“You didn’t toss up the twine?”
He frowned at me. “Gus, maybe you’ve been out here too long already. I didn’t toss up anything. I told you, I just got back. Now come on down and eat something. You appear to be getting light in the head.”
I glowered at him for a second. He wasn’t above playing practical jokes. But, he looked sincere. I shrugged and climbed down the ladder.
We sat under the cache, our backs against the support logs and ate our sandwiches, and drank our beer. Life was good. Haywood, among his other numerous achievements, was an accomplished maker of outrageous sandwiches. He was famous for his liverwurst, red onion and sardine on sourdough. That’s what he’d made today. Both the liverwurst, and onion were cut into half-inch slabs and three sardines were squished in between the layers. Magnificent! We washed them down with the first beer and chased them with a second. While we were enjoying a leisurely post-lunch smoke, a ptarmigan wandered into the clearing to see what we were up to. We didn’t take any great pains to remain still or silent, but the bird seemed perfectly comfortable with our presence and, after a thorough inspection of our project, it went on its way.
“They’re pretty good eating,” Haywood observed, “but it’s considered bad form to shoot the local building inspectors when you’re remodeling without permits.”
I recognized the wisdom of this and made a mental note to learn more about local protocol. I was sure Haywood would be happy to fill me in if only I asked. I didn’t ask. When we’d finished our second beer, we took up our tools and went back to work. I worked aloft, lashing down the remaining rafter poles, while Haywood cut logs and split planks for the door. As my hands worked with the poly-twine, my mind went back to my meeting with Charlie Manning and his mention of yega. I wondered what sort of spirit could chuck a ball of twine fourteen feet in the air and put it through a small crawl hole in a wall. In the end, I decided that Haywood was having a little fun with me. Yega, indeed.
After I had the basic frame for the roof built, I climbed down the ladder and went out to the creek bank where I cut several fresh willow branches and stripped them of their leaves. When I had enough slender rods to make up a good bundle, I took them back the cache. Haywood helped me get them all aloft, then returned to his door project. I laid the willows perpendicular on top of the rafters, then tied them down. The cache was shaping up nicely. The willows clearly defined the pitched roof, and their slender branches would provide a fine substructure to support the tarp. I didn’t put the tarp on at this stage because I wanted to give the green wood a few days to dry out in the sun and wind – no sense encouraging mold. I puttered around up on top a bit more, adding a tie-down here or a new branch there and, finally satisfied, I went down to help Haywood with the door.
He’d made good progress and was just assembling all the cut parts into a recognizable door structure. He asked me to go back up and verify the measurements of the door opening. I did. And when, back on the ground, we compared them with his finished door, it looked like it just might fit.
“Pity we didn’t bring an extra set of hinges.” He lamented.
“Don’t think we’ll need them. Looks like this will snug into the gap nicely, and we can lock it in place with a couple of pivot latches.”
“Well,” he considered, “without hinges, that’s what we’ll have to do.”
I went back to camp for a few more bottles of beer while he put the finishing touches on the door. When I got back to the cache, he was up at the top of the ladder fussing and cussing, and trying to make the door fit the opening.
“Trouble?” I enquired.
“It’s a cunt hair too wide. We’ll have to shave off a little.”
We had a drawknife with us so, back on the ground, he held the door on edge and instructed me to take a little off the side. I made a few passes with the knife, going with the grain, the moist wood peeling off in a slick, white ribbon.
“Easy!” He admonished. “Only needs an RCH.”
‘Oh! A Red CH!’ He hadn’t specified the color earlier. We engineers take our measurements and calibrations quite seriously. I don’t know how, or why, but every engineer alive – for that matter, every male alive – understands that an RCH is much finer than any other color CH. Another of life’s little mysteries, but it’s something we all know without ever being told.
“You didn’t say red.” I reminded him.
“I meant red.” He affirmed, eyeballing my work. “Let’s give it a try.”
With that, he scrambled back up the ladder; door tucked under one arm, beer clamped firmly in the other hand. At the top he deposited the beer bottle on the skirt of the platform and maneuvered the door in place.
“Shit,” he said. “Looks like red wasn’t enough. Should’a gone with black.”
Everyone also knew, without ever being told, black was the coarsest CH. Red was fine, black was coarse. I assumed blond fell somewhere in the middle.
“Bring it down,” I told him. “We’ll shave off a tad more.”
I pulled chef duty that evening. We were dining on grilled rib-eye steaks and potatoes baked in the open fire. Haywood had prepared the grayling the previous night, pan-fried and stuffed with herb butter, served on a bed of wild rice. There is simply nothing better than fine cuisine served on tin plates, al fresco.
I was busy tending the potatoes, wrapped in two layers of aluminum foil and placed directly in the coals of the campfire, when Haywood came up from the creek lugging a bucket of fresh water.
“You know,” he observed, “the one trouble with this cabin location is its proximity to the creek. It’s a long haul for water.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But I don’t see any way around it. I could build a storage tank up here, but I’d still have to haul water from the creek by the bucketful to fill it.”
“Well, shit,” Haywood chided, “brilliant fuckin’ engineer like yourself ought to be able to come up with something better than that!”
True, I thought, but, so far, that was the best I could do. I promised to put my mind to it while I was filling in the hole in the middle of the beaver pond.
When the potatoes had been in the fire about thirty minutes, I flopped the steaks on the folding grill we’d set up over the campfire. I’d marinated them in Madeira laced with Herbs de Provence all afternoon. When they hit the hot grill they hissed and released a delicious waft of smoke into the air. We both liked our meat closer to rare than medium, so I let them sear only a minute before flopping them over. Haywood pulled the cork on a bottle of Cabernet and filled two tin cups. We drank it while the steaks spit and sizzled on the grill.
When the rib-eyes looked just about ready, I rolled the potatoes out of the coals with a willow stick and unwrapped the two layers of foil. They steamed in the cool evening air and the smell of their butter and chives blended with the aroma of the hot, juicy meat. It was mouth watering. A baguette, split and drizzled with olive oil, and warmed on the grill, rounded out the meal, and the full, red wine added the finishing touch.
We had just settled down on a log by the fire and begun eating when Haywood suddenly froze, his fork halfway between the plate and his mouth.
“Uh-oh. Looks like we’ve got company.”
He said it quietly and without any sense of urgency, but his voice conveyed danger. I looked up and saw the bear on the far bank. There was still plenty of daylight and I could see it clearly. It was an adult black bear. That can be good or bad. Black bears are smaller than grizzlies, but they’re unpredictable. The ones that have been around humans can get very aggressive. Of course, I’d still prefer this one to a twelve hundred pound grizzly. Nevertheless, any bear showing up for dinner can present a problem.
It was clear that this fellow had picked up the aroma of our grilling meat and come upwind to see if he could mooch a meal. He stood on his hind legs and stretched full length and sniffed as he swung his head upstream and down. When he’d zeroed in on the source of the food smell, he dropped back down to all fours and ambled down the bank and into the water. He was coming across.
Until now, both Haywood and I had been cutting rib-eye and stuffing it in our mouths as fast as we could chew and swallow. That seemed the prudent thing to do if the bear was going to give us time. Now, with Bruno showing every indication that he intended to join us in camp, it was time for more direct action.
We were both wearing our side arms.
I had my .44 magnum and Haywood was carrying a .357 magnum. But, unless things got out of hand, we preferred to rely on diplomacy. I set aside my plate and threw some more logs on the fire. I wanted to get it roaring and burn the meat residue off the grill as quickly as possible. There was also the chance that the fire itself would keep the bear at bay. Haywood went over to the kitchen tote and took out our largest aluminum soup kettle and started banging it with a wooden spoon. While he was doing this, I picked up a few rocks and began launching them skyward, in the general direction of the bear.
All the racket and activity brought the bear up short. He stopped before reaching midstream and backed off a few paces. Then he stood up in the water to afford himself a better look at what was transpiring on the bank where all the inviting smells were coming from. A minute ticked slowly by. It looked like we were coming to a stand off, so I corrected my elevation and adjusted my windage a smidge, and let fly with a golf ball sized river rock. It hit him high-left – about where his shoulder would have been if bears had shoulders. The sheer surprise of the contact, rather than the impact of the rock itself, buckled his knees and he dropped back down on all fours with a splash, turned on his heels, and plowed back through the water to the far bank. He climbed out of the creek, took a moment to shake off the water and, without a backward glance, disappeared into the woods.
The incident had taken no more than five minutes but, already, our meat and potatoes had gone cold. We finished eating standing up while we kept an eye out for the return of our uninvited guest. Chances were good that he wouldn’t bother us again but, with bears, you never know.
“That’s the first bear we’ve seen.” Haywood said.
“Yeah,” I answered, “I saw some black bear tracks along the bank between here and the landing strip on the first day but nothing fresh. He was probably just passing through and caught the smell of the meat cooking and came to investigate.”
“That’s probably it. Let’s hope he doesn’t come back later for another try. We better clean up good tonight. Might be a good idea to get that bacon and some of the other food up in the cache before we turn in.”
After dinner I took all the plates and pans down to the creek and gave them a good scrub while Haywood removed the beer from the cooler and put the bottles in the stream. We then filled the cooler and the red river bag with anything that a bear might find yummy and hauled it all back to the cache. When we had everything safely stored aloft, we moved the ladder and propped it against a tree at the edge of the clearing. Then we went back to camp, had a nightcap, and turned in. I hadn’t slept with my pistol thus far, but I did that night. I didn’t see Haywood’s .357 laying around anywhere, so I assumed he was sleeping with his too.
I tossed and turned most of the night and woke at every small sound. But the bear never reappeared. I finally fell off into a sound sleep just as the sun was peaking over the eastern hills. Considering sunup was sometime around four in the morning, it still left me plenty of time for half a night’s sleep.
The next day, Sunday, we’d planned on bacon, eggs and coffee for breakfast. But, with the bear’s visit still fresh in our memory, and most of our food stores up in the cache, we opted for instant oatmeal instead. After breakfast, Haywood brewed a second pot of coffee and filled a thermos before we headed upstream to do some logging. We’d decided, the night before, to go back up to the burn and bring out two more twenty footers. We figured I could manage the lighter stock alone, but it was best to tackle the long, heavy base logs while Haywood was there to help. Along the way we checked the bank carefully for fresh sign but didn’t see any new bear tracks. There was plenty of other activity in evidence. The beavers had been busy along the bank, and it looked like wolves had been through recently. I noticed another track, which I didn’t recognize. It resembled a very small bear track but there were only four claw marks on the forepaw. I pointed it out to Haywood. He said it was a porcupine. I studied it so I’d remember what it was the next time I saw one.
“Do they have any natural enemies around here?” I asked.
“Wolverine, maybe, but he’d have to be pretty desperate. As far as I know, the puma and the fisher are the only ones that will go after a porcupine on a regular basis. Certainly no pumas up here. For that matter, I don’t think there are any fishers either. You’ll find them farther south. They’re basically oversized weasels, with a whole mouthful of very sharp teeth. They’ll circle the porcupine until it gets tired, then go after its face. If they can get at it, they’ll blind the poor bugger and bite and cut and slash at the face until the porky wears down. Then they go for the underbelly and the party’s over.”
“How big do they get? The fishers I mean.”
“Not as big as a porcupine. They’ll average about twelve pounds. Some get as big as twenty pounds but that’s rare. They’re not large animals, but they’re quick and persistent and vicious. The porcupine always tries to keep its back to the danger. They’ll even climb a tree to keep the fisher behind them. The fisher can climb too but if they go up the tree after the porky, they can’t penetrate the quill defense from the rear. No way to get at the vulnerable face, unless, of course, there’s another tree close enough so the fisher can go up and over and come down the porky’s tree. Then it’s curtains for the porcupine.”