One Man's Wilderness, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Louis Proenneke

  A strange object appeared halfway up the slope of Allen Mountain just under the rock outcrops. It changed shades. It was a bear. I ran for the big spotting scope. Sure enough, a big blonde bear and then another, chocolate color, and another, until there were three standing half as tall as the mother. Cubs, but not this year’s.

  They were digging for roots or ground squirrels and rattling an occasional boulder down into the timber. Now and then I could hear a growling followed by the cubs bawling their answers. I saw one cub start a rock going and stand there spraddle-legged following its progress as if contemplating the wonder he had wrought. If they made as much racket all the time, it would be no trouble locating this crew at work. The last I saw of them the old mother had lain down nearly on her back, and the little guys moved in for supper.

  A bunch of sheep bedded down on the skyline high above them.

  It is good to see bears on the mountain again—a mother and three fine-looking cubs. Good company for a man out here.

  April 23rd. Calm and plus twenty-one degrees. Moon nearing the half.

  I spent the day following a fresh wolf track to the upper end of the lake and beyond.

  I saw a cow moose and calf leaving the country. Very interesting when I came to where the wolf track intersected with their trail. The cow had led her yearling down the running creek. I found where she had crossed over two ice bridges. This was definite evidence of the wisdom of the wild. She had succeeded, temporarily at least, in giving the wolf the slip by taking to the water.

  Many ptarmigan in the willow flats, a regular convention. The roosters are full of cackle, with bright red splashes over their eyes, their heads and necks a glinting copper color. They are fast coming out of winter plumage.

  Those cubs are wrestling and rolling like balls on the grassy slopes. Such carrying-on up there in the high country.

  Several eagles sailed the thermal updrafts this evening. There is a wild freedom about their presence.

  April 24th. Fifteen degrees.

  The falls across the lake is trickling a very tiny stream.

  A wedge of about fifty swans flew high and rained their music down on the land. They sound happy to be back.

  Crag Mountain, southeast of the cabin.

  Time to retire the snowshoes.

  April 30th. Thirty-three degrees. A strong breeze down the lake.

  I spotted the bear family again today. The cubs were playing “King of the Hill” on a snowbank. One of the little guys put on quite a show, waltzing with a small cottonwood. He tried to climb a larger one with no apparent success. The old mother appears to be unconcerned about their antics, but the way she tips and tosses that muzzle into the air, you know she is on the alert all the time.

  Ants on the ice—but in the glasses they were caribou, five head trailing across from the gravel bank toward Emerson Creek.

  When they disappeared, I decided it was time for an Emerson Creek patrol. Off I went over the ice.

  Bear tracks were mixed with the caribou tracks in the gravel. I moved on to the top of the rise and saw about thirty-five cows—but no calves yet.

  Two caribou bulls on the flats, with new antlers more than a foot high.

  A small trickle of water courses beneath the ice flakes on the mud banks. The clear song of a robin is heard now and then.

  The days of snow and ice are numbered.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Breakup

  May 4th. Feathers of blowing snow. Thirty-two degrees.

  Back in late November I had cut my cache logs at the far side of Hope Creek, about forty of them, and I had peeled the frozen bark with a drawknife. These logs were four to six inches through at the butt. I had cut four other heavier logs about fifteen feet long and seven inches in diameter at the butt, and peeled them also. These would be my stilts to hold the cache aloft. The logs had been seasoning all this time.

  It is my birthday today. I spent it chasing the bear family, and they obliged with what I hope will be some fine pictures.

  This evening the robins are singing.

  For my special supper, a thick ram steak fried in a salted skillet. Red in the middle with the juices running all over the plate. Blueberries for dessert.

  This country makes a man younger than his birthdays.

  May 6th. Thirty-five degrees. A light breeze down the lake.

  I was up at four. I looked out, and there under the trees no more than thirty-five feet from the cabin door was the largest rabbit I have ever seen in my life, at least two feet tall. It was still snow white except for a dark trace in its ears. It had to be an arctic hare. Its ears worked like a pair of scissors and its nose twitched as if with an itch within it couldn’t reach. Then it flowed into motion, traveling like a ghost off into the shadows.

  May 7th. An inch of snow during the night. Clear, calm, and twenty degrees.

  Tracks of Super-Rabbit outside my cabin door. Still a good tracking snow, so I decided to find out something about him. He was a busy rabbit. The snow was all packed down around some willow brush where he had fed. Then I came to the smooth, snow-covered creek ice, which must have been a speedway to him. He really got into high gear. I measured a good fourteen feet between the tracks of the hind feet. His hind foot track, where he sat down, measured a shade better than six inches in length and a strong two and a quarter inches in width. The arctic hare is no midget.

  Today I would see about the postholes for my cache stilts. The ground was not nearly as frozen as I had thought, but many rocks made for hard digging. I packed water and dumped it into the holes. This helped some. I decided to let the water set in the frost to hasten the thawing.

  I cut my heavy stilt poles to length. The cache will sit at least nine feet off ground level, which should put it better than five feet above the winter snows. I plan to angle the stilts in a bit and run the upper ends at least two feet up into the corners of the inside of the cache. This should make the cache itself solid on the stilts without side bracing.

  To set the stilts at an angle and extend the upper ends into the cache corners, I would have to make a bend about two and a half feet from the upper end of each post. After a few unsuccessful experiments, I gave up and sawed off the post ends, and just hewed a flat place on which to anchor the little house to its platform.

  Like the cabin and the fireplace, I can see the cache up on the poles.

  May 8th. Snow showers. Thirty degrees.

  A kettle of lima beans bubbled on the stove while I deepened my postholes.

  Babe came sliding in on the skis. Something very special this time, a fancy chocolate cake. Sister Florence had sent Babe’s wife money to bake me a birthday cake.

  I popped a pan of popcorn in some bacon grease, and soon we were munching away. No, he hadn’t seen arctic hares around Lake Clark. He might bring the mission girls out to see my cabin one of these days, maybe while the ice was still good. After a slice of my birthday cake, he took off in a swirl of snow and disappeared over the volcanic mountains.

  I read my mail and went back to my posthole project. The holes are now thirty-two inches deep.

  I must sprinkle a fresh coat of gravel on my floor and the path out front. That threat of the mission girls arriving causes me no end of extra laundry, not to mention dusting and keeping things in reasonable order.

  I can hear the sound of the small waterfall over on Falls Mountain this evening.

  May 9th. The sun lighted the cabin logs at four-thirty this morning. Soon the sun will clear the mountains completely and there will be sunshine in the valley all day.

  I watched a chickadee going in and out of a knothole in the big spruce near the clothesline. Instead of packing material in, she was packing it out, rotten wood from inside the tree. Should be a nest there soon. Today the frozen snow sparkles with the blaze of billions of diamonds. A very wide wedge of snow-white swans flew against the dark blue sky. Caribou bulls on the upper end of the lake. Many sheep on the mountains. Lambing time draws near.

  May 10th
. Twenty-six degrees. Hope Creek broke through the ice today and flowed on top down along the far side.

  A pair of hoary redpolls. The little male looks as if he had a can of red paint spilled on his head and down his vest. Many small birds are here now. An eagle, circling low along the slope, let out a war cry. Does he do this to flush his prey out of hiding?

  May 11th. Saw a sight today. As Babe would say, “Now wasn’t that something?”

  It was a beautiful spring morning. I decided to climb up through Low Pass and take a look at the Kigik River country. The snow crust kept breaking through but I finally made it over the pass to my favorite rocky knoll overlooking the big basin of the Kigik River. The sun was warm as I glassed the surroundings.

  I picked up the trail of a lone caribou in the lenses and had just caught up with the cow when I saw her turning suspiciously. Something else caught my eye—a calf and a very small one. The cow was working toward me, and on her heels the wobbly legged calf. I hoped they would keep coming but the calf lay down. The cow browsed about and finally settled down beside it.

  She had picked a good place to have her calf. There was very little chance of a wolf finding her here. Soon she was on her feet again. But at that moment I spotted a bear in the snow basin. His course would take him right to them.

  The cow saw him and knew it was danger. She headed my way, stopping and nudging the calf to follow. The little one hurried as best it could, which was none too fast. The cow trotted and waited, trotted and waited.

  Then the bear saw them and broke into a lumbering run. On they came, the calf doing its best with its legs going in all directions. I knew it wouldn’t make it. They would pass me at 100 yards along the top edge of a high bench with an open rock slide face.

  The bear was coming on fast. He would catch the calf near my stand. The end of the bench pitched steeply into deep snow and the cow ploughed into it. But it was too much for the calf. It bogged down in the snow, calling, How! How!

  The cow stood in the snow at the foot of the bench, looking up. Still bawling, the calf struggled to the rocks. On came the bear along the top edge. If I had had the ought-six along, I would have changed his mind in a hurry.

  The baby caribou was pretty wobbly.

  Then a strange thing happened. The bear seemed unaware of the calf in front of him. His mind was on the cow and he took a shortcut across the slide, rattling rocks down in his haste to get to her. He passed less than forty feet below the calf. When he hit the snow on the dead run, he ploughed along on his muzzle and nearly upended. The cow leaped in panic down the canyon toward the upper lake, the bear helter-skelter on her heels. I was shaking with the excitement of the scene.

  The little calf struggled across the steep, snow-covered slope. It lost its balance and collapsed in a heap. As I approached, it lay very still, head outstretched on the snow. I don’t think it was a day old.

  As much as I wanted to comfort the calf, I decided not to bother it. I would wait for the cow to return. Would she come back? Had the bear caught up to her?

  Two hours passed and still the calf lay there in the snow. I would move it to a patch of dry grass, scent or no. I picked it up. The little doe was limp as a rag. I laid her on the dry mat of grass and she lay there very still. Suddenly she got to her feet and tottered toward the rock slide. This would never do. She started climbing faster and I cut her off. Then she turned and began to grunt and came right toward me. She thought I was her mom. I caught her and tied her four legs together with my bandanna. I left her resting easy in a sheltered warm place and followed the bear tracks to the head of the canyon. Those big claws were really digging in and I could see the long leaps the cow had taken in the snow. I waited and watched, but saw nothing.

  Finally I went back to the little orphan. I could see the red bandanna before I saw her. They really blend in with their natural surroundings, I thought.

  She was gone! The bandanna was still knotted. I picked up her trail and found her bedded down about 100 yards down the slope.

  It was getting late and it was now snowing. I hated to leave her. What if the cow did not come back? Had the bear dragged her down? I decided to pack the little girl to my cabin, and return with her in the morning. If the cow did come back in the night, she would probably stay in the area for a spell.

  What a tussle! She struggled and blatted, How! How! as I tied her legs together and pushed her rear end down into the front pocket of my ammunition bag. She was so small that only her neck and head stuck out, and I felt like a mother kangaroo with a young one peering out of the pouch. For a time she churned and twisted to get out, calling out, How! How! over and over again. I kept bucking the deep snow with the little noise-maker-squirming below my chest. Finally her struggles lessened and her hows became grunts. She began to work her mouth. The little tyke was getting hungry, and she rubbed her nose against my face.

  The lake at last. Her eyes were closed and her head resting against my arm as we covered the last two miles to the cabin.

  I turned her loose inside. She was pretty wobbly at first but soon she got around, nosing here and there. She fell over the potato box and finally lay down in front of the fireplace.

  What to feed her? I had some non-fat powdered milk. I boiled and strained oatmeal, added a little sugar and some honey and a drop or two of vinegar. She was up rubbing against me before it was done. I took a clean white rag, saturated it with the mixture and put it to her mouth. She sucked my finger. I decided she was going to make it.

  She curled up in the middle of the gravel floor and seemed happy as a new baby caribou could be under the circumstances. What should I name her? I thought I would call her Mae, as it was the month of May when she became my orphan.

  Perhaps I should have walked away and left her on the mountain. If I had, I don’t think I would have slept at all.

  May 12th. Well, I didn’t sleep anyway.

  A baby caribou has a loud and penetrating voice. Its vocabulary consists of three words: … how! ow! and uh! She used them all through the night and, in addition, rattled everything that was loose in the cabin. I fed her at ten, at twelve, and at three. She even tried to climb into my bunk but finally settled for just curling up beside it.

  When I opened the door this morning, she scrambled out and picked around here and there. Her neck is barely long enough to reach the ground without spreading those front legs. I measured her. Two feet tall, level with her back, legs sixteen inches, two and a half feet from nose to tail, and width an amazing four inches!

  I was soon off to Low Pass with her. She didn’t want to ride in the pouch so I turned her loose. She trotted along behind like a dog, those long legs tangling and untangling on the slippery rocks of the beach. I picked her up in my arms and walked the lake ice. When she began to struggle, I put her down again. She slowly tagged along, but before long her mouth sagged open. In a small snow patch she lay down and licked the ice from her tiny hooves in true caribou fashion.

  Ride and walk, ride and walk. At the foot of Low Pass she curled up in the snow and closed her eyes. It would be a hard climb up the trench. I put her into the front pouch. As I climbed, she didn’t make a sound, not even a move. Now and then I scooped up a handful of snow and she licked at it.

  Through the saddle and finally to the scene of yesterday. Sure enough, caribou tracks backtracking the trail of yesterday right to where the little doe had collapsed. I should have left her as she lay. The cow had returned and had checked the surrounding bare spots. I glassed the slopes and the basin thoroughly, but not a caribou was in sight. The mother probably had headed for the Kigik. She hadn’t found her calf so she had given up and left. There was only one thing for me to do—bring the little girl back to the cabin and hope for the best.

  On the trip back, my passenger was quiet. Now and then she licked my hand and rubbed alongside my ear with her nose. She was not too lively when I unloaded her, probably tired from the long trip. I put her down in the warm sun and fed her. She lay quietly, nibbling
weakly at some small brush. But she didn’t call out as before. She just wasn’t acting right. She lay stretched out instead of curled up as before. When I checked her again, she was warm but stiff and dead. How I wished I had left her on the mountainside!

  May 13th. New snow on the high peaks. Thirty-two degrees.

  I skinned the little caribou, fleshed and salted the hide, and puttered around the cabin wondering what the cow was doing.

  Spring is coming on fast. The slopes are showing tinges of green. Some flowers are in bloom, and the cottonwoods are budding out. Mosquitoes are beginning to appear.

  I set up the spotting scope for an inspection of Falls Mountain across the lake. New lambs, six of them with nine ewes. I studied them through the 60-power eyepiece and finally talked myself out of climbing up there among them to see them at close range. I had a cache to build.

  I finished the postholes and set in the big stilts for the cache, along with a set of two braces for each post to get them all in place at the proper angle. I backfilled and tamped the gravel and rock around the butts with a pole stomper. Then I packed water and poured it around the bases. When it was all solidly in place, the braces were removed. I’m now ready to square off the tops of the big stilts.

  Many flocks of geese, like hounds driving overhead. No real evidence of a caribou migration yet.

  May 14th. The camp robbers were early for breakfast this morning.

  A mighty roar from Crag Mountain startled me. I looked up in time to see tons of snow unloading from a high, narrow wash and spreading down the slope to blanket my cranberry patch. To be below when all that broke loose would be enough to frighten a man.