Cache Lake Country

by John J. Rowlands

  As soon as the griddlecakes puff up and show little bubbles all over the top, flip them over and bake them on the other side until brown. Only a rank greenhorn ever turns a griddle-cake twice. I guess I don’t have to tell you what to do after that, but it is all the better if you have plenty of butter and real maple syrup.

  We have already had the first sharp cold spell of the winter and the thermometer outside my door showed a steady thirty below zero for five days. When it gets that cold you need the right clothing, to be sure, but not as much as some folks think you do, for ideas on what to wear to keep warm in the winter have changed a lot in recent years. There was a time when a man piled on everything he could find or borrow, and he still couldn’t get warm. The secret of keeping the body warm in cold weather is pretty much the same as insulating a house by having dead air spaces which stop the escape of heat.

  Many a man who has been comfortable in a suit of heavy lumberman’s woolen underwear has wondered why he felt the cold after it had been washed several times. The reason is that when he first put it on the chances are that it fitted him loosely thus keeping a wall of air about his body, but the way most men wash woolens by putting them into hot water, caused the garments to shrink, and all he can do now is to skin himself into it. Without that blanket of warm air the heat leaves his body quickly and he feels the cold. It is the same with animals. If you brought a short-haired dog here from a warm part of the country he would probably die of the cold, for he has grown no undercoat of soft hair to serve him as underwear and hold the heat to keep him warm. My dogs can curl up in the snow in a blizzard until they are nothing but white mounds, but if you run your fingers down though their heavy fur their bodies will be comfortably warm.

  Another thing that makes a fellow cold is to sweat in the winter, for if his underclothes get damp from sweat the moisture carries off the heat of his body.

  What I like for winter wear is a good all-wool, one-piece union suit that is fairly wooly so that it holds the air, and on top of that a good woolen shirt that doesn’t fit tight, and maybe on top of that a light-weight loose woolen sweater. A tight-fitting sweater is a snare and a delusion on a bitter cold day. Furthermore if you use a sweater be sure it buttons up the front so that you can get it off easily if you are working hard. Then, with a pair of heavy woolen trousers, such as they make for icemen and lumbermen, and a mackinaw caught with a belt, you are pretty well fitted out for anything that comes. I have one coat that I had made up from a four point Hudson Bay blanket which is lined with closely woven cotton drill, which keeps out the wind in fine style. I had the armholes made extra deep so that if my hands get very cold I can pull my arms in and hold them against my body, poking the empty sleeves in under the belt to keep the wind out. This is a method that the Eskimos use and it is a fine idea.

  One of the little miseries of traveling in bitter cold weather is that the stiff edges of your sleeves are apt to chafe your wrists and make them very sore. My grandmother used to knit me warm wristlets about six inches long which I slipped over my wrists before putting on my mittens, and somehow or other in addition to stopping the chafing I felt much warmer. The old lady had a theory that if your wrists get cold it chills the body. Be that as it may, I still wear wristlets and even the Chief has taken to them. They protect a spot where the arteries are nearest the surface and the cold can chill the blood.

  There is such a thing as piling on so many pairs of socks in winter that your feet get damp from sweating and you defeat the whole purpose of the extra covering. The Indians have several good ways of keeping their feet warm. Some make little soft doeskin moccasins that come up just like a slipper, and then they wrap their feet in pieces of blanket about fourteen by eighteen inches in size. I have tried that and it works fine. But what I generally wear is a pair of light all-wool socks next to the feet and two heavy pairs on top. I would rather have home-knit socks than the manufactured ones, for they have a looser weave and hold the warmth better. Most important of all, you want the outer pair of socks long so that you can tuck your trousers into them. You pull the tops up just under the knee and tie them with a little thong to keep the snow out. I think I have said before that tight footwear whether it be a shoe or a moccasin is an abomination for it not only cramps the foot but gives you no air to insulate you from the cold.

  You may laugh, but for sleeping up here I have a special set of one-piece woolen underwear, and when I go to bed I pull on this underwear and a pair of woolen socks, and I am as snug as a bug in a rug. A fellow wouldn’t be very comfortable up here in pajamas.

  Once in a while a fellow gets caught in a cold spell without enough clothing. In a case like that if you can get hold of some paper to put inside your coat it makes a good windbreak. The Chief says that you could probably use strips of birch bark for the same purpose although we have never needed to try it. But the thought of birch bark reminds me of the day the Chief came over to visit me and got caught in a freezing rain. When he got to my cabin he was wearing over his shoulders a large piece of birch bark with a slit and a small hole in it to put his head through, and it kept the rain off his shoulders in good style. As I have said before, the Chief knows what to look for in the woods, and how to use it, so that he can meet almost any situation.

  Every once in a while you hear about somebody being found frozen to death on the trail in the north woods. When that happens it usually means that the man was either sick or didn’t know how to take care of himself in the winter woods. If an Indian gets caught out on his trap line in a blizzard he knows better than to try to get back to camp unless he is in country where he recognizes all the signs and knows where he is every step of the way. If he is on a lake, where anyone quickly loses all notion of direction, he digs a trough in the snow and turns his hunting sled on its side as a windbreak and sits it out. That may sound crazy, but the secret of keeping on living in the bitter cold of a northern winter is to save your energy. You freeze to death when you drop from exhaustion and have no more energy to keep your blood circulating. If a man keeps his head, saves his strength, and stops when a storm closes in he won’t freeze to death if he is dressed for winter weather. If you are in the woods you can always make a shelter of boughs and bark, and build a fire if possible, but the important thing is not to go on when there is any danger of getting lost. If you do you surely will be in trouble.

  In the old fur trading days some travelers would dig themselves a shallow trough and lay snowshoes over the top and spread a blanket or tarpaulin on top of that and hold it down with a sled or toboggan. That was all right as long as a man didn’t get drifted in and have his air supply cut off.

  Everyone who goes into the woods should carry a first-aid kit. I am not one who believes in taking medicines every time you have a pain, but it is only good sense to be prepared for emergencies. In the old days I always carried iodine, which is effective, but can cause serious burns in open wounds. Now I take sulfadiazine or sulfathiasole in either the powdered form or in salve. It is wonderful stuff to prevent or halt an infection. My kit also contains laxatives, aspirin, vaseline, bicarbonate of soda, several rolls of bandages, and some surgical tape. The small prepared bandages for covering minor cuts are also mighty handy. If the Chief gets a small cut he just washes it and then covers the spot with balsam gum, which is a fine emergency treatment.

  One year when I was home I took a first-aid course which included elementary surgery, and what I learned has come in handy many a time. My family doctor helped me choose a small surgical kit which included two scalpels, some surgeons silk, gut sutures, and a dozen surgeons needles, as well as a small pair of surgical pliers to hold the needles.

  In an emergency requiring stitches ordinary household needles and cotton thread can be used, but only after the needle and thread has been thoroughly sterilized by boiling for at least ten minutes. Once you get the hang of it putting in stitches is fairly simple. You don’t stitch a wound as you would a seam, for each stitch is put in separately and then tied. Once w
hen I was alone in the winter my hunting knife slipped and I cut the end of the little finger on my left hand, but not through the bone. That was a test for my surgery skill as well as my courage. I didn’t have anything to kill the pain but I hit on one idea. Why I don’t know, but I figured if I got that hand numb enough I wouldn’t feel it, so I went out and, plunging my hand into the soft snow, I held it there until it was numb. Maybe a medical man would say that was a dangerous thing to do, but up here where there is nothing to pollute the snow I figured it was a chance worth taking. Anyway I put four stitches in that finger and, so far as pain was concerned, I hardly felt it. It healed without any trouble and doctors who have seen the faint scar that remains tell me that I did a good job.

  Once when I was on a railroad construction job the doctor in the emergency hospital we had beside the skeleton track (just a tar paper shack with oil lamps to work by) corralled me to give the anesthetic while he took off the arm of a man who had been smashed up in a dynamite blast. Once he got on to the fact that I had had a mite of training, he called me in for operations all the time I was there and I got so I could handle ether pretty well. Later on I kept a can of ether at the cabin, but it is dangerous stuff unless you know how to handle it and I don’t advise fooling with it.

  Walking around in the north somewhere is a fellow that I brought into the world in a little railroad shack with the assistance of a young engineer who gave me more trouble than the mother. One is enough for me!

  I also learned to use a hypodermic syringe, but there again unless you are very sure of what you are doing and have a good knowledge of what is wrong with the man you are working on, it is wise not to use a hypodermic.

  To go into the woods far away from medical men is taking a risk unless you know at least the simple rules of first aid, including the methods of stopping bleeding and how to take care of broken bones.

  If you think time hangs heavy on our hands in winter up here in the north I want to tell you the days are not long enough for the things we want to do. A while back I read about a heliograph, an instrument used for signaling by picking up the sun’s rays and flashing them long distances. It is much the same idea as flashing a mirror in peoples’ eves. The book had a diagram of a heliograph, so we planned one that could be built of things we had at hand. In place of mirrors you could use tinfoil smoothed out and pasted on circles of wood, or pieces of shiny tin, but it so happened we had two round shaving mirrors, the kind you can buy almost anywhere. They must be flat, not curved. We mounted the various parts on a board about two feet long and eight inches wide, but the supports or yokes for the mirrors were made of strips of white pine half an inch square and five inches high.

  One mirror is used to pick up the rays of the sun from any position and reflect them down to the signal mirror, which then shoots a bright beam at the point where you want your signals to be seen. In the exact center of the signal mirror you scratch away the silver coating in a tiny circle about one-eighth of an inch in diameter. When you are ready to use the heliograph you stand behind this mirror and by sighting through the hole aim at your “target” which is located by bringing the two cross wire sights into line in just about the way you aim a gun. Of course the signal mirror must also be adjusted to pick up the most light from the sun mirror so that the beam you send out will be bright and sharp. If the sun is in front of the signal mirror you don’t have to use the sun mirror. I might say that aiming a heliograph accurately is mighty important for the beam it sends out is quite narrow and unless it is aimed right at the person watching for it, he may not see it.

  If you signal for any length of time you may have to adjust your mirrors once in a while, for as you know the sun is always on the move. To help keep the mirrors in good adjustment after the heliograph has been sighted on the receiving station, you put a small round white paper patch, perhaps a quarter to half an inch in diameter, on the center of the cross wires of the sight that is shown below the sun mirror. When both mirrors are properly adjusted light passing through the small hole in the center of the signal mirror will not be reflected. Thus a small dark spot will appear on the little white patch, and as long as this little shadow spot shows in the center of the patch the heliograph beam is in good adjustment.

  The shutter for making signals by shutting the beam on and off should be on a separate base so that when you work it you will not throw the mirrors out of adjustment. The shutter which you move up and down to make dots and dashes is very simple. We just mounted a very thin piece of pine, about six inches long and four inches high, on an upright nailed and glued to a baseboard. The shutter, as you will see, has a rounded end and is screwed to the upright at a point so that, when it is flipped up by the little handle, it gives the beam an open path to the target. A light spring keeps the shutter down and you need to experiment a little bit to find the right position for the handle which can be a nail or a little piece of dowelling. It is important that this shutter work smoothly and quickly so that by pressing on it with your finger in much the same way as you operate a telegraph key it moves up and down rapidly.

  You can build a heliograph about any size you want to and the distance between the sights and the mirrors doesn’t matter much, but it is very important that the center of the signal mirror where the light peephole is made be lined up both horizontally and vertically with the centers of the two sights. Otherwise you won’t be able to aim accurately. The sights can be made with pieces of fine wire stretched up and down and across between supports. The sight next the signal mirror we made by bending a stiff piece of wire in the shape of a U, and then lined up our cross wires and twisted them on, and added a drop of waterproof glue to hold them in place.

  Our heliograph works perfectly. The Chief was so interested in helping us that when the time came to test it he put on his snowshoes and hiked all the way up to Faraway See Hill to see if he could get our signal. Of course he had no way of flashing back to us for we had only one, but we agreed that if he saw our flashes he would light a smoke signal to let us know. I don’t know any feeling that is akin to the thrill that comes when you make something and have it work just as you planned it, so we were mighty pleased with ourselves when we saw smoke curling up from the top of that hill miles away. And hours later when the Chief got back he was as excited as you ever expect an Indian to be. He is already planning to buy himself a couple of mirrors the next time he goes out to the settlement so that we can signal back and forth from the hilltops. Hank is studying the Morse telegraph code so we can send messages to each other.

  Every year about this time the three of us make a trip out to the settlement to pick up some special luxuries for our Christmas dinner and get the parcels from the folks. But we have had a long spell of bad weather with heavy storms and we decided that we would have to wait for a better time. Maybe that sounds like a disappointment, but after you have lived in the woods for a while you don’t think about such things as disappointments. You come to know there is something bigger going on than just your plans and if what you want to do doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, you take it as it comes.

  I’ve got plenty to do getting ready for Christmas and one of the little jobs I always enjoy is fixing up the candles. To be on the safe side I stick nails in the ends of short candles and then float them in glasses of water. The nail holds the candle with the top just about level with the water and because the wax is kept cool the flame burns in a little pool and lasts a long time. When the candle burns down to a stub the nail pulls it under and the light goes out. I will have candles burning in the windows when the Chief and Hank come down the trail on Christmas Eve. They say it wouldn’t be Christmas if they didn’t see those little beams across the snow.

  Even though we didn’t get to go out to the settlement, I had the new sled with the ski runners all ready for the trip, and the Chief had made new moose hide boots for my dogs in case we got into crusted snow, which cuts their feet. Dog boots are like little tobacco pouches which you tie around the top above the
dogs’ paws. Old Wolf is that fussy that he won’t start on a trip when the footing is bad until he has his boots on, and he sits down and holds up his front paws to tell me what he wants.

  One morning when the air was full of ice crystals and had that quiet silvery look that may mean anything, including a blizzard, the Chief, Hank, and I were out by the cabin putting up food for the birds when the old Indian, who can hear like a deer, stopped to listen. Pretty soon I heard it too; it sounded like a plane and yet I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t the rapids. Then it came louder and clearer, and suddenly out of the gray we saw the lumber company’s plane.

  He came diving down and roared over the cabin so low that the tops of the trees were bent down by the air from his propeller. Up he went again, circled over the lake, and came gliding down on the snow like a big black duck, for this was the first time he had been in since he changed from pontoons to skis. It wasn’t good flying weather, but if anybody can take a plane into the north woods and get it through, it is my friend, Jack, the company’s pilot. I knew why he had come, and I got a lump in my throat, for he had plenty of other things to do and a family of his own to think of.

  He brought the little plane right up to the shore and when he jumped out he was lugging a pack-sack full of bundles. One of the things that tickled me the most was that my sister had sent the Chief a new pipe, which he needs badly, and a pound of the kind of plug tobacco he likes best. I don’t believe I ever saw him so close to showing his real feelings as when he opened that package, for he didn’t think to wait for Christmas. The company sent in a turkey, which the Chief has tasted only once before, and Jack brought as his own present to us a plum pudding and some brandy to burn on it. I don’t believe any Christmas we have ever had will come up to this one.