Along with our fish we had a batch of nice brown biscuits baked in the reflector oven I made from a couple of gallon-size tin cans flattened out and a wire shelf from an old refrigerator. Makes the nicest biscuits you ever bit into. Of course you can also bake fish or chickens or partridges, not to mention rice pudding, in a reflector oven. Sometimes just for a change I made my biscuit dough extra stiff, pull it out into a sort of rope, wind it around a green stick and push it into the ground in front of the fire. Turn the stick every few minutes and you will have something worth eating or I don’t know good food. Once in a while I wrap apricots and a little sugar in the dough, and there you have one of the best “long-tailed pies” you ever ate.
I always put up some blueberries for winter eating, for I like blueberries for pies and muffins when the snow flies. I follow the method used in olden times. Make sure that the berries are clean and free of any leaves or stems, then boil them up with just enough water to cover the bottom of the kettle until they are soft, and no longer. Then pour into jars that have been cleaned and boiled. Sprinkle a little bit of salt on them; you don’t need any sugar. Of course when it comes time to make a pie or muffins you add what sugar you want.
The Chief has his own way of preserving berries. He lays them out on sheets of birch bark and lets the sun dry them, being careful to take them in at night or when it rains. In about a week to ten days the berries are all shriveled up and to look at them you wouldn’t think they were worth keeping. When it comes to cooking you soak them for a while just as you would prunes and use them like any other dried fruit. They are delicious. The Chief is apt to put a handful in his flapjack batter which is also a good idea.
The Moon When the Birds Fly Away
THE NIGHTS are getting cool now and the Northern Lights are beginning to play in the sky, for summer is over and fall is on the way. The Indians call September Benasee Jewan, the Moon When the Birds Fly Away. For all of us here in the north, man and beast, it is time to get ready for winter. The driving snow and the bitter cold have no mercy on the man who fails to prepare, but if you have plenty of wood and food to carry you through there is no need for fear.
Most of my chores are done, for I have already banked the cabin foundation with pine spills, moss and boughs, with earth to hold it down, and I’ll be as snug as a beaver when the blizzards come. Banking is best done before any frost gets into the ground. If I didn’t leave the cabin again until March, I would still have plenty of provisions to live on. The wood I cut last February to season through the summer, all twenty cords of it, is stacked handy to the cabin and covered with bark, and there is more on the porch. I am ready, come what may.
The days are clear and often warm, but as soon as the sun goes down the air chills quickly, and in the morning likely as not the lake is covered with a frosting of mist. Generally we have quick flurries of snow before the month is over. For the animals, especially those that sleep the winter away, this is the fattening season and the bears are already gorging themselves on berries, beechnuts and grubs against the time of denning up. The seeds of plants and the wild grain are dead ripe now and the mice, squirrels, and chipmunks are making the most of the harvest and filling their caches with food to keep them alive when the snow is deep and food is hard to come by. The squirrels are fond of mushrooms and the way they hold them in their paws and turn them round as they nibble makes me hungry.
The beavers are already beginning to cut the young, sweet, green wood—poplar, alder, and the like—which they store in the mud in the bottom of their ponds to feed on in the winter. They are also repairing the dams and making their lodges weather-tight. The muskrats are likewise busy on their houses which are something like the beavers’ lodge, but smaller. They are usually made of bulrushes and the stalks of water plants with a few small twigs worked in and are entered through a tunnel. They store away pieces of root and other vegetable matter, but not wood as the beavers do. Musquash, as Chief Tibeash calls muskrats, move about under water in the winter and in a pinch they can exist on the material of which their houses are built. If by chance they live on a creek they burrow into the bank from below water level and work up to hollow out a dry, warm room. In the summer they live a good life, getting their food from water-lily roots and other water plants.
The does and their fawns, and even the yearlings, are moving about together, while the bucks keep out of sight in quiet, shadowy places until the points on their antlers finally harden. The deer, which spend a lot of time around the rivers and lakes feeding on water plants during the summer, are now beginning to move back into the woods where they find plenty to eat. One of their favorite foods is beech mast. Just in passing, venison that has fattened on mast is mighty special eating. About this time you notice that the deer are shedding their reddish summer hair and the darker “blue” coat that will carry them through winter begins to come in. Now the spots on the fawns disappear. Most of the furbearing animals look pretty ragged, what with losing their summer fur and getting ready to put on their winter overcoats. About this time too the bright colors on some of our fish begin to fade.
Most of the birds are through molting and the bright feathers of summer have been replaced by the darker traveling colors they wear on the journey to the south. The migration is already well started, for many birds began drifting away in August. If it were not for the arrival of birds that spent the summer still farther north of us, the woods would seem deserted.
The colors of birds and the reasons nature plans them that way is very interesting. Many of the males have bright summer coats, while the females wear dresses of dull hues so that they will not be easily seen by their enemies while they are on their nests. Take the scarlet tanager with his bright red feathers and black wings, you would spot him on a nest in a minute, but the olive green of his wife is so like the color of the leaves that you can hardly see her. However, not all the males have bright feathers. Both the male and female of some species, such as the various sparrows which spend most of their time on the ground, wear dull colors. On the other hand a few females of the kind that nest in holes or underground have as bright colors as their mates, for their nests are out of sight and color doesn’t matter.
Just as the tide of feathered creatures flowed north in the spring, now it has turned and as the leaves begin to color the birds are flying toward the tropical forests of the south. If you keep your eyes open these days you will see them gathering in flocks, sometimes sitting in trees and chattering, and then flying off to whirl and turn as if they were drilling in formation for their long flight. The older males leave first, while the females and the youngsters that were hatched in the summer follow at a slower pace, for they are not as strong flyers. I’ve already heard many flocks of Canada geese flying through the night honking to each other. These mornings when I get up around five o’clock there are almost always black ducks feeding in the shallows across the lake. They’ll be flying down from the Hudson Bay country for quite a while yet, and to see one of those fellows come hurtling down with feet set for a landing always gives me a thrill.
The robins left last week, big flocks of them, and I have noticed the white-throated sparrows and the wood thrushes passing on their way. The vesper sparrows that nested nearby have gone, too. I haven’t seen a bank swallow or purple martin for days, and the kingbird that used to sit on a dead limb of the pine out front hasn’t been around for a week.
A fellow might feel a little lonely if he didn’t stop to remember that they will be back in the spring. One thing I can be sure of, my friend Gabby, the moosebird, will be here with me all winter. He is tough and bold and I keep him well fed when the snow flies. He waits for me in the pine by the porch every morning for his breakfast and scolds if he doesn’t get it on time. When the blizzards come he goes down in the black spruce swamp to roost in a shaggy tree where the snow can’t touch him.
There is much we have to learn about the birds and their ways. Nobody has figured out how they know when to start their migrations, nor h
ow they find their way thousands of miles over land and sea from the Arctic barrens to the jungles of the tropics. Who gives the signal to go? In August you see the robins and the swallows gathering in flocks, small at first, then by the hundreds. Suddenly one day they are gone, flying south through the night. They rest and feed during the day. Yet one pair of robins has come back to my cabin to build a nest for three years running. How do they find my little place deep in the woods year after year? It’s a mystery that many people who study birds would like to solve. Some day they will.
Speaking of birds, they tell me that down in Mexico there is a woodpecker that caches his victuals in the hollow stems of certain plants. He bores a hole just below a joint and drops in nuts and acorns and when he needs food he bores another hole lower down the stalk and they drop out just like gum drops out of a slot machine. In the western part of the country there is a woodpecker that drills holes in the soft bark of trees and stores an acorn in each hole. As a matter of fact, blue jays like to store nuts in holes.
The coming of the first Canada geese reminds me to tell you of our wild rice, for this is the harvest time. Some call it Indian rice, or water oats, and for hundreds of years the Indians have gathered it in the northern part of the country. At one time it was found in almost every lake in the north, but now it is getting scarce. You have to know wild rice to be sure of getting it, for the grain ripens very quickly and unless you know just when to gather it, it will suddenly drop into the water. We watch it until it is just ripe and then I go with the Chief down on Snow Goose Lake and we gather it together. We paddle the canoe very gently through the rice, and with thin sticks strike the heads of the plants so that the grain falls into the canoe.
I flail my rice on my tarpaulin to get the grain from the husks and fan the chaff away, but the Indians in some places parch the grains over a low fire and then separate the grain from the husk by fanning it. You can buy wild rice in the city, but it costs plenty. It is wonderful with roast duck. The Indians used to pound it into a sort of flour to thicken their stews, and some made a kind of bread from it. Usually they boil it whole with meat.
Now that the waterfowl are on their way through, Hank is spending a lot of time on photography. He has studied nature photography for years and his pictures of animals and birds are the best I have ever seen. As Hank says, it takes the patience of Job and plenty of time to photograph the wild things. One thing we learned from the Chief a long time ago was that if you sit still in the woods the birds and animals that are frightened when they first see you soon forget all about you and go about their business as if you were not there. That is the way Hank gets some of his photographs; he will sit almost motionless for hours and finally the bird he is watching for comes within range of his camera. Just sitting and keeping quiet is the best way to learn about wild things and their habits.
Most people, Hank says, snap their pictures before they are close enough to get anything worth-while. Take a bird, for instance; a lot of folks click the shutter when they are ten feet away and think they have really got something. Of course that is closer than they usually get to a wild thing, but the bird is still a long way from the camera. When you try to find that bird on the print, it is like hunting for a gnat on an alder. Hank takes most of his photographs of small birds and such like at a distance of one and a half to three feet. If he is unable to get that close he doesn’t waste his film. That kind of photography often calls for hours, sometimes days, of planning and waiting. If he wants to get a picture of a mother bird feeding her young in the nest, he sets up a little black box or something that looks like a camera right close to the nest. In a day or so the bird is so used to seeing that box that she doesn’t pay any more attention to it. Then, when she is away looking for food, Hank puts his camera in place of the box and gets out of sight. When she comes back the camera is all focused on the nest just the way he wants it, and all he has to do to take the picture is pull a long cord, or better yet, use a super-long cable release which he has.
Hank is a great fellow for building himself blinds so he can get up close to the animals. If you were to be up here in the woods and saw a stump get up and walk away, you could be pretty sure it was Hank; or maybe a small spruce tree begins moving down toward the lake where he wants to get a close-up of a black duck and her family of downy little ones. I’ve know him to build a blind high up in a pine tree to get pictures of a horned owl feeding her young. He uses an old piece of canvas dyed about the color of the trees, and leaves it up there for several days until the birds get used to it. Then when they’re away he climbs in and when they return takes the photographs without them ever knowing it. In that way he gets pictures of the owl in the air just about to land with a rabbit in his talons and then others of the young ones feeding.
One thing about birds, except possibly crows, they cannot count above one. Often when Hank has to go to a blind while the birds are watching, he takes me in with him. The birds see us enter and stay away, but when I come out again and go off they think the blind is empty and come right back. I wouldn’t mind obliging Hank this way if he only wouldn’t put so many of his blinds in such hard places to get to, like tops of pine trees.
Pictures of jumping fish are about the hardest kind to get, but Hank has a special high-speed flash lamp and a supply of patience the like of which I never have seen. Of course patience is not the only thing in getting good wild life photographs, for you have to know a lot about the animals and their habits. Hank will watch a partridge for weeks to decide just where he can get the best chance of a close-up. I have known him to spend most of a day sitting in a blind with corn spread all around it to get a photograph of a crow, which, just in passing, is one of the wariest critters in all the woods.
When I went over to visit Hank not long ago I found nobody home, but it didn’t take long to find out why, for there, out on the lake, was Hank in his canoe chasing a swimming moose. And it didn’t take very much guessing to know why, for to Hank any wild animal means a photograph. Sure enough when he was close up on the moose I saw him drop his paddle and grab his camera. The way be paddled back made me pretty sure he was satisfied with what he got.
As long as there are blueberries we eat them almost everyday. They are mighty nice with evaporated milk and a little sugar, but when it comes to cooking them you can’t beat Hank’s blueberry pudding. This is his recipe:
Hank was chasing a swimming moose
2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons shortening
1 cup milk, fresh or evaporated, whichever you have
1 cup blueberries
Mix and sift the flour, baking powder and salt, and then work in the shortening—fresh bacon fat or lard is good— with the tips of your fingers. Then add your milk and berries and mix them into the dough. You need something to steam it in and a coffee can is just right. Grease the inside, put the cover on, and then steam it for an hour and a half. The easiest way is to put a little water in a big pot, bring it to a boil, then set the can in. The water should come about halfway up the can. The cover should fit tightly so there’ll be lots of steam. When it is done you turn it out of the can and slice it across just like brownbread, then put a big helping of a special kind of hard sauce Hank makes on top. He mixes a third of a cup of butter with a cup of sugar (confectioner’s if he has it), then beats in a half cup of mashed blueberries. That is good eating!
An old friend of mine who lives in the city was up for a visit not long ago and we did some tramping about the woods. Now, I think nothing of walking over to Hank’s cabin, which is only about two miles away, but the trip always tired my friend, and that worried him. What he didn’t realize was that a fellow who walks in the city on pavements doesn’t use the same muscles that a man who walks in the woods does. Here the trails twist and turn, rising suddenly, now dropping away over a ridge, with ruts and rocks waiting to trip him if he doesn’t watch out. On city pavements, which are smooth
and mostly level, a man doesn’t have to think very much about the ways of walking, but here in the forest every step is a matter of balance, and you learn to feel the ground as your foot touches it whether you are walking in daylight or in the dark. The feet of a good woodsman tell him where the trail is, no matter how dark it is, for even in heavy boots they become very sensitive to the lay of the land. The constant change in the trail is what tires the muscles of a city man. The woodsman develops an easy, effortless rolling gait that takes him over rocks and windfalls without a lot of labor. He walks from the hips down, while the city man, as the Chief says, walks from head to foot. The feet of a woodsman move straight ahead and not at an angle as many city folk walk, and the body above his waist leans slightly forward.
Knowing how to take care of your feet has a lot to do with comfortable traveling in the woods. I believe in bathing as often as I can. Walking in wet footgear is hard on the skin. If the going is damp it is my habit to take off my socks which are always pure wool, and wring them out if I have no dry ones with which to replace them. Another important thing is to have shoes or moccasins that fit. After a day of hard traveling, when your feet are apt to be pretty tired and sore, it is very restful and beneficial to bathe them in warm water and salt.
When a shoe begins to chafe, particularly on the heel or the toes, you are almost certain to get a blister, and one way of easily avoiding the trouble is to rub candle wax on the toe and heel of your sock. That makes it slip easily and prevents friction on the skin. I know several woodsmen who do that regularly whenever they take a long tramp because it also keeps their socks from wearing out. Nothing will make you more miserable than undersized socks, for a short sock cramps your toes and tires your feet, which means being tired all over. Socks should be a size longer than the foot, for wool is bound to shrink a little. Just in passing, never wash your woolen clothes in hot water. It should be not more than lukewarm, for hot water shrinks and hardens wool and robs it of that springy softness that traps air between the fibers of the yarn and acts as insulation.
Cache Lake Country Page 17
