Cache Lake Country

by John J. Rowlands

  Cache Lake brought me luck, for I hadn’t been there long when I learned that Chief Tibeash, a Cree Indian I had known years before when my father and I came north to fish, was living on Shining Tree Lake about two miles from my camp. It was a meeting, I can tell you, for I had lost track of the Chief when we moved to another part of the country and many a time after I came back to the north again I had tried to get trace of him. But Indians don’t leave forwarding addresses.

  I was young and green when I first met the Chief and in those days I thought I knew the ways of the woods, but it didn’t take me long to realize that I couldn’t see much more than a puppy when his eyes open. Not until I traveled the woods with the Chief for several summers did I know the real meaning of a newly bent blade of grass, a broken twig, or water slowly oozing into a hoof-print in the mud. I hadn’t learned to see an animal standing motionless in the woods, much less catch the quick movement at the moment of its escape. But the Chief saw it all. With him I learned to use my eyes and my nose and my ears in ways only the woods people know. Here in the clean air of the forest the sense of smell becomes keen and in time you learn to detect many things, lynx and bear, moose and other animals, by their scents. Gradually the eyes learn to see and the ears to hear, for every sound in the wilderness has a meaning, be it the faint rustle of a deer mouse in dry grass or the quavering howl of a timber wolf.

  Chief Tibeash is not the kind of Indian you might picture. He is small and lean and his muscles are as tough and strong as a rawhide thong. The warm brown of dry pine spills is the color of his skin, and the many fine lines about his eyes come from years of squinting across glaring snow and ice and shining water. You might expect his eyes to be dark, but they are gray and keen. If you could summon his ancestors back it wouldn’t surprise me if you would find among the darker skins a fine looking voyageur with gray eyes. The Chief figures he is about seventy now. His mother told him that he was born in “the winter of the deep snows,” which could be any one of many winters up here, so he can’t be sure. But his age doesn’t matter, for he is faster on the trail and can last longer in a canoe than many a younger man. He still takes a hundred-pound pack over a five-mile portage without stopping to rest.

  It was the Chief who showed me how to handle a canoe like an Indian with the short stroke that begins at the waist and ends with a thrust from the shoulders and never tires. The proudest moment of my early years in the woods was when I was taken for an Indian because of the way I worked my paddle. I learned to live in shelters made from what came to hand in the woods and to know and use the natural foods of the wilderness. It was the Chief who helped me to make my first hunting sled and taught me to drive a dog team. I helped him tan deer and moose hides and make them into moccasins. Now I was back with him again as though there had been no space of years since I had seen Chief Tibeash.

  When I finished cruising the timber and started out to make my report to the company, I promised the Chief I would come back someday, but right then I didn’t know just when it would be. Well, when the company people got my report they asked me how I would like to make a permanent camp on Cache Lake and keep watch over the timber country. It didn’t take me more than two breaths to say I would take the job and be glad to have it. All I asked was that they send in tools, spikes, and tar paper roofing to build a log cabin, and supplies to keep me fit through the winter. That they did with a large hand, including good windows for the cabin, two stoves and plenty of pipe.

  The stuff came in three freight canoes and the six young fellows that brought it stayed on to help me build the cabin, for by then it was late October and we had no time to lose before the snow came. The way those men went to work getting out logs, singing and yelling as they cut, was a caution. We used white pine for the walls and tamarack for the roof timbers. Green logs mean you must watch the chinking, for they open up as they dry, but winter was coming and we couldn’t wait for them to season, a process which takes at least six months.

  While the boys cut and placed the logs the Chief and I brought in plenty of sphagnum moss and gray clay for chinking, and in two weeks the cabin was closed in with the roof on. I found enough down timber that was dry to make the floor of hand-squared logs. A pretty sight it is to watch a man, who knows how to use an adz, square a timber almost as straight as if it was sawed. They did a fine job of fitting.

  The boys stayed on to cut twenty cords of firewood, for no man in his right mind faces a north woods winter without having his wood cut and stacked. Mostly wood is cut in the winter and yarded to season until the fall. In that way you can take your time and choose the weather. But cutting wood day by day to keep warm when the temperature drops to the bottom of the thermometer is something I don’t like to think about. When the crew left, all the Chief and I had to do was to finish the inside of my home and make it snug with bunks, tables, and chairs.

  The site I chose for my cabin is on a knoll and from my window I can look out across the lake and over the ridge to hills far beyond. Tall jack pines lift high above my roof, and down in the marshy ground along the lake’s edge to the south fish-net willows grow side by side with alder and high bush cranberries.

  One of the things that means a lot to me at Cache Lake is my spring which lies back a little way in the woods just north of the cabin. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for springs. In a great valley I have run across a spring forty feet wide with water bubbling up under pressure. I have even cooked eggs in a pool so hot the water would scald you, and on one occasion I saw a spring of cold, sweet water in a hollow in the rocks on a tiny island far out in the ocean. But above all I love the little springs that are hidden in the moist and shadowed places in the north woods.

  Paths to springs are not laid out by men. They choose their own way, twisting between trees, side-stepping rocks, and skirting marshy places. So it is with the path to my spring, for roots, lightly covered by moss, lie in wait to catch your toe, and when bruised on hot summer days give off the pleasant scent of spruce or balsam sap. You walk on through a patch of sphagnum moss, soft and heavy with water, and if you look you find the little star-shaped tufts that grow between the rocks, green on top and brown below. Everywhere balsam and spruce seedlings, some of them only a few inches high, are fighting their way toward the sky that shows in little patches through the tops of the trees high above, but in this struggle for survival only a few will grow up to feel the warmth of the sun. And overhead from the dead branches long whisps of gray moss hang like the beards of old, old men.

  Suddenly from under your feet a bird startles up into the air and is gone before you hardly have a chance to see it, although there is no mistaking the sound of a partridge, and maybe a little further on a fool hen will lumber into the air and light on a low spruce limb where you could knock it over if you wanted to. I have flushed hundreds of partridges in my day but my heart always jumps when they whirr off the ground.

  A great dead pine blown over by winter winds years ago lies part way into the spring, and in the dark cavern under its roots where the soil still clings, a hole shows where a chipmunk makes its home. All about it are ferns—thin, pale fronds that reach up only a few inches—and a little way beyond, where there is too much shade for their good, are a few thin raspberry bushes.

  Going to my spring you walk from open pine woods into a quiet world of green shadows and broken sunbeams where life begins with little seedlings and ends in sodden boles resting under blankets of moss, slowly sinking into the dark soil from which they once lifted their heads to the sun. There is beauty even in decay.

  The first sign that you are close to the spring is a granite boulder which shoulders its way out of the moss. Here, close to one side of the big stone, you come upon a pool, clear, cool, and sweet. When your eyes get used to looking down you see grains of white sand jumping up like little fountains where the water comes in. The stream that carries the runoff is only a few inches wide, but further along it nourishes skunk cabbage and marsh plants as it makes its way tow
ard the lake below.

  Then if you glance up and away to the east where the ground begins to rise again you think you are looking into a smoky haze, but it is only the gray trunks of the spruce standing close in the dim light. And when you turn back, if it happens to be early June, lady’s-slippers will be growing in a cool, shady place that gets just a little sun. And in midsummer on the higher ground where the pine needles are deep, Indian pipes stand like little groups of ivory statues.

  I had been living on Cache Lake for several years when one June day the plane that the company kept to patrol the timber limits dropped down on the lake and brought in a young fellow who was making his living by drawing and photographing wild animals and birds. And a first rate artist he was. His name was Henry—we called him Hank—and the letter he brought from the company asked me to be neighborly and make him at home for as long as he wanted to stay. I was glad to have this new friend who came loaded with drawing paper, pencils and ink, several cameras, and gear enough to keep him going for a long time.

  The Chief took a strong liking to Hank and the three of us had a good summer. It was so good Hank decided he would stay on, so the Chief and I turned to and helped him build a cabin over on Beaver Tail Lake, which is about two miles to the east of me, and a mighty sightly place.

  From my cabin on the knoll I look down on the lake

  The Cache Lake country is a land of rolling hills, none of them very high, with more lakes and streams than can easily be counted. It is a country of heavy forest, broken by muskegs and swamps where the black spruce grows. There is fine timber, white pine the best of all, and big hemlocks with the twigs on top that usually point to the east. Hundreds of square miles are covered with banksian pine, which we call jack pine, and others know as Labrador or Hudson Bay pine. It is one of the trees that comes back after a forest fire, for they say its seeds sprout faster if the cones have been scorched. And everywhere you go there is plenty of spruce and balsam, that good tree which provides man with a bed to sleep on and gum to heal wounds or to cover the seams of birch bark canoes.

  Up on the sandy ridge the quaking aspen grows, and when the soft breeze blows on the leaves they make a whispering sound. The Chief calls them “the trees that talk to themselves.” And on the slopes of these whispering hills you find poplar and white birch, “the ladies of the woods.” The Indians call it canoe birch, for it provides them with bark for canoes and from it they also make good paddles, snowshoe frames, and sleds. In the swamps, some of them many miles across and lonely, the feathery tamarack stand in close ranks, and there is no finer cover for deer and moose than the cedar that grows in the lowland.

  Up in the northwest is Faraway See Hill, the highest point of land anywhere around here. It was used by the Indians as a lookout for generations, for Cache Lake lies on one of the ancient highways of the north, and from my cabin on the knoll I like to look down on the lake and imagine the scenes of the old days when big canoes and dog trains passed this way and became part of the rich history of the great fur trade of the north country.

  After I had been living at Cache Lake about two years, a geologist came by and stopped in for the night as men do up here. They always know they are welcome. He was making a study of the minerals of the country and knew a lot about how these northern lakes and rivers were formed. I took him up on Faraway See Hill and, looking down on Cache Lake, he told me he was sure that my lake had been formed by beaver works hundreds, maybe thousands, of years ago, and that the narrows between Cache Lake and Snow Goose Lake was where the great beaver dams had been built centuries before.

  When the ice went out a year ago and scarred the banks in the narrows I found an old, yellowed beaver tooth sticking out of the soil. Likely as not, he told me, if I dug deep I would find the sticks of the beaver dam preserved in the mud and water.

  Long before men ever thought of flood control, which you hear so much about today, beavers were at work. Behind their dams the soil brought down by the water settled in the low places and began to build up rich land. The fact is, my friend said, some of the finest farming land on this continent was made by beavers. Until I began studying their history I had never heard that beavers were plentiful ages ago in Europe and Asia. The kind we have in this country is a close relative of the European species and they tell me our beaver is even kin to the squirrel family.

  From that welcome day in spring when the rivers break the icy thongs of winter, and flow free and wild, until the last leaf skitters down in late October, Cache Lake country is a land of ever-changing color and activity. The sifting rains of April release again the scents of rich earth, brown wood, and sodden leaves, and soon fresh grass shows in the clearings and the buds on the trees burst their winter sheaths. The Canada geese and the ducks, heading north, drop down to feed in the lakes that steal their color from the sharp blue sky. Then the singing birds come back from the south. May brings the peepers singing in the swamps and birds getting ready to nest in June, when the young animals will be out exploring their new world for the first time. Summer comes with a rush, bringing long, hot days to help plant life blossom and ripen its seeds. The mosquitoes and black flies are at their worst when July comes along, and you know August is here when the drowsy warmth of dog days raises the acid odor of rotting pine spills while heat waves dance in the hazy woods. It is not a pleasant smell to some to be sure, for it’s the odor of rotting vegetation turning back to the earth from which it first came.

  Almost before you know it the blueberries are ripening in the clearings and in other places, especially where the land has been cut over, raspberries hang like rubies in the sunlight. About that time, if you know where to look, juicy blackberries can be found too.

  Late in August when the leaves of the poplars stir with the sound of a host of fluttering wings, you may feel the first cool breath of early autumn in the night air. Now the summer foliage slowly turns to crimson and gold, a violet haze dims the far hills and the blue lakes turn to silver.

  To me there is something almost comical about the first flurry of snow that comes usually in September. It’s the way the clumsy big flakes float down, dipping and rising as if afraid to hit the ground. But they are not timid very long. In another month the snow has gained experience and the flakes, small and solid, drive down in close slanting lines, sure of where they are going and the job they have to do in the winter months ahead.

  I like the feeling of danger in the cold autumn air that carries a quiet warning that winter is on the way and that time is running short. You would best be prepared for Pawatchicananum, the Whirlwind Moon of December, and Kushapawasticanum, January’s Moon of the Great Cold, and Kichi, the Big Moon that rides the February sky.

  There’s no mistaking the signs of the first heavy storm of December. An old friend of mine used to say: “Snow like meal, snow a great deal.” And that is pretty nearly always true, for when I hear the peculiar whispering of fine snow sifting down through the still air when the temperature is up around the freezing mark, I stack more wood on the porch and get ready to hole up for a few days. As the storm tucks the woods under its heavy white blanket the temperature is apt to fall, and when the weather clears it may be far below zero.

  Some folks say the north is savage and a heartless country. In a way that is true, for winter shows little feeling for the man who takes no steps to prepare for its heavy snow and ice and the fury of its bitter winds. Here in the big winds the strong win and the weak lose, which, to be fair to the north, is the way folks everywhere work out life among themselves.

  The white silence that closes down on the woods in winter like some kind of fog is strangely different from the hush of summer, when there are soft sounds that cannot be denied even though it may seem quiet. But when deep snow blankets the land and ice holds it in its rigid grip, there are few things left from which sound can escape except the wild creatures and the cracking of frost in the trees. So when the brittle silence of winter is broken by a noise it seems louder and is the more startling.r />
  The Old Lady in the Clouds is generous when she starts plucking her geese and in normal years we are likely to have five feet of snow in the woods where the wind can’t blow it away or pack it hard. And in low and sheltered places I have seen it actually twenty feet deep. On the waterways where the strong winds keep it moving the snow is seldom very deep and its surface, beaten hard by the winds, is fine for traveling.

  After a heavy storm with little wind, snow burdens the trees and great snow bosses form between the branches of the spruce and balsam, while the slender cedar saplings in the swamps give up the fight and bow their heads to the ground. Many of them never quite straighten out again. Every stump becomes a gigantic white toadstool and in some open places the wind makes beautiful ripples on the snow like the marks of waves on a sandy beach. Along the streams where rabbits girdle the willows, the marks of their sharp teeth may be ten feet above the ground when spring carries the snow away.

  Chief Tibeash is the head man of the Indians who come from their hunting grounds to camp during the summer on the west shore of Snow Goose Lake. A Chief doesn’t inherit his position, but is chosen by general agreement on his qualities as a wise and intelligent leader. So it is to my old friend, the Chief, that the Indians of the Cache Lake Country turn with their problems, or to settle their disputes. They respect his natural dignity and his word is law, although they would resent it if he made his decisions in that spirit. No matter how thorny the problem, the Chief’s way of working it out is based on the rules of common sense, the greatest gift that a man can have.