One Man's Wilderness, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Louis Proenneke

  The waterhole isn’t closing in as fast as before. The ice-making season is just about over.

  On one of my trips I had noticed a huge burl on a dead spruce tree. Today I would go back and salvage it. A king-sized one it was, measuring thirty inches by twenty-seven inches and about fourteen inches thick. I slabbed it with a four-inch cut next to the tree, then a three-inch cut. The cap would be about seven inches deep, and perhaps from that I could carve a bowl. Plenty of sawing, and while I sawed, the wind picked up. By one-thirty in the afternoon I was finished.

  Two slabs on the packboard and in for lunch. Back again for the cap and the tools. Now the wind was howling and wailing through the boughs.

  I removed the bark from my prize burl sections with the sharp block plane. The slabs will make interesting table tops. While I worked in the woodshed, the three camp robbers came begging, and I had to get some meat scraps for them. They get so excited they can hardly wait their turn to come to my hand—sometimes two at once.

  To celebrate the first day of spring tomorrow, I will take a jar of blueberries from my underground cooler box.

  March 24th. Dense fog and a plus four degrees.

  A fox misses very little in his prowlings among the snow drifts. One has been in and out the brush near the big chunk of moose meat bait, and he knows exactly what he is doing. He watches the magpies as they whack away at the frozen meat with their bills. They hop away with hard-earned morsels and bury them in the snow. Back they come, beaks white to the eyes, to peck and twist away some more. And the fox patiently waits to make his rounds of their storage places, to gulp the bite-size pieces. Maybe that’s what the conversation of the magpies is all about when they find out what the red pirate has done.

  The ptarmigan are talking on the slopes. Their voices sound like the croaking of frogs.

  March 26th. Plus twenty-four degrees. An inch of snow as dry as powder during the night.

  A good day to check the snow register and see who signed in recently. I was about a mile up the lake when the sound of a plane pulled me up short. It was Babe all right. Had he brought the mission girls this time?

  When I reached the cabin, Babe was unloading a front quarter of caribou. He had brought his rifle along. There were thousands of caribou just beyond the mountains. He had landed on a small lake, where caribou were all around. He had butchered three—the limit—dressed them out to cool, and came on up here hoping the day would get colder and the snow better for takeoff with a heavy load.

  A purple-blue hue bathing the snowy landscape.

  I told him I had plenty of meat left and must get it used up before warm weather. Others at Port Alsworth could use it more than I, so we loaded the shoulder into the little Black Bird again. He hadn’t expected to be out this way, so the mission girls were still back at the mission. He stayed for a short while, then he started thinking about something getting to the caribou before he did, and off he went.

  The sun was warm and the eaves dripped. A bald eagle soared past. I wonder if he spotted the moose bait?

  March 27th. Plus five degrees. The sky not as blue as it should be. Looks like the weather is about to change.

  I went down to the lower end of the lower lake to check on the caribou and see if their new antlers were showing yet.

  I crossed the trail of two wolves traveling side by side. They looked as though they were headed for sheep country. Do they change their menu now and then? Babe says they prefer moose to caribou.

  From the mouth of a canyon I glassed down country and found a big spread of caribou about three miles below the lower end of the lake. I spotted another bunch closer, and they told me what I wanted to know. Most had no antlers at all, but a few showed knobby stubs about three inches long.

  It was getting late. It would take three hours of steady going to get back home, against a breeze that chased the powder snow over the crust.

  There were big tracks near the magpie bait when I returned. A pigeon-toed walk and toes spread out wide—the wolverine. Not a bit bashful, he had nosed around the barrel with the moose meat in it. Tomorrow I will track him.

  Before I went to bed I dropped a heavy chunk of moose meat into the snow.

  March 28th. Cloudy and plus twenty-five degrees.

  It seemed as though I had no more than turned in last night when it was daylight. I looked out. The moose chunk was gone.

  After breakfast I followed the fresh trail going toward Hope Creek. A few moose hairs on the snow told me I was on the right track. Across the creek it wound, into the brush headed toward Cowgill Creek. Not once had the wolverine set the load in the snow. Finally in a gully I saw a blood-stained patch on the packed snow, and a chunk of bone. A bit farther he had stopped to eat again. The magpies were helping. They were ahead of me, picking up crumbs at the third feeding place.

  I found two beds in the snow and a fresh track leading on. The wolverine climbed higher as he headed down country. I probably had been discovered. He had stopped now and then on a high place to look back over his trail.

  At a point with a good command up and down the lake, I took a stand and studied my surroundings with the binoculars. Nine head of sheep were up on the edge of the big pasture. Then I saw something on the ice, about halfway out. The wolverine was crossing to the far side. Through the lenses I could see the cream-colored stripes on his dark back, that rocking-horse gait as he loped, stopping often to look back. He climbed the bank of the far side. One last look back, then he disappeared into the timber.

  I spent the afternoon fattening up the woodpile. In the evening I took more moose meat out of the barrel and tied it to the front end of the sled. As the meat goes, so goes the sled. My cabin is where the action is these days.

  March 29th. I wonder if this morning’s minus-one will be the last below-zero reading this spring?

  The sled and moose bait were as I left it last evening. I found fresh wolverine tracks on the point up the lake from the cabin. He came back, but he was circling as if suspicious of a handout.

  All through the day I heard the thump of falling rocks, and now and then a rolling roar that signaled a snow slide. I watched snow pouring over the ledges of Crag Mountain, like water over a falls.

  The sun sets one diameter higher on the slope of Falls Mountain. In a month it will be dropping behind the peak.

  March 31st. Foggy. A fine snow drifting down at plus twenty-five degrees.

  What a surprise when I looked out! My sled was pulled up against the willow brush on the point a good thirty feet from where I had left it. The skunk bear had returned in the night.

  After breakfast I went to investigate. Tracks and the brushing strokes of a broad tail showed much bracing of feet, pulling, and yanking. It had been upgrade all the way. The snow was packed and soiled with blood at the end of the rope. He cleaned up everything, or took what was left. I had tied the rope around the moose hindquarter and the loop was still on the rope end. What I need is a silent alarm system to wake me while the raid is in progress.

  That evening I heard suspicious sounds. I rushed out with my flashlight and there was the wolverine about 200 feet out on the ice, his eyes blazing in the beam. He didn’t seem in any particular hurry as he ambled toward Hope Creek flats, stopping often to stare at me. An animal of about thirty pounds or more, with the combined mannerisms of a skunk and a small bear.

  I would be ready if he came again in the night. I roped some more moose meat to the sled and parked it on the ice out from the waterhole. From the sled I ran a long cord up the path to the cabin and through the kitchen window.

  When I turned in for the night, I wrapped a couple of turns of the cord around my wrist. If the wolverine took off with the sled, I would not be far behind.

  April 1st. Foggy. Plus twenty-two degrees.

  I really couldn’t sleep last night thinking about the wolverine. At ten-thirty in the dark cabin I rested my elbows on the counter and peered out on the moonlit apron of the lake. It was a little before midnight when he came,
around the point of willow brush along my snowshoe trail to where the bait had been the day before.

  He loped a few steps, then stopped with head low as if listening, advanced in a rippling motion, stopped again. Suddenly he “chickened out” and retreated, but spun around to advance again. He repeated this performance several times until his appetite overruled his judgment.

  He jerked savagely at the bait. The line tightened. The sled didn’t budge. The runners were frozen fast to the ice. He decided to eat right there and I watched him working over the bait.

  I had fresh batteries in my flashlight. I eased the window to a more open position, laid the barrel of the flashlight flat on the ledge and flicked on the switch. His eyes sparkled like big blue diamonds in the bright swath at one 100 feet.

  Then he did a strange thing. He went back to his eating as if the light was nothing unusual at all. He fed gluttonously, looked at the light, then turned his back to it. A few minutes later he loped away fifty feet or more, only to return and feed again. I studied his beautiful pelt, all powdered with snow, in the glare of the light until he finally left with a heavy belly.

  This morning I was awake at five. Just as I unwrapped the alarm cord from my wrist, it went hissing over the window ledge. I jumped out of the bunk and saw the wolverine at the bait. There was some slack in the meat line attached to the sled, so he had picked up the meat and headed off down the lake when the line attached to the sled brought him up short.

  The sound of the cord running out over the window ledge spooked him, and he probably heard me stirring around, too. After many starts and stops to look back, he headed up the lake, then veered into the brush.

  Later on I found his tracks all over the place. He is definitely a trail traveler. Every time he hits one of my snowshoe trails, he follows it wherever it winds. He even runs his own tracks a second time.

  Strangely, although his tracks are all around my mortar-mixing tub bottomside-up over the meat barrel, he made no effort to get the moose quarter beneath it. A very light push would tip off the tub and expose the meat.

  Cabin windows glowing with lamplight beneath ice-glistening slopes. There is a hint of the aurora in the frosty stillness.

  He must know it is the ermine’s territory. If an ermine weighed thirty-five pounds too, he would have a wolverine for breakfast every morning.

  I cut a hole in the ice 200 yards out where the snow cover is kept shallow by the wind. The ice was forty-three inches thick over 280 feet of water.

  April 4th. Clear and calm. Minus two degrees.

  I was awakened last night with a yank. The line flew off my wrist, and the spool to which the line was attached skittered over the gravel floor. I snubbed up and stopped whoever was pulling on the other end. He had turned the sled and was pulling it down country. He went about fifty feet before I stopped him.

  Then started the tug of war. I hauled the meat chunk my way, him right on top of it with his front paws, his head shaking from side to side as he tore at the hide and muscle of the leg bone. I pulled him my way until the sled stopped me because it had turned crosswise. Then I would give him line and he would pull it smoking over the snow.

  I snubbed the line to a shelf bracket and set up my spotting scope. With the aid of the flashlight, I got a close look. There he was, the king of the weasel family, with short, rounded ears, teeth bared and glistening, muzzle wrinkled like an angry chow, eyes blazing blue—a sight to remember. Abruptly he quit the struggle and loped out into the blackness.

  I followed his tracks this morning. I found he had bedded down under a small spruce where the needles were dry. I had interrupted his sleep, as was revealed by fresh tracks up the slope.

  I could hear water running today under the ice and snow of Hope Creek.

  April 6th. Plus twenty-two degrees. Overcast.

  My alarm cord stirred me again about midnight. The wolverine was within fifty feet of the kitchen window, moving powerfully from side to side and stripping meat from the hide. It was quite dark with no moon shining, only the whiteness of the snow. When I caught him in the beam of the flashlight, he glared at me momentarily, but the light seemed too much for him and he loped with short rolling leaps into the dark.

  This morning I spotted him coming across the lake. From his general direction I thought I knew where he was headed. As soon as he was out of sight, I ran for the cabin, grabbed my movie camera and snowshoes, and slogged through the timber to cut him off. Surely he would cross Hope Creek on the same track as before. A blurred movement through the scattering of spruce, and there he was, rocking along his trail. Not much of a picture at 200 yards, but much satisfaction in that I had guessed his move.

  April 11th. Partly cloudy. Plus twenty-four degrees.

  For the past several evenings I have tried to live-trap the wolverine. I built my trap out of the two halves of the fifty-gallon drum, hinged on one side so the weighted upper half would lift in a cocked position and slam shut when the bait trigger was pulled. I had visions of one mad wolverine. I figured he had more guts than brains, and his guts would get him into the jackpot. First get the meat, then get out of the trap, that would be his philosophy. But he never came, and finally I wrote him off as being on his delayed circuit calls beyond the mountains.

  This morning as I came from woodsplitting detail, I saw a red fox near the live trap and the moose bait tied on a line. Why the fox didn’t see me was hard to understand. I froze. Just like a red fox would do with a fat hen from the chicken yard, he snatched up the meat in his jaws and lit out for the brush.

  He didn’t figure on the line being tied on the other end, and when the slack ran out, the line whipped tight, the meat flew out of his mouth. He calmly turned around as much as to say, “Why, of course. You have to untie it first.” In less than five seconds he was trotting triumphantly to the brush with the meat. I looked at the cord. It was cut as if with a knife. How about that for being smart as a fox?

  Later I climbed the ladder to the cabin roof and rapped the stovepipe a few licks to knock down some soot and make the stove draw better. I happened to look down the lake. Something black was on the ice. I scrambled down the ladder for my binoculars, through which I saw a big black wolf with a white patch on his chest and another one, light-colored, lying down near the shore.

  Moonlit cabin under a snow mantling. Snowshoes ready to go.

  No doubt they saw me but couldn’t figure out what they were looking at. They hunched on the ice quite a ways apart, then decided they had come close enough to this strangeness. Off they went toward Emerson Creek.

  April 16th. A crust on the snow. Scattered clouds. Plus twenty-five degrees.

  It has been more than three weeks now since Babe was last here.

  This morning the beating of wings startled me. Spruce grouse were moving through, whirring from tree to tree. I saw the rooster puffed up like a balloon on the snow, tail fanned and wing tips dragging as he drifted over the crust. He ignored me completely. Skin patches were tufted above his eyes like bright red flowers. The feathers on his neck stood straight out. His fan tail flicked and winked almost as if it were rotating, and he made a noise that sounded like two pieces of fine sandpaper rubbing together.

  As he came within two feet of me he stopped, shrugged his inflated body and flipped his tail in a gesture that seemed to say, “Step aside, Bud, and let a man past.” And off he strutted over the snow. In the shadows of the spruce the females seemed absolutely bored with the entire performance.

  The old rooster feels spring coming on strong. That’s a good sign.

  April 17th. Plus thirty-five degrees. The icicles dripping.

  I saw the weasel for the first time in several weeks. I do believe he is starting to turn to his summer coat. It is getting cream-colored in places.

  When I was up on the Cowgill benches looking for ptarmigan, Babe came. He was unloading on the ice when I reached the cabin. All kinds of supplies. Mary had started plants in her greenhouse. His boys were cutting house logs. Yes,
those little spruce grouse roosters this time of the year will walk up and peck you on the shoe. Ptarmigan will do the same. And a man could tame a wolverine if he had lots of meat. Babe knew of one that had packed a trapper’s snowshoes away and the trapper never did find them. Oh yes, he just might be back on Sunday with the one-eighty and bring the mission girls.

  I had heard that before.

  April 19th. Plus eighteen degrees. Clear and calm.

  He did come back! Babe in the one-eighty, with passengers! Surely he had brought the mission girls. I counted three others besides Babe, a man and two women.

  Babe had brought his wife, Mary, and a young school teacher and his wife. The mission girls couldn’t get away today.

  We had a nice visit. Mary toasted marshmallows in the fireplace for all hands. Babe suggested the young couple sing a song or two. Both had strong, clear voices and the songs were hymns, of course. There sat Babe basking in the warmth of the fire, his head bowed, his eyes closed as if asleep in the Hereafter. Surely he enjoyed the singing more than anyone.

  The teacher left to take some pictures of my cabin, and no sooner had he left than he returned. He was noticeably excited. “A bird lit in my hand,” he said.

  I got out the can of meat scraps, and the teacher and his wife were like little children as they held out their hands and the birds came to them.

  They sampled some of my blueberries from the cooler box. Better than fresh picked, they said.

  Babe grinned at me as he climbed into the pilot’s seat. “I’ll bring the girls next trip,” he said.

  They all waved, and off they went over the ice.

  April 22nd. Fog halfway down the mountains. Plus twenty degrees and calm.

  I climbed up past the hump and picked a two-pound coffee can of big, firm, dull red cranberries. I dumped them into a pan to cook them in their own juice. I stirred the berries around a bit and picked out the sticks, moss, and leaves. A fistful of sugar was next, followed with a shot of corn syrup, a few wooden spoonfuls of Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, and a generous spill of honey. Soon the potion was bubbling away. I mashed the plump berries with the spatula. When the mixture cooled, I poured it off into empty bottles. Now those sourdoughs would have an elegant topping in the morning.