The Moose Jaw (7 page)
The spruce stand behind the cabin site offered a good selection of poles so we cut and dragged them, lashed them together with parachute cord, and set up the tent. I was always surprised at how much room there was inside. It was only ten feet wide and twelve feet long, and stood six feet at the walls and eight feet in the center. It was the smallest wall tent in the catalog. Nevertheless, there was plenty of room for two cots, a small table, a camp stove, and all the gear two hunters would ever need. There was more than enough space for one man alone. The tent would serve me well as my temporary digs until I got the cabin built.
After we pitched the tent and ate a quick lunch, we walked upstream to have a look at the old burn Haywood had spotted from the air. It was a little over two miles, following the creek, and we took our fly rods along in case a hatch brought the grayling to the surface. We studied the tracks in the bank along the way.
“Don’t think I remember so many wolves around here.” Haywood observed.
“Judging by all the other tracks, there’s plenty of prey to keep them around,” I ventured.
He nodded. “Yeah. There’s plenty of carrion too. I imagine they enjoy a pretty fat diet.”
I thought for a minute. “You know, I haven’t seen many bear tracks up here – none, in fact. That’s seems a bit odd.”
“Oh, they’re around. They just don’t spend too much time along the creeks until the salmon start running. Then you’ll see more of them than you can shake a stick at.”
I supposed that was true. Still, there was something vaguely disturbing in the absence of the bears.
I didn’t dwell on it. Instead, I asked, “When do the salmon runs start?”
“Already have out on the coast. It’ll take them two or three weeks to get back in this far. They’ll come up the Yukon and then up all the feeder creeks. My guess is you’ll be seeing the Chinook – what we call King Salmon – around the second week in July. The Chum Salmon come up a month or so later. You’ll want to have a smoker ready. And you’ll need to have the roof on your cache. If the bears give you fishing rights, you’ll be able to lay in a pretty good supply of smoked salmon.”
I thought about that. Haywood was right. I had a busy two weeks ahead of me even if I didn’t get right after building the cabin. There was a lot to do.
As we came around a bend we could see the bare, blackened tips of burned trees following a ridge line down from the distant hills to a meadow just off the creek. There were several burns along the river, the result of lightning strikes over the years. We struck inland and crossed a narrow marsh, and then came up against a beaver pond, which we skirted on the west. At the backside of the pond the terrain began to rise gently up through the burn. Haywood had been right. There was a lot of dead standing timber. This was a bit of luck I hadn’t expected. Live trees were easier to cut and notch, especially in the early summer when they were full of sap. But live trees were also a lot heavier, and the bark had to be peeled off with a drawknife, and then they needed to dry. That was a time consuming process. Dead standing trees were already dry and free of bark and, with their much lighter weight, a lot easier to move.
Since this was just a scouting mission we hadn’t brought the chainsaw; we had, however, brought the folding saw. I took it out, opened it, and cut down one of the taller trees. The trunk was straight as an arrow. It was no more than sixteen inches at the base, but the taper was gradual and regular so it didn’t lose much girth over the first twenty feet. After I’d felled it, we inspected it for decay and insect damage. It was prime stock; I was certain it would make a perfect foundation log, perhaps a sill or a girder.
As an engineer, the construction of the cabin was to be the high point of my summer.
I’d done a good bit of research, and had decided on the traditional trapper style cabin, which was, basically, a rectangular log box with one door, three small windows and a gabled roof. Originally I had wanted to keep it small, maybe nine by twelve feet, but I didn’t want to build a stone fireplace, which would take time I didn’t have. A freestanding stove was a better option, but it would take up a lot of space inside the cabin. It had been a tough call. I had, ultimately, decided to go with the stove which necessitated increasing the footprint to sixteen by eighteen. To accommodate that size interior plus a covered porch, I would require several logs over twenty feet, and they would be difficult for one man to handle. Nevertheless, I wanted the extra room inside, and I was eager for the challenge.
Before we’d flown in I had drawn up detailed plans for the construction, including a material take off list that specified the exact number of logs I’d need of each particular length. The longest were twenty-two footers. Fortunately, they would be roof supports, (ridgepole and purlins), and would be of smaller diameter than the foundation logs. I’d need five of that length. That was the good news – the bad news was that I would need three larger diameter logs, twenty feet long, for the sills and girder. Since they would be the heaviest ones of the lot, I wanted to get them cut and moved to the cabin site while Haywood was there to help.
I spent twenty minutes walking the slope above the beaver pond, counting the suitable standing spars. It looked like there were plenty. I hoped to be able to harvest all I needed from this slope so gravity would help me get the logs down to the beaver pond, and the slides and channels would provide a float path out through the marsh to the creek. The set up looked pretty good.
As we stood there, taking in the sun and inspecting our timber supply, we heard far off honking. Haywood pointed at the sky to the south. A huge flight of Canadian geese came into view, beating their way north to their breeding grounds. There must have been two thousand of them. What a magnificent sight. We watched them pass to the east of us and continue their journey north. We could still hear their honking, long after they had passed from sight.
Satisfied with the logs of the burn, we decided to make a test run with the tree I’d dropped earlier. I cut it to twenty-two feet. This would be the girder. Then I went the length of it and lopped off snags and limbs, rolled it over, trimmed the other side, and nodded to Haywood.
“O.K. Let’s see if we can get this thing back to camp without killing ourselves.”
We shifted it so it was pointed down the slope and then, using a couple of drag ropes, we sledded it down the grade and across the marsh grass and into the water of the beaver pond. It was hard work but, with two of us tugging and pulling, it didn’t take long.
The pond was deeper than it looked, and Haywood found a hole halfway across. He filled one hip boot and almost lost the other in the mud bottom. I had been walking behind him and, being six inches shorter, had considerably less freeboard above my boots’ water line. Laughing, I beat a quick retreat to the bank while paying out my towline, climbed ashore and walked the log around the pond to the downstream end where the beavers had built their earthen dam. I left Haywood to extricate himself from the mud. I waited at the spillway while he clambered out of the pond, sat on the bank, removed his right boot, and poured a couple gallons of black water back into the pond. He gave me his patented toothy grin.
“Good boot! Didn’t leak!” he shouted proudly. “Didn’t let out a drop.”
I waited while he went through the same routine with the left boot. Reshod, he walked around the pond and joined me at the spillway.
“You might want to see about filling in that hole before I come back,” he suggested. “Were I not so nimble, you might have lost me there.”
“I’ll see to it,” I promised.
There was a pretty good channel from the spillway to the creek bank. It was about two feet deep and quite straight. Using the towlines we were able to slide the log along the slick mud bottom of the channel or float it where the water was deep enough. It took us less than thirty minutes from slope to creek, even with Haywood’s boot dumping break. When we arrived back at the creek the grayling were jumping and rolling, and having a field day with a fresh hatch. We abandoned the log test there and then, and broke out the fly rods.
Ah! What a day on the stream. It appeared that the fish were feeding on a hatch of black gnats but, evidently, they weren’t picky. I had a number fourteen Caddis on my line, and Haywood was sporting what looked to be a stuffed pheasant on the end of his.
“Tied it myself!” He’d stated proudly, upon noticing my silent and dubious scrutiny.
“And to think,” I mused, “you do surgery on living beings with those very same hands.”
Whatever my misgivings, and, whatever it was he’d tied, Haywood’s haystack fly worked. So did my Caddis. And, when I lost the Caddis on my fourth or fifth grayling, they were equally happy with a number sixteen mosquito. It was just one of those wonderful days when anything you threw out on the water was just right.
As is always the case, it ended as suddenly as it had begun. One minute we were catching and releasing a fish every cast – the next, there wasn’t a feeding ring to be seen, up or down stream, as far as we could see in either direction. Fortunately, we’d had the foresight to keep four of good eating size. We gutted and cleaned them there in the cold water of the creek. Grayling are, in most aspects, very much like a trout. Same bone structure, same flaky, white meat. The noticeable exceptions are the oversized dorsal fin, and the scales. One needn’t scale a trout. Unzip the belly, crosscut the jaw, pull out the guts, a quick rinse, and Bob’s your uncle. Not so with Arctic Grayling; you have to scale them first. Nevertheless, they’re delicious and well worth the extra effort.
I cut a slender willow branch, stripped it of leaves and strung on the fish. When that was done, we dragged our test log out into the current, untied our towlines, and launched it downstream. We walked along the bank as it made its ponderous way down the creek. It got hung up in shallow water at several points along the way, and we had to wade out and push it free. When we finally did reach camp, we had a bit of bad luck. As the camp lies on the inside of a bend, the deep water follows the cut bank on the other side of the stream. We hadn’t thought to reattach a guide rope to the log at any point along the way, so there was nothing we could do when it got caught up in the strong current. It swept around the outside of the bend, and shot past the cabin site like a rocket sled. We ran it to ground a few hundred yards downstream, tied on a towrope and hauled it back up to the gravel bar at camp. A good lesson learned. Glitches notwithstanding, it had been a very successful trial run. It appeared I’d be able to bring in most of the logs for the cabin using the same approach. Things were, indeed, looking up.
The following day, Saturday, Haywood suggested we get a start on the repairs to the cache.
We took a folding saw and a roll of polyethylene twine back into the clearing where it stood, and built a new ladder. We cut two slender spruce saplings for the side rails, and two more which we cut into rungs, then lashed them together with the twine. It was a sturdy ladder, but heavier than I would have liked, due to the green wood. Nevertheless, I expected I could manage it by myself when it dried a bit with age.
We propped it up against the platform in front of the door opening and I scrambled up to have a look. As it had appeared from the ground, all four walls were intact and looked to be in pretty good shape. The door was missing altogether, and there was no evidence of hinges or door hardware. I suspected the door had been nothing more than a hatch-cover held in place with a couple of pivot latches. I climbed inside. The platform appeared solid enough to support a sizable load. It was littered with the rotted logs and some of the sod that had once served as the roof.
The front wall, which contained the door opening, was roughly five feet high; the rear wall was a couple of feet shorter. You wouldn’t have wanted to live in there, but it would serve nicely for a larder. Basically, it was an enclosed, lean-to type structure, which made the roof easy. All I needed to do was cut several poles long enough to span the distance from front to back and lay them in place as rafters. A layer of willow branches over these, and plastic tarp on top would serve as the roofing. The steep pitch would assure runoff. I made a quick estimate and determined I’d need about a dozen ten-footers. I climbed down and began cutting spruce poles while Haywood went up to clear away the litter.
When he came back down he volunteered to go back to camp and get a few more tools. We’d need an ax for splitting, and the adze for shaping planks for the door. We’d also need a hammer and some spikes. I agreed and pointed out that a couple of cold beers might come in handy also. He grinned wide as if the thought had never occurred to him, and set off for camp.
I cut and trimmed the poles for the roof and took them up the ladder two at a time. I was just setting the last one in place, across the walls, when I heard Haywood rustling around below.
“Hey,” I said over my shoulder. “Toss up that roll of poly- twine, will you?”
The ball of string came sailing through the open doorway, skittered across the floor and bumped against my foot.
“Lucky shot,” I called down. “Thanks.”
No answer came up from below, but Haywood, when preoccupied, couldn’t be reached. I picked up the roll of cord and began lashing down the rafter poles. I had half of them secure when Haywood’s voice boomed out from below.
“Hello in the compound,” he shouted. “I’m coming in. Don’t shoot!”
I looked out the door and saw him coming through the woods laden with tools, lunch, and beer.
“You had to make two runs?” I asked him, as he came into the cache clearing and deposited his load on the grass.
He gave me a puzzled look. “No. What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you come back about twenty minutes ago?”
He shook his head. “No. I just got back.”
I experienced a slight tingling in the skin of my scalp.