in outer suburbia in the middle of the twentieth century, needs all the help he can get.
3. Animal ABC’s: Stories Wild Creatures Write
Every night, dramas are written in the woods. Tragedy, comedy, irony, mystery are all set down there waiting to be read. Even though most of the plays are nocturnal, we do not have to see them to know they happened. The wild animals themselves tell us. The theme of each of these stories is survival: I hunted; I found; I ate; I live. I was hunted; I was found; I was eaten; I died.
Every animal that walks, every bird that flies, knows how to write. They all leave notes. Some even leave letters. Wild creatures do not write as we do, for some of them write with their teeth, some with their claws, some with their wingtips, and some even with their tails. All of them write with their tracks and with their scat.
Big men sometimes walk with little feet, while small men often walk with big ones. But animal tracks never lie. Big animals have big feet; small animals have small ones. Long-legged animals take long strides; short-legged creatures take shorter ones.
Whenever I read an animal’s tracks, I know immediately what it was, whether it was a big or a little creature, whether or not it was in a hurry, how long ago it had been there, where it had come from, and where it was going. Learning how to read animal writing is no different from learning how to read human text. When one first learns how to read, he begins with simple stories told in simple words. In reading animal and bird script, one should begin by learning how to decipher simple words written in an inch or two of soft snow: “I am a fox.” As the subtleties of nature’s semantics are mastered, more complicated scripts can be understood. The same writing will say, “Last night, I was here at midnight. The wind was blowing from the northwest. I found a field mouse under the snow. It tried to run away, but I caught it. I ate it. It was delicious, my favorite kind. I am still hungry, so I’m going to skip up to the old Thatcher place. Maybe the wind blew some apples down from a tree.”
A first-rate woods linguist can translate stories with complicated plots woven around several characters, written, not only in snow, but in frost, in leaves, and even in a few wisps of disturbed vegetation. Translating a foreign language is a painstakingly slow, illogical process for most students. It’s the damed grammar and the back-end-to phraseology that throws us off. It takes many years to become an expert at deciphering woods hieroglyphics. But then, does one expect to read the Aeneid during his first lesson in Latin?
To a woodsman, all picture writing is called sign. Out of the woods, there are many kinds of signs: road signs, advertising signs, warning signs, weather signs. In the woods, there is animal and bird sign. It is this the professional woodsman or a naturalist reads and interprets. Game sign is made by all birds and animals that are hunted. Fur sign covers all those wild creatures taken by trapping.
Whether it be game or fur, to me, animal sign is tracks: tracks in snow, in mud, in sand. It is scratches: scratches in sand, on logs, or on trees. It is bits of hair or of feathers. It is pieces of bones. It is drops of blood. It is a disturbance among leaves. It is sticks and tips of bushes stripped of bark. It is bubbles under ice. Above all, it is droppings; for scat is the universal biographer.
What kind of creature passed by? When? Where had it been? Where was it going? In what bistro had it dined? Had it eaten a three-course steak dinner, a blue plate special, or had it filled up on pretzels at the bar? Was it alone, or did it have a companion? And often most important of all, how big was it? To a consummate interpreter, scat reveals all.
A “woods scientist” always examines scat. To an experienced “bush pathologist,” its size, its shape, and particularly its location are definitive. Most wild animals are fastidious in their personal habits. Each has its individual privy. Foxes, cats, coons, deer, mink, beaver, and otter leave their scat in certain places. The sloppiest creature is the porcupine. Its digestive juices must boil and bubble constantly, for it leaves a continuous fecal trail.
To examine an animal’s scat is to read its diary. Fresh raccoon droppings found on the shores of a river or a lake in mid-October reveals that El Bandito has been living more like King Farouk. Yesterday, he had been up in the hills for acorn hors d’oeuvres. Then, en route to the fish course of frogs’ legs and freshwater clams, he had stopped at a pioneer cellar hole for an apple and a pawful of grapes. Then he got his courses confused. But how could he resist crude honey? He had had a ringed eye on that hive of short-faced wasps since July. Only a fool would try to dig up ground hornets then. (They have no sense of humor about anyone who interferes with their papermaking.) He waited until a killing frost paralyzed his favorite dessert. Raccoons eat hornets for the same reason we eat corn. The insects are only partly digested.
In late fall and early winter, the scat of the black bear tells us that theirs is also a crude digestive machinery. Next to honey, black bears fancy apples. Because they sense the approach of hibernation, they eat the fruit compulsively. In order to keep up with the intake, intestinal conveyor belts run at high speeds. Little damage, beyond being halved and quartered, is done to apples.
Otter scat fascinates me. I have hiked many miles out of my way to read a river dog’s potential travelogue. Because they travel constantly, mostly by water, sometimes by land, otter live exciting, adventuresome lives. Because they never have to fight for food, they play together every day. No otter is ever too old, too dignified, or too fat to play tag or touch football. Of all wild animals, they have the best minds and the warmest hearts.
If you are an expert at reading sign, you would know, as I did, that two days ago, a family of four stopped to fish and to visit. There was a large, fully mature dog, his wife, and their teen-age twins. Father had come ashore first. After a thorough investigation, he had scratched up leaves, pine needles, and humus into a pile. He had deposited his scat on top of the little mound. Then he signaled mother and the children that it was safe for them to d
isembark.
The power of suggestion works for them as it does for us. The size of each of the four mounds of scat identified the family members for me as surely as if I had been there. They had all been eating dace and little frogs. But it was the few pink slivers of shellfish that climaxed the story.
Two miles from where I stood, lay a small pond. It crawled with crayfish, but it belonged to a different watershed. From here, it could be reached only by an overland hike across hilly, rough terrain. Obviously, this household had made the difficult portage to the tiny pond before continuing their scheduled journey. Doesn’t any trip go better when one has been fortified with fresh lobster?
Some of the most brain-stirring, heart-quickening dramas I have witnessed, were written into early winter’s clear, “black” ice. And how can any animal write on ice, you ask? They don’t write on the surface, but rather on the underside. It’s like reading through a pane of glass.
All fur-bearing animals—mink, muskrat, beaver, and otter—can breathe under ice. This is a proved scientific fact. But how? Based on a lifetime of observation and investigation, I cannot agree with the popular belief that air is locked under ice. If this were so, the air would show in the form of bubbles. When ice is thick and covered with snow, bubbles can’t be seen anyway, but no trapped bubbles show under the first clear ice of early winter. The only way to get air under ice is to put it there. To prove my theory, pick up a stone the size of a baseball and toss it up into the air over clear ice a quarter- to a half-inch thick. As it comes down, it will break through, sucking in air. Now watch small, white bubbles form. You put them there. Natural bubbles are made by a water animal’s breathing or by bottom vegetation decaying to produce methane gas. Unlike human beings, water animals have been adapted to live part of their lives underneath ice. While there, they continually exhale dibs and dabs of their air supply, always holding a good portion in reserve. Contrary to accepted theories, I believe any one of them can remain under ice indefinitely, needing only to come out for food. My theory is that, whenever a water animal must replenish its air supply, it pushes its nose close to the ice and expels all its remaining air in the form of carbon dioxide. This instantly forms into a white bubble on the undersurface of the ice. Putting its nose back into the newly born bubble, the animal breathes in oxygen. I think a chemical change is somehow wrought by the ice itself and these original “frogmen” can swim merrily on their way with marvelously replaceable tanks of oxygen.