Cache Lake Country

by John J. Rowlands

  Cache Lake Country

  Cache Lake

  Cache Lake Country

  LIFE IN THE NORTH WOODS

  BY JOHN J. ROWLANDS

  Illustrated by HENRY B. KANE

  Wilderness Edition

  THE COUNTRYMAN PRESS

  A division of W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  Contents

  Introduction

  Foreword

  CACHE LAKE Portage to Contentment

  JANUARY Long Nights and Deep Snows

  FEBRUARY The Stars and the Silence

  MARCH Strong Winds in the Sugar Bush

  APRIL Thundering Ice and Black Water

  MAY The Green Tide Flows North

  JUNE Soft Twilights and Fireflies

  JULY The Moose Are in the Lakes

  AUGUST Harvest of the Wilderness

  SEPTEMBER The Moon When the Birds Fly Away

  OCTOBER Frost on Scarlet Leaves

  NOVEMBER Gray Skies and Cold Rains

  DECEMBER Blizzards and Wailing Winds

  Woodcraft Index

  Introduction

  MY FATHER came of age in 1947, that unusual year, when he was a very young bandleader in a small Iowa town. That year he began collecting the books he has come to call, by convention, “the library,” as if it were a Turkish-carpeted chamber with a dinner gong and a superannuated attendant instead of a wall in the hall where we keep the books. “The library” was and still is a ragtag collection. It includes my mother’s nursing texts, limp and alarming, an enormous variety of do-it-yourself volumes, and a few books, circa 1947, which must have been acquired by my father and mother with the trepidation all young bookbuyers feel. If you are not accustomed to spending money on books, the weight of choosing just one from the whole world of letters—especially in a time before paperbacks became popular—is almost too much to bear.

  Cache Lake Country, which was published in that year 1947, may have been the first real book my dad ever bought. By real I mean that it was not an assigned college text but had been purchased out of simple desire to own a book for itself. By real I also mean that it cost four dollars, plenty at the time, and came with a dust jacket and illustrations. But if Cache Lake Country was the first real book my dad every bought, it was an amazing choice because it is also the best book ever written. So I thought when I first found it in “the library” and read it as a boy. So I have thought upon re-reading it every year since. So I think now, having just closed its covers again.

  Cache Lake Country is one of two books (Spindrift is the other) written by John J. Rowlands. Nothing in Cache Lake Country will tell you that when he wrote it (it began as a “Cache Lake Letter” distributed to friends), Rowlands was the public relations officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You would never guess that he had been a widely respected journalist with the United Press Association in New York and Boston or that he had been “the first person to reach Vice President Calvin Coolidge in Vermont with the news that President Warren G. Harding had died.” What you learn about Rowlands in Cache Lake Country is far more vital and concerns an earlier era—the years in the early part of this century when Rowlands worked as a miner, prospector, surveyor, and timber cruiser in northern Ontario, just south of Hudson Bay.

  It is as a timber scout that he chooses to appear in Cache Lake Country. One September dawn, working his canoe up “a chain of lakes and streams,” he paddled into the middle of an unknown lake and stopped to rest “like a fellow will when he sees new water for the first time.” But this was old water too, for as he sat there motionless in his canoe, Rowlands felt it all come back to him: “as the sun cleared the hills and turned the black water into shining gold, I remembered. This was the lake of my boyhood dreams!” Though time was pressing him upstream, Rowlands paddled ashore and brewed a pail of tea under a tall white pine that reminded him, as everything about this lake did, of a millpond he had camped beside as a child. “I knew then,” he says, “that I had found the place I had always wanted to be.”

  To have found the place you always wanted to be: that is the secret of this book. Rowlands tells us how he happened to get to Cache Lake, but he wisely never tells us how he happened to leave. (We have only MIT’s word that he did.) And it is the perfect glory of Cache Lake Country that reading it for the first time (or for the first time in a year) is like paddling out of the narrows onto a small, open lake bordered by white pines and hemlock—moose at browse in the weedbeds along one shore, a loon calling across the ripples—and pausing “like a fellow will,” pausing for an entire year. In Cache Lake Country the months pass slowly one by one, beginning in the snows of January and ending in the snows of December, while with his two good friends—Chief Tibeash, an aging Cree Indian, and Henry B. Kane, the book’s illustrator, both living on nearby lakes—Rowlands guides the reader through a year in the life of the north woods.

  Let me tell you what I learned from this. I learned that nature works with reason, and though its reasons are often harsh, they are just as often beneficent. “In January,” Rowlands writes, “we generally have a thaw that reminds us of a spell of April weather, which is to make sure that the water is spread around fairly” (29). I learned that real danger, the source of real fear, can be understated without minimizing it. “If you get snow blindness when you’re alone on the trail you’re in a fix and no mistake” (38). I learned that it is delicate business comparing what is easy with what is hard. “If you have common sense . . .” Rowlands says, “you don’t often get into trouble, and every time you do get into trouble you learn something about common sense the hard way” (47). I learned that if you lived in the north woods you would want to be able to cook and sew and garden as well as fish and hunt and sharpen an axe.

  And in this book I also had what I consider my first real contact with a culture not my own—that is, with the Cree. In Chief Tibeash, Rowlands found a sagacious northwoods tutor, and he passes along to his reader every lesson that he can. From Tibeash I learned that in most of the matters that were important to me as a boy (if only in imagination)—the way you paddle a canoe, for instance, the track your footsteps make, the respect you show for game, your ability to read “the real meaning of a newly bent blade of grass, a broken twig, or water slowly oozing into a hoofprint in the mud”—there was no higher praise than to be taken for an Indian. The Boy Scouts had tried to teach me all of this, but Rowlands and Tibeash did it without the condescension or the treacle.

  As you will be able to tell at a glance from Henry Kane’s illustrations, this is a work brimming with woodcraft. With patience you can learn from its pages how to make a rabbitskin robe or an Indian drum, build an iceboat or smoke a fish, pack for a week’s canoe trip or weather a blizzard in the open. But there is a catch to all this. Those two young men, Jim Rowlands and Hank Kane (not to mention Tibeash), were possessed by a demonic ingenuity. What they couldn’t do with a length of quarter-inch brass pipe and a long winter can’t be done. And they lived in an era of canvas and wood. Goods were shipped in barrels that could be turned into reading chairs. Friends came to fish and left behind fencing foils, which could be filed into bait rods. Theirs is a strange old-fashioned world filled with unfamiliar things they just happen to have on hand, substances like “sugar of lead,” for instance. Theirs is a place where time stretched out far enough on all sides that a man, for that is how Rowlands puts it, could turn himself to good use in just about every direction. As for women in Cache Lake Country, they come in the form of sisters and grandmothers. “Wherever men boil water” is how Rowlands begins some talk about the sound of teakettles.

  You will not have read this book properly unless you mess up the house trying some of the project
s Rowlands describes. Start easy. Fry up some leftover oatmeal. The recipe is on page 30. Sew yourself some moccasins out of an old blanket (page 34). Make a bird’s Christmas tree, the way Rowlands does on page 255. When summer comes and the grass is high, go out early one morning, twist a grassblade into a tiny loop, and capture a drop of dew with it. Use it as a microscope, like the illustration on page 121. Dig a bean hole in the backyard (188). Work your way up to the iceboat and the outdoor bake oven. Work your way up to a life in the woods.

  Everyone who reads this book will eventually wonder where Cache Lake really lies. There is only one good hint. It comes on page 140. To make a permanent magnet you first have to poke a steel bar into the earth at an angle that matches your latitude. To make a permanent magnet at Cache Lake you use 47 degrees. That knowledge is as close as I want to get to looking for that quiet lake with a solitary white pine on its edge and a small log cabin on a knoll. Instead, I will go on reading this book every year until the years are taken from me, grateful that by some strange quirk my father came upon it when he was twenty-one and decided that of all the books a man might buy in this world, this was the one he would start with. Cache Lake lies before you right this minute in Rowlands’ beautiful, unassuming prose, in Henry Kane’s exquisite illustrations. If you want to search for its actual vicinity, just walk across Canada on the 47th parallel. Take this book along. You will appreciate the advice it has to offer.

  —Verlyn Klinkenborg

  Foreword

  It is now better than a dozen years since Cache Lake Country was first published and in that fragment of time the world has seen great changes. We have watched the dawning of the Atomic Age, bringing new triumphs for man, new hopes and also new and haunting fears.

  But Cache Lake has not changed. Serene, remote, untouched, it lives on as always, a symbol of the beauty, simplicity and natural honesty of the Northern wilderness in which it lies, the abiding place of peace and contentment.

  In Cache Lake Country I have recounted not only the happy and rewarding experiences of life in the North, but the deep satisfaction and excitement of discovering how inventive and resourceful man can be when his living depends upon making the most effective use of whatever comes to hand. He must learn—often with only an axe for a tool—to build himself a home. He must know where to look for and how to procure food if he is to survive, and he must learn to find his way through a world of trackless forest.

  There is more that he must learn, for now and then he must walk alone, trying to conquer fears that he has never known before—fear of illness, fear of death and, now and then, fear of the motives of men. If the man of wilderness thinks of security at all, it is as something that lies in the future and has to be earned. He would never dream of demanding security in advance. He has no fear of failure, for he thinks of failure as one of many steps in the business of getting ahead.

  Many readers of Cache Lake Country have told me that its simple philosophy—our way of thinking to get the best out of life—has been helpful in easing the tensions of the hard fast pace of modern civilization. Many, too, have discovered for themselves the satisfaction and pleasure of developing skills of the hand by working out various ideas and projects in the book. And no less pleasing has been their delight in joining the spirit on the trails and on the waterways and in sharing the warmth of life at Cache.

  “Cache” is the woodsman’s term for a safe and secure place in which to store valuable possessions, food and equipment, against the day of need. In Cache Lake Country are stored the best and most treasured memories of my life, a keeping place of conviction and contentment from which I may draw when I feel the need.

  There is a Cache Lake for everyone, but it won’t be found beside a four-land highway nor will there be a clear trail to lead to it. If it is worth finding, it will be far from the sights and sounds of civilization, quiet and clear, and without pretension. Unless you know what to look for you may pass it by.

  To my great satisfaction Cache Lake Country has lived on through the years and appears to have found its special place in the affections of readers old and young. I greet this new Wilderness Edition with pleasure, and hope that it may find new readers in years to come who will share the ageless rewards and riches that I found at Cache Lake in time gone by.

  —John J. Rowlands

  1959

  Portage to Contentment

  ON MOST maps Cache Lake is only a speck hidden among other blue patches big enough to have names, and unless you know where to look you will never find it. But a place like Cache Lake is seldom discovered on a map. You just come on it—that is if you are lucky. Most men who travel the north woods sooner or later happen on a lake or stream that somehow they cannot forget and always want to go back to. Generally they never do go back.

  Cache Lake lies deep in a wilderness of spruce and pine which, except for a timber cruiser like myself and maybe a trapper now and then, few white men know. But the Indians find it good game country, and so do the big gray timber wolves that run its hills. So like many other worth-while things, there’s no easy trail to Cache Lake, for it is protected by distance, mile after forgotten mile of woods and water, and it is still clean and clear and safe from civilization.

  Strange it is how things work out sometimes. A man starts out for a place in mind, but before he gets there he comes on something more to his liking than he thought a spot ever could be. That’s how it was with Cache Lake. I was working north through a chain of lakes and streams to look over some timber for the lumber company. I had never been in the region before, but knew in a general way where I was heading. It was in the Snow Goose Lake country and I figured I would go up the Manitoupeepagee River and make myself a camp handy to the district I had to look over. A trapper told me I would find Wabun Lake a likely place for living, Just by way of remarking, Wabun is Indian for “east” or “dawn.”

  The time was early September, which is one of the best months for traveling in the north when the days are clear and sunny and the nights sharp with frost to make a fire feel good and remind you that fall is coming on. I stopped one night at the south end of Snow Goose Lake, where the Indians camp in the summer, and at dawn I started on. At that time of day the water is apt to be quiet and since my canoe with outfit and supplies was riding almost to the gunwales, the smoother the water the easier it was for me.

  You leave the north end of Snow Goose Lake by a narrow creek or thoroughfare, a dark and deep neck of still water with muskeg and tamarack on the west side and heavy spruce on the east where the ground rises. It was so quiet I could hear the drops from the paddle hitting the water. The map showed that the waterway linked Snow Goose Lake with a small lake which had no name, so I didn’t think much about it. Lake Wabun was a day’s paddling ahead with some tracking up the river to boot, and my mind was set on getting there as soon as I could make it.

  After I cleared the thoroughfare and came out on the small lake, I stopped paddling like a fellow will when he sees new water for the first time. The sun had come up and mist hung motionless like a big cobweb just above the surface. “Ghosts’ breath” we called it when we were young. Over to my right, to the eastward, the shore was lined with jack pines and in one place close down by the water I could see a natural clearing. On the west was part of the great swamp I had passed coming up from Snow Goose Lake, but going north on that side the land lifted and the white boles of big canoe birches showed on the slopes of a low ridge.

  I have seen maybe a thousand northern lakes, and they all look alike in many ways, but there was something different about that little lake that held me hard. I sat there perhaps half an hour, like a man under a spell, just looking it over.

  On rigid wings with feet outstretched for a landing

  This lake gave me the queer feeling that I had been there before. The tall pine tops were moving in the first soft breeze of morning and as the mist drifted away dark shadows began to edge across the water into the woods just as they had somewhere, sometime long ago. The
n, as the sun cleared the hills and turned the still black water into shining gold, I remembered. This was the lake of my boyhood dreams! This was the lake I used to picture when I camped with my chum by a little millpond near a meadow on a farm. We made believe it was a lake in the far northern wilderness. The cows that came down to drink were deer and moose; the dogs that barked were wolves, and the perch we caught were fighting trout. Our flat-bottomed boat was a birch bark canoe.

  Then I remembered the little brook that hustled into one end of the pond and now as I looked toward the north I saw the froth of white water at the far end where the Manitoupeepagee comes down over a rock-spiked forty-foot pitch. This was my lake at last, even to the black duck that came out of the shadows of a cove to fly clear against the sky and drop down on rigid wings with feet outstretched for a landing. In our millpond it was a kingfisher.

  Then, for no reason that I understood, I paddled ashore, built a fire and made myself a pail of tea. And there was the big tree, not the elm that stood by the old millpond, but a tall white pine just where it ought to be. I knew then I had found the place I had always wanted to be.

  After a while I headed on my way, but, when I pulled out for the carry at the head of the lake and looked back, I knew I would one day return. The fact is, I was back in a week and I pitched my tent in the clearing and worked out of Cache Lake on my job of cruising the timber country. The longer I stayed the better I liked the lake and after a while I began thinking about giving it a name, for by then I had a feeling that it belonged to me. It could be called a lot of pleasant names and all of them would fit, but I liked “Cache” because here was stored the best the north had to give: fine timber to build a cabin and keep a man warm, fish and game and berries for food, and the kind of peace and contentment that is found only in the woods. Where you store your belongings in the north, the things you can’t live without, that’s a cache. I could think of no better name.