Camps and Trails

by Henry Abbott

The cooler was an empty pork barrel which a year earlier we had procured at a lumber camp several miles down the valley; and which at great expenditure of effort and time we had rolled, tumbled and carried through the woods all the way back to our camp. We had then scrubbed out the barrel, weighted it with stones and in the shade of a clump of balsam trees had sunk it in a deep hole in the brook flowing from our spring so that the water came near its top. On nails inside of the barrel we hung our fresh meat and game, and the icy water from the spring flowing around the barrel kept the contents as hard and fresh as if in a cold-storage warehouse; while a slab of spruce bark with a stone on top formed a cover to keep night prowling flesh-eating neighbors out of our refrigerator.

At the supper table I told Bige about the deer I had seen digging beech nuts, and he said that in dressing out the deer he shot, he found its stomach filled with beech nuts, and that they more nearly resemble buckwheat, than any other food a buck-deer can find in the woods. Long after the first snowfall in the Autumn one can find places where deer have pawed away the snow to dig beech nuts out from under the leaves.

In the middle of the night I was wakened by some unusual noise outside the cabin. Listening intently I heard footsteps softly padding down the path toward the spring brook. Not a breath of air was moving and the silence of the night was noisy and oppressive. Straining my ears I again heard the soft foot falls. Then a sniffing, smelling sound. Later, two bright stars close together appeared through the open doorway about a foot above the sill. Twinkling, shining, expanding, the stars grew into a pair of eyes in the darkness. The owner of the eyes sniffed, then spoke, apparently to his partner outside, — "Uh huh!" — They're here! — "Uh huh! Uh huh!" — Been here before! — They're here again! — "Uh huh!" We keep a pile of dry wood inside the cabin for use in kindling fires on rainy days. From my bunk I reached over, grabbed a stick of wood and flung it through the doorway and the thieving coon in his striped prison garments scuttled away through the bush into the night.

The following morning we found the coon's tracks — they looked as if made by the hand of an infant — in the soft mud near our refrigerator.

After breakfast Bige and I sawed a couple of blocks, each about four feet long, off a spruce log. Then Bige took a pack-basket and went back to Wild Cat Mountain for the forequarters of the deer which he had left hanging in a tree the day before; while I, with an axe and a couple of hard wood wedges (the same tools with which Abe Lincoln, ninety years ago, split rails), proceeded to split the two spruce blocks into thin staves from six to eight inches wide. These I sharpened at one end and drove into the ground on the bank of the stream below the cooler; arranging them as nearly as possible in a circle with the edges touching and making a vertical cylinder about two and a half feet in diameter. I put hoops of osier withes around the tops of the staves and used other slabs of the spruce for a cover. Then I gathered stones and built a fireplace on the gravelly bed near the water. A trench was dug from the fireplace up the sloping bank and under the cylinder of staves. This was covered with flat stones and dirt and it served as a flue to carry smoke from the fireplace by the brook into the smoke-house on the bank. In the smoke-house we hung strips of venison — the venison having first been packed in salt over night. The fire was kept smoldering and smoking by a liberal use of green birch wood. At the end of two days smoking we had on hand a stock of the finest "Jerked Venison" that any hunter ever put into his lunch bag. The smoke of green birch imparts a spicy flavor that is not found in jerked meat cured by the Indian method of drying in the sun.

The Dan'l Boone Cabin was built fifteen years ago, and was located in this particular spot because of a spring of pure cold water which we discovered while on a hunting expedition. It is a long way from any lake but is in the edge of good hunting country. To reach it, from our cottage we went by boat up the lake to the mouth of the river, then proceeded along the river bank past the rapids about two miles to the falls. At the falls the township line crosses the river, and we followed it through the woods up over the top of the mountain and down to one of the foot hills on the opposite slope.

The township line was marked through the woods by four blazes on each tree, placed in the form of a diamond, a chip being cut out at each angles of the diamond. The line was practically straight and was not difficult to follow, except that it led up the steepest part of the mountain and over the highest ridge. In places one had to crawl on hands and knees and hang onto roots and bushes to avoid sliding back. We had to climb just the same, both going and coming and with a heavy pack on one's back it was rather strenuous, and there were about four miles of the line that we used.

The Township Line

I felt confident that a better route could be found to the camp and Bige and I often discussed the matter but we continued to use the township line through the first season. One day during the second summer of our tenancy, while Bige was busy with some other chore, I took an axe and started out from camp, determined to mark a new and better trail out of the woods.