One man’s wilderness (40 page)

Eleven logs in place, plus the floor stringers, by late afternoon. A good start.

May 19th
. There they were at six o’clock, high in the rough stuff above the grubbing grounds, the old sow in the lead with the three cubs trailing. I watched them until they went over the edge to the big sheep pasture and out of sight.

Another day to make chips. The logs fitted snugly into their custom-made notches.

Tonight finds thirty in place. The cache is now twenty-nine inches high.

Does the lake ice melt from the top down or the bottom up?

May 20th
. Wind bags in the sky. Those small oval clouds usually forecast high-velocity winds.

More cache-building today. Forty logs in place, three feet high to the square. The gable logs are put up and the ridge log is in place. Now for some roof poles, which are cut to length, ready and waiting.

Everything has a good, snug fit down here on the ground. I hope it goes together with no trouble when I climb the ladder with all the pieces. This is the first pre-fab cache at Twin Lakes.

The lake level is rising but the ice is still thirty-two inches thick. The border of open water around the lake is dimpled with rain this evening. A gentle spring shower is in progress.

May 21st
. Those wind bags yesterday told the story ahead of time. Wind blowing a gale this morning.

One year ago today Babe brought me here to Twin Lakes. We sat and talked on the gravel bar at the upper end of the lower lake. I had backpacked two loads that day up to Spike’s cabin and had even picked up a sunburn from the sun on the snow. It was the first day of what I believe has been the most interesting year of my life.

Now it is another day to make chips and sawdust. The floor poles must be cut to length. It is blowing much too strongly for any work on the cache ladder.

I used the long ladder to bridge the moat of open water and get out on the ice. It is twenty-eight inches thick, a shrinking of four inches from yesterday. I doubt Babe will come until ice is out, unless he comes on floats and lands in the open water at the outlet of the connecting stream.

The wind carried rain with it in the afternoon. Not a day to work outside.

I went to the woodshed and ripped out planks for the door frame of the cache, and some one-and-a-half-inch planks for the twenty-by-twenty-three-and-a-half-inch door. I cut two sets of hinges out of stump wood.

I am thinking the lake will rise considerably from this storm, as no doubt it is raining hard in the high mountains and the water will come pouring down the slopes. The more rain and wind the better now, because it will speed the breakup of the lake ice.

May 22nd
. Forty degrees and still sprinkling. The wind blew itself out last night.

The lake ice is now twenty-four inches thick and still plenty solid. Under a bright sun the ice has changed from green to a snow-white. The lake is steadily rising and the open water around its edges is widening. If I travel the ice today, I might have trouble getting off.

I was ready to take my little log house apart and put it back together again on top of its nine-foot stilts.

Three sharp calls from a camp robber, meaning danger in the area. Twice more I heard the alarm signal, then I saw a hawk flashing through the spruces.

I used my meatpole ladder for a scaffold. Soon number-one log was resting atop the stilts, but it was past six o’clock and I decided to call it a day. Tomorrow evening should see the cache all assembled in its new location.

While I was eating supper, a pair of red-breasted mergansers cruised down the stretch of open water, upending out of sight and feeding under the ice. When they bobbed to the surface, they looked dry as corks.

The camp robbers came with no battle scars. The hawk had something else for dinner.

Hope Creek is now back in its regular channel and running under ice nearly three feet thick in places.

May 23rd
. Clear, calm, and twenty-five degrees.

Today would be my high-rise construction day. I made certain I had a good bearing surface on the ends of the posts. I mixed a batch of glue and sawdust to
insure a real good fit at each corner. Two sixty-penny spikes also were driven into each of these important areas.

I still was not satisfied. I had salvaged some one-inch-square tubing from a wrecked Tripacer aircraft at the upper end of the lake. It would come in handy now. I augered a seven-eighths-inch hole through each log on the four corners and on down into the top of each post. Then I drove a length of tubing into each of these holes with the heavy axe. In the process, I knocked the logs three-quarters of an inch off of square. A line from one front corner to the opposite rear corner pulled it square again.

The logs fitted perfectly. Forty-penny spikes went into the heavy ends and sixteen-pennies into the small ends. Eaves logs, gables, ridge log—a smooth operation. The fitting time spent on the beach really paid off. When noon arrived, I was just finishing up with the roof poles. I never expected the structure to go up so quickly.

Next the door. The logs forming the top and bottom of the opening were already partly sawed through, so all that remained was to cut the logs in between. And I had the opening for the door.

The roof covering was a course of tar paper, a sheet of polyethylene, a layer of moss, and poles to hold the moss down, same as for the cabin.

May 24th
. A ram stew on the fire first thing. Soon the ram will be all cleaned up. It was a lot of fine eating.

The lake ice is now twenty inches thick and still safe to travel. The problem is getting off it once you are on. The water temperature in the shallows is thirty-eight degrees.

May 25th
. A skim of ice on the open water. With the water level up like it is, the ice must be free to shift. Surely it has cracked all the way across in places, but it shows no sign of shifting at all.

I should be able to finish the cache today. I turned out a long, curved fancy door handle with a latch to put on the end of it. I am really proud of that piece
of work. That door and handle look happily married. I chinked with a little oakum and lots of moss. For all practical purposes, my miniature cabin on stilts was complete.

How one thing leads to another! My fifteen-foot meatpole ladder is too big for the cache. Tomorrow I will make an eleven-footer.

A few jobs to do in the late afternoon—repair my shoes, which are too good to throw away and not good enough to keep, plus tools to sharpen and saws to file.

May 26th
. The mountain slopes are misted with green. The leaves are unfurling unbelievably fast. Cottonwood buds are opening.