It didn’t take us long to walk up to the burn and, by eleven o’clock, we had dropped two more long trunks and slid them down to the beaver pond. This time we guided them around the pond with guide ropes rather than trying to walk them across. We also left the tethers on them when, back out at the creek, we launched them downstream. As a result, we were able to fetch them ashore before they swept past our camp. After we had dragged them up on the bar and laid them alongside the other one to dry, we had a quick lunch. Haywood declined the bottle of beer I offered him to go with his sandwich. He’d be flying out in a few hours, and when it came to alcohol and airplanes he went strictly by the book. I knew he was anxious to get back to Fairbanks. He’d mentioned he wanted to get the plane into the hangar for some scheduled maintenance, and I suspected he was looking forward to an evening with Donna, his new lady friend, before returning to work tomorrow. I couldn’t say that I blamed him. I’d like an evening with a lady friend too, if I had a lady friend. With Sylvia gone from my life I’d have to do something about that when I returned to civilization. For the present though, I was just going to enjoy my not-yet-divorced-but-nevertheless-single status.
After lunch Haywood packed a river bag with all the gear he’d be taking with him. I told him he could leave his sleeping bag and inflatable mattress if he wanted, but he said he liked to keep all his gear in the plane in case he had to put down in the bush sometime. You always had to be thinking survival out here. Then we made up a shopping list of items he’d bring in on his next visit. After that, we put in a little time on the creek, but the grayling weren’t rising, and we, dry-fly snobs both, refused to resort to nymphs. It occurred to me as we stood there, casting and chatting, that I hadn’t taken very good stock of my fly tying material before we flew in.
“Better add some dubbing wax and some more hooks to that list.” I told him.
“What size?” he asked, fishing his notebook out of his shirt pocket.
“Oh, fourteens and sixteens, I guess. A hundred each ought to be enough. I think I have plenty of eighteens.”
He wrote it down. “How you fixed for thread and head cement and all that sort of stuff?”
“Fine,” I answered, “The hooks and the wax will do it.”
At about two in the afternoon we gave up on the grayling and went back to camp to retrieve Haywood’s river bag before heading up to the landing strip. I had mixed feelings about his departure. I enjoyed his company and wished he could stay a little longer. On the other hand, I was anxious to get started on my solo adventure and I couldn’t really do that until I was, well, solo. I saw him aboard his Clipper and waited while he stowed and secured all his gear. Then I stood off a few paces and watched while he went through his pre-takeoff checks. Before he cranked up the engine he opened the door, propped a boot on the sill and leaned out.
“O.K. You’ve got enough beer and tobacco and whiskey to see you through a month. I’ll be back in three weeks for the Chinook run so you should be all right until then. The tent’s good enough to get you through anything the weather can throw at you in the summer months and you’re well enough armed to fight off all the bears in Alaska plus half the Red Army. I’m not going to worry about you.”
This, of course, was his way of telling me he was worried about me.
I patted the toe of his boot that was sticking out the door.
“I’ll be fine, Mom. Stop worrying.”
“Goddamnit. I’m not worrying! I’m just – well…” he laughed, “fretting. It’s a mother’s right, you know. Seriously though, you sure you’ll be O.K.? This all-alone shit sounds exciting and all, but it can go wrong fast. I wish you weren’t such an asshole about that radio. At least you could call out for help if you needed it.”
I smiled. He was genuinely concerned. He was a good friend.
“That’d be cheating. Seriously, I’ll be O.K. It’s only three weeks. I can make it alone that long.”
“I know. I’ve just been thinking about what Hard Case said the other night, about strange things happening back in here, and about what can happen to a white man’s mind.”
“Haywood,” I said with a bit of exasperation. “Three weeks, for Christ’s sake! And I’ll have plenty to keep my mind occupied. Stop fretting!”
“O.K.” he said with finality. “O.K. So, take care of yourself. Don’t let the bears eat you.”
With that, he swung his leg back into the cockpit and slammed the door. I watched the dog-ear handle rotate into place. Then I walked back to the edge of the bar and waited while he checked dials and flipped switches. Then I heard the winding of the motor and the propeller began its slow spin. When he had it revved up to speed he shot me a quick salute, swung the nose around and roared off up the gravel bar into the wind. His wheels lifted off, touched briefly down, and then leapt skyward and he was airborne. I watched as he made his slow turn with the river and then he was up over the trees and into the sky. I waited until his plane disappeared into the distance. As I walked slowly back to camp, I felt the solitude close in gently upon me.
The next three weeks went by quickly. That happens when you’re busy with projects you enjoy. I finished up the cache first. I got the roof tarp installed and added a knotted rope ladder as a safety device in case I got treed up there by a bear and had to jettison the log ladder. When that was finished I addressed my lack of furniture. I needed a bed and a table and two chairs. I would need them to furnish the cabin when it was built, so I decided to make them early and have the benefit of them while I was living in the tent. This was a good project to start with, as I wasn’t ready to dive right into the cabin. I took the chainsaw up into the spruce stand and dropped one tall tree. Its trunk was roughly fourteen inches in diameter, and I cut it into five-foot sections. Then I put a rip chain on the chainsaw and rigged up the “Alaska Mill” and ripped all the sections into two-inch planks. Sounds easy, but it’s a lot of work, bending over to keep the saw’s bar parallel with the ground, while guiding it the length of each log, slow and steady, to make an even, straight cut. Difficult as it was, that one tree gave me enough lumber to build my table, and all the shelves and steps I would need for the cabin. Next, I dropped enough three, and five-inch stock to make the bed and chairs. After I skinned off their bark with the draw knife, I ripped a few of them into half logs for the seats and chair backs.
The first thing I built was a sturdy, half-log bench. It was nothing more than what it sounds like – a log, ripped down the middle, and fitted with four legs, flat side up. I figured it would serve me as a table until I could build a proper table, and, after that it would be perfect for lounging on the porch. The bench only took about an hour to make. It took me two full days to build the other four pieces of furniture, but when they were finished I was very pleased with my handiwork.
I used a foam mattress that had come in on Load 2 as a template to design the bed. It had once been a full sized mattress, but I’d cut it down to three quarter width so it would not occupy too much of the cabin’s limited floor space. Consequently, the bed frame wasn’t big, but when complete, it was still quite heavy. I built it in place, inside the tent, and made it so I could break it down and move it to the cabin when the time came.
The table was a rustic masterpiece. The plank top and log legs were rough hewn, but its form and solid structure were very satisfying. The chairs gave me the most trouble. I had a couple of false starts, and shaping the seats with the tip of the chainsaw took some doing, but in the end they turned out quite well.
I can’t say which of these new appointments I enjoyed most. I had been sleeping on a thin ground pad directly on the gravel for a week, so my first night up off the ground, in a bed, with a foam mattress, was a pleasure beyond description. Nevertheless, the usefulness of a flat working surface, even one still sticky with sap, cannot be overemphasized. Sitting on logs and stumps, and trying to prepare and eat your meals on the lid of a cooler is fine when you’re camping, but a real table, and a chair, quickly turns a tent into a comfortable home. When I had everything arranged inside, I was pleased see there would still be enough room for Haywood’s collapsible camp bed, if he remembered to bring it in on his next visit.
The only thing I lacked was running water.
As I worked on the furnishings, I gave this issue a good bit of thought. Jake Larkin, the old trapper who had chosen this site, knew exactly what he was doing. Would he have brought all his water up from the creek by the bucketful? I doubted it. I found it hard to believe he would have been so assiduous with regard to all other aspects of his cabin location, and overlook a primary consideration like water availability. So, the day after I finished building the bed, I decided to do a little snooping around, and within an hour, I discovered his spring. It came as no great surprise. My faith in old Jake proved to be well founded. I’d started by poking and probing around the perimeter of the old cabin, and unearthed a section of rusty pipe along the back wall. It appeared to be pointed upslope, toward the tree line. That made sense, as gravity was the only way to move water out here. So I followed the pipe to see where it led. It was covered with leaf mold and years of debris, and there were stretches where it was missing altogether, but there was enough exposed here and there to keep me on track. When I finally followed it out, it led me to a partially developed spring on a bit of high ground just inside the spruce stand. There was water seeping out of the ground there, but it quickly joined a small swale that drained into the creek, so it was almost impossible to see that it was, indeed, a spring. With a bit of work, it was clear that I could dig out a catch basin and shore up the walls with stone and have a gravity fed water supply down to the cabin. My faith in the old trapper had been justified.
I hung my hat on a bush next to the spring and paced off the distance back down to the chimney. It was a hundred and eight paces – just over a hundred yards. I didn’t have a hand level but I judged, using my hat for a reference, the spring to be about twenty feet above the floor of the cabin. Not enough to develop much of a head of pressure, but definitely enough to deliver a steady flow. I’d have to ask Haywood to bring in three rolls of one-inch plastic pipe. By the time I had a cabin, the cabin would have running water. What else could a man want?
Once I had the tent well outfitted I began spending half of each day up at the burn, felling, dragging and floating logs out to the creek. I found I could manage about four each morning. Even with a few days off, at the end of three weeks, I had stockpiled over fifty logs, of varying lengths, on the bank awaiting their float trip down to the cabin site. At midday, when I’d break for lunch, I’d leave the chainsaw there at the burn and float a log down the creek on my way back to camp. In all that time, I never encountered one bear in the two-mile stretch of river between my camp and the burn. I never even saw a track. I found this to be very strange, but I was grateful, nonetheless; it made my logging a lot less stressful. And, by the time Haywood was due to return, I had moved eighteen logs down to the cabin site.
I spent my afternoons getting acquainted with my new surroundings. Sometimes I’d take the canoe and scout downstream a few miles, occasionally seeing a moose or bear along the banks. I never encountered a caribou or Thin-horn sheep, but I knew, from previous trips, they were indigenous to the area. They just kept to the high country during the warm summer months. Sometimes I’d walk back into the woods and meadows behind the cabin, or on the far side of the creek. I always wore the .44 when poking around on foot. I also tried to make plenty of noise, especially in the heavy cover. It must have worked, since I never ran into a bear.
I was already a fair hand at reading animal tracks, but I learned a good deal more about it while on these daily excursions. The abundance and variety of game to be found within a mile of the cabin offered a great opportunity for study. I’d brought along a field guide on the subject and carried it with me on my hikes. It came in handy when I ran across a track I didn’t recognize. Whenever I saw the game itself I’d go check their tracks immediately after they had moved on. I’d make a point of going back to study the same tracks a few hours later, and then check them again the next day. This was a particularly good way of learning to read the age of a track. It worked best on the larger animals, but then, they were the ones I was most interested in anyway.
After a couple of weeks I’d become quite familiar with the country around my camp and had seen, or found sign of, most of the local wildlife. My new stomping grounds were, basically, divided into three distinct environments: the creek and its banks, the mixed spruce and birch woodlands, and the open marshes and meadows. From a purely dietary standpoint, I had the world at my doorstep. Big game notwithstanding, there were fish in the creek, spruce hens, ptarmigan and hares in the woods, and waterfowl in the wetlands. For living off the land, the property I’d purchased couldn’t have been better situated.
There was also a very active beaver community nearby that provided me with a good bit of entertainment. They had built a series of three ponds in the meadow behind the spruce stand above my camp. Each pond had one lodge, and I often saw beavers, adults and their kits, working or feeding on the banks. I’d occasionally spend an hour or so just watching them. Whenever one spotted me there would be the inevitable KAPLOOSH of a beaver tail smacking down on the water – their danger signal. Then they’d all dive underwater. Even when I knew it was coming, the tail-slap never failed to startle me.
Haywood had noticed a red fox coming and going on the far bank when we’d first arrived. I now saw her often. She had a litter of at least five kits, maybe six, and I’d see them occasionally during the day. The vixen usually has her litter in mid May but the kits don’t leave the den until late June, so I suspected they were no more than two months old. Whenever they would appear, I’d stop whatever I was doing and watch them. I was glad they weren’t on my side of the creek. Foxes have the nasty habit of marking their territory with scat. If they claim an area as their own, they shit all over the place. Bears, at least, had the decency to mark their territory by clawing marks high up on a tree.