Indian Creek Chronicles

by Pete Fromm

  When the shacks at Slow Gulch were in sight the ski trails broke from the road, sinking through the snow-covered willows to the shacks. Running, I started shouting again, excited to finally see them.

  But no shouts answered mine. I broke through the snow over a willow and had to swim out of the hole, one leg on the surface, the other buried to my waist. I shouted again, and there was still no answer. Looking to those two buildings as I struggled free of the hole in the snow, I wondered what was waiting in them for me. Back on my feet, I ran again.

  I burst through the door of the first cabin and it was empty. I stared into the dark interior, my eyes still squinting against the spectacular glare of the snow. Trying to slow down my breathing, I walked out of the cabin. The place was crisscrossed with ski tracks, but none had gone into this cabin. If I had been thinking I wouldn’t have gone in either. Then I turned to the second cabin and really didn’t want to know what was inside. All the tracks went into it.

  Pushing aside the images of the frozen bodies at Wounded Knee and the Scott party in Antarctica, I pushed the door open. It was half full of hay and I was glad that was all there was in it. I could see a few traces of their presence, but no fire.

  Slowly I begin to trace their trails throughout the shack area. I found the spot they’d used for a latrine. I found everything they had done here, except their fire. They had not built a fire. It was forty below and they hadn’t built a fire. I followed every track they’d made, unable to believe they hadn’t built a fire. They must have been out of their heads with the cold.

  I circled around the camp once more and then went back to the road, following their freshest trail. It led up toward the pass, I trudged along in their tracks, still shouting now and then, but no longer believing I was right behind them, and no longer thinking they were simply late. I wondered if they had left for the stouter cabin at Blondie’s. The rendezvous had turned into something feeling a lot more like a rescue.

  When I came to Kerlee Creek I saw where they had skied over to the signpost and kicked the snow off the sign. I felt almost sick, picturing them wondering where they were, wondering how far they had come and how far they had to go and how long these hellish temperatures would last. I shouted again and the sound echoed back to me.

  Just past Kerlee Creek there was a series of ski pole circles stamped into the snow, spelling out 9:30. I was five hours behind them. I didn’t shout again. I kept going up to Blondie’s.

  Why would they stomp out times? Only if they thought somebody else would be up here. They’d only think that if they thought somebody would be looking for them. And they’d only think people were looking for them if they were in trouble.

  They hadn’t left the road at Blondie’s, on the way in or the way out. I kept going, but it was obvious now they were going for the other side. I hesitated. There was no way I was going to get back to Magruder before dark. Going the other way they had a five-hour head start on me, and I’d already gone twelve miles. There was little chance of my catching them. If they were in desperate shape the way to get to them would be from the other side. I thought of the phone box at Hell’s Half. It was on the same line as the Magruder phone, so it should work. I wanted to see them more than I’d wanted most things in my life, but it would be safest for them if I got back to that phone and got some Forest Service guys heading up the other side.

  I stopped on the snow-covered road, a couple of miles shy of the summit, and tried to collect myself before moving on. My legs were feeling the climb and I was getting cold. I thought soup sounded like a good idea, but I couldn’t take the time to build a fire. I knew going back the way I came, alone, knowing there wasn’t going to be any reunion, knowing there would be no one around the next bend, was going to be harder than the climb up. Frozen pancakes weren’t going to be enough fuel.

  I got out my backpack stove and poured gasoline over it and lit the gasoline, trying to warm the stove up enough to work, but it was hopeless. I put the stove and the soup packet back in my pack and started for Hell’s Half, eating more pancakes as I went, thawing them under my arms.

  It was almost worse passing all their landmarks a second time, knowing I was getting farther from them this time instead of closer. The snow kicked off that sign and the time stamped in the snow were two of the most pathetic things I had ever seen. I kept straight past Slow Gulch and still could not believe they had not built a fire. Their nights without a fire must have lasted forever. It was dark then from five in the evening until eight in the morning. Fifteen hours of silent darkness fighting to stay warm. I kept pressing my tired legs toward the phone box.

  I reached it with an hour of light left. The ranger I talked to said, no, they hadn’t heard from them, but he’d take a drive up and see if their car was still at the trail head. He asked again where I was and suggested getting my ass to Magruder. It was cold out, he said. I said thanks and told him I would call again from Magruder.

  Magruder was eight miles away now. Disappointment and anxiety were mixing with the exertion and the cold, wearing me out. I shuffled on, pausing once to crunch over to Deep Creek for a drink. There was a hole open in the ice about a yard wide. I was reaching my cup to it when the ice gave way.

  The creek was very small, but I couldn’t get back to shore before one of my shoes dipped in. The rawhide webbing was instantly fogged with ice. Realizing I hadn’t fallen into the water, I sank back in the snow to give my heart a chance to slow down. Then I got my drink and crippled back to the road.

  With the ice the one snowshoe seemed weighted with lead. I couldn’t break it off with anything. I took both of the snowshoes off and tested the road. The packed snow machine trail seemed to hold my weight fairly well and I strapped my snowshoes onto my backpack and kept walking. I only broke through the crusted trail a few times, but each of those jarring steps seemed to drive my leg through my hip, and the extra effort of pulling myself out of the hole hardly seemed worth it.

  In the last trace of even the dusky light I passed the sign I had made with sticks in the snow the day before. I stared at it a moment, then kicked it out, knowing no one would read it now.

  I had three miles to go and I plodded on slowly in the darkness. When I entered the thicker trees around the road even the starlight was blotted, and I started to wander off the snowmobile track, floundering up to my hips in the snow. I stopped long enough to get my headlamp out of my pack and strap it onto my chest, its metal backing too cold to put on my head.

  The second wind I waited for never came. I was beat, and the snowshoes on my pack were heavy with ice. The flashlight batteries waned and I was shocked breathless when something broke through the brush by the creek and leapt onto the road. The light picked out a shape darker than the darkness, loping down the trail in front of me—one of the moose I had seen that morning. I could hear it trotting in front of me a few more times, but never saw it again.

  I hit the Selway at 6:30 and turned it up for the last half mile to Magruder. The cabin was dark against the starlit snowfield. I was as alone as I had been since my first days in here. I pushed the door open and lit one of the propane lamps. There was half an inch of frost on the front of my hat and down my coat to my chest. It cracked and fell on the pine floor when I undressed.

  I looked at the phone and then went into the basement and restocked the furnace. After putting some water on the stove to heat, I went to the phone box and turned the crank. Two long, one short.

  A ranger answered the phone quickly and told me my dad and brother had made it out half an hour before, minutes before I’d reached Magruder. The ranger said he’d arranged for them to come back at ten the next morning and call me. I thanked him and hung up.

  My exhaustion disappeared. I nearly danced around the gloomy cabin on my played-out legs. I had a small party, extravagantly lighting the rest of the lamps and cooking another can of stew I found in the basement. For dessert I had hot chocolate and a can of fruit cocktail taken with the stew.

  It wasn’
t until I was in the darkness again, in bed, that I thought about the collapse of my Christmas plans. My tent was full of frozen bread and coffee cake and rice pudding, all I had made to feast with my first guests. All that and the fifty miles I had covered were for naught. I wasn’t going to see anything of my family other than a few miles of five-hour-old ski tracks. The sleep that I thought would take me in seconds was a long time in coming that night.

  The next morning I cleaned the cabin and shut down the propane and everything else. The minimum thermometer read forty below. At ten o’clock sharp I cranked the phone for West Fork and the ranger put my dad and brother on the two available lines. I was so giddy to hear their voices, to actually be talking to them after the horrible images that had flashed through my brain as I approached the cabins at Slow Gulch, that I had trouble controlling my voice.

  I first asked if they were all right, and my dad told me he’d frostbit a handful of his fingers, but other than that they were fine.

  They’d spent the first night on the pass, making only nine miles. I could hardly believe they’d let themselves stay there—it had to be minus forty or worse that high—but when they’d reached it it had seemed like a destination, something accomplished, and they’d decided to stay.

  The cold hit that night and it made everything take longer; they hadn’t gotten on the trail until 10:30 the next morning. The snowmobile path gave them fits, my father said, their skis sliding off into the runner tracks and riding on their sides, turning their ankles. The downhill that they had expected to be push and a fifteen-mile glide had turned out to be hardly easier than the climb to the pass. My dad said the snow had the characteristics of sand—and he had never seen anything like it in Wisconsin.

  When they saw the cabins at Slow Gulch they couldn’t resist. They’d gone on a little farther and then turned back for the cabins, thinking they might continue on in the morning. About four miles the second day.

  They didn’t know I was at Magruder, and with the cold they’d eaten their food faster than they expected and didn’t know how much extra I had to feed them while they were in. They were worried they’d put me in a bind, eating food I’d need later in the year. And here I sat with a whole moose.

  I finally had to ask about the fire. Why no fire? They told me they hadn’t built one because they were afraid of melting everything and getting wet besides.

  The third morning my dad’s fingers were frozen; he was down to having Paul zip his clothes for him, and they knew they had to give up. He had been ready before Paul and he was too cold to stand still. So he left without him and stamped the times in the snow to let Paul know how far behind he was. They made it out that day, thirteen miles. It would have been eleven to Magruder.

  We didn’t talk long, but the brief flashes he gave me of their journey made me feel even worse for them than I had when I saw the snow knocked off the sign at Kerlee Creek. He told about nearly crying when Paul, wearing his huge mittens, knocked the pan of bacon grease off their little stove and into the snow. They’d been burning calories like mad and he’d been planning on frying bread in the grease. He had been so counting on the hot grease, he said. And when they got back to the car at dark it would not start and he said he sat behind the wheel, perfectly ready to give up.

  But Paul put the camp stove under the oil pan until the car started and they stopped at West Fork and found out how close I had been. They felt bad for letting me down, Paul said, and I thought of him zipping our father into his clothes, then chasing him through these foreign, snowbound mountains.

  We said good luck to each other and had to hang up.

  It was a long ten miles back to Indian Creek that day. The channel was fine, despite the temperatures. I chopped out a little ice, and went back to my tent.

  It took three days to thaw out my plastic five-gallon water jug and I nearly melted through its side, but caught it just as the plastic began to bubble. The cold snap took a little longer to give up. And it was longer still before I could think of their desperate attempt to visit without my throat getting tight and dry. I knew how my father had felt watching that bacon grease steam its way down through the snow and disappear when he had already know how it would taste.

  I knew exactly how he felt.

  12

  During the long walk back from Magruder I’d expected to reel into a depression after the failure of the visit, but that never really happened. The days thawing my tent were slow; full of small chores and fire tending, reading and cooking. I was tired, and the slow pace was nice.

  The second afternoon back I went to my food cache to retrieve some potatoes for dinner. Elk tracks were thick throughout the meadow, but I was surprised to find them in the timber so near my tent. As I got closer to the cache the ground grew more trampled, and soon I saw bits of hay scattered through the snow. The hay the hunters had given me to insulate my cache.

  The cache was a mess. Driven down by temperatures perhaps, or emboldened by my absence, the elk had eaten all the hay. They’d also broken through some of the old planks of the roof, and pushed others aside with their hooves.

  My cache had lain open to the air at thirty below zero. I lay down to reach into the potatoes and found burst cans of corn and peas. The carrots were frost-covered sticks. The potatoes seemed like potatoes, though, and I carried a bag into my tent. By the next morning they thawed, turning black and oozing the vilest reeking goo I’d ever smelled.

  I threw the potatoes out and salvaged the cans that hadn’t broken, bringing them into my tent. I repaired the cache, but I was down to mash potato buds and half the cans I’d had days before. The Big Sky characters were always saying a man could survive on nothing but meat. It seemed a mountain man type of thing to do, and I didn’t feel as badly about the losses as I should have.

  The next day, while lazing around on my bed, cooking one of the cake mixes my sister Ellen had sent in, I suddenly heard snow machines and I stepped out in time to meet the lion hunters from Paradise. They invited me to stop down anytime and they roared off. For the next few days I heard their machines going by twice a day as they cruised the river, looking for lion crossings, but they didn’t bother pulling up to my tent often.

  Once the tent thawed I took a hike up to the top of Indian Ridge to get into the sun again. The weather was still clear and cold and sitting on top of the ridge, I pulled out the moose ribs I’d brought for lunch, only to find they were frozen solid. Sunning in the five-degree air, I whittled tiny slivers of frozen meat, holding them in my mouth until they were soft enough to chew. When most of the meat was gone I gave the bones to Boone, who lay in the snow chewing noisily. As usual I stayed in the sun as long as I could before dropping back down into the dark river cut that was home.

  On the way down I crossed a track I hadn’t seen before. I followed until it crossed a crusted-over drift. In the hard snow I was able to see more than just the broken line of a trail in deep snow—I was able to see paw prints. I was stunned, staring at the first mountain lion tracks I’d ever seen. The feet were much bigger than I expected, four or five inches, roundish like any house cat’s. I smiled looking at them, and when the lion hunters next stopped by my tent I did not tell them about the lion on the ridge.

  The cold held on and on: negative teens or twenties at night, rising only to single digits during the day. Every night was a battle, wondering if it would be better to leave my head out to freeze or to tuck it in under the blankets, where my nose would wrestle with my once-a-month-bath aromas. I slept with a watch cap on. By morning the ice of my breaths edged the blankets, laying snaking fingers of cold around my neck.

  The wood stove I’d been given was an old one, and a cheap one, its sides too thin and its dampers too crude to hold heat long. I could have gotten up every couple of hours to restoke it, but watching its sides glow red with the fire inside, I wasn’t very comfortable about sleeping with it going and I decided to suffer through the cold. By dawn it would be below zero inside and I knew my rubber-soled boots
would be frozen, that I’d have to stamp on them just to straighten them enough to get my feet into them. Every morning I lay in bed until last night’s tea finally forced me through the tent flap in a clothes-unbuttoning rush.

  Then I’d stoke up the stove and set on the percolator and walk down to the channel, wiggling my toes in my frozen boots. I chopped ice every morning, even the waterfall at the end of the channel freezing solid every night. By the time I was back at the tent my face and chest would be frosted over from my breath and I’d unzip my coat and take off my boots to let the stove’s heat engulf me. The coffee would be ready by then and I’d sit and sip, waiting for my oatmeal to cook, reading everything my father and sister had sent in.

  The wardens were due in at the middle of the month and I decided to take a walk down to Paradise to see if that phone worked. If it did I’d call out and ask if they knew exactly when they’d be coming in. Every morning, stamping on my frozen boots, I thought of the biologist’s offer of a week trade-off in here. I thought of what it would be like to be out again, to have a thermostat, to wake up warm, to see all my friends again. I’d ask the Forest Service guys if they’d heard any word from the biologist.

  But on the ninth of January the cold broke. It hit thirty-two that day and instead of hiking down to Paradise I walked up Indian Creek to the meat pole. I’d been stuffing myself with moose meat every night, and cooking huge steaks to slice into sandwich meat for every lunch, but there were still three untouched quarters hanging from the pole, and almost half the fourth. If the weather stayed warm for long the meat would go bad. I pushed at a rock-hard quarter and watched it swing, trying to decide what to do.

  I walked slowly back to my tent and spent the day reading my manuals, studying curing methods. I didn’t have a smokehouse, and I didn’t have brine barrels. Angier suggested cutting the meat into chunks as big as was manageable and rubbing them in a mix of salt and spice. No matter the method, it’d require bringing the meat into the tent and working with it for days. I couldn’t do that, not with the wardens due in. I wondered if I’d be able to bring myself to bury it, waste it all. Somehow I forgot it was still January.