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 how 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.
If you get a blister on your foot don’t pull off the skin. Doing so may cause a serious infection. I have known woodsmen to take a clean needle and run a thread through a blister cutting off the thread after it is through, which helps the water to drain off. The Chief very seldom has any trouble with his feet, which are toughened by years of walking, but once when he got a blister he spread balsam pitch on it and wrapped a clean piece of cloth over it. Pitch is also good for corns.
Every year in September a friend of ours comes up for a little late trout fishing and as he always wants to take some home to his folks we smoke them for him. The squaretails are at their best now, hard and fat, and the sport is good. Smoking fish is a job that cannot be rushed and if you do it well the results are mighty satisfying. There is a flavor to smoked fish that leaves you craving more, especially if you freshen them for an hour or so in cool water and then cook them slowly in milk. Before starting to smoke fish split and clean them and then rub salt on the inside. If you are going to eat them right away very little salt is needed. For keeping any length of time soak them for a night and a day in brine, which is made by adding salt to water until it will float a small potato, before smoking begins. The old Chief loves to work the smokehouse. First he builds a good hot fire, then puts on a lot of damp or green wood. Birch punk is best to my way of thinking. In time the fire just smolders along giving off a thin smoke. The Chief digs himself a lot of fine spruce roots and ties the fish by their tails to short green saplings to hang in the smoke flue. Then he lets them stay in the smoke for two days. You can smoke fish and meat over a smoldering open fire, on mesh wire over a barrel, or even in the throat of a fireplace chimney, but I have a smokehouse which does a better job.
Fish is not the only thing you can smoke, for the Indians smoke geese and ducks, as well as deer and moose meat. You can also smoke partridge. As a matter of fact when I get a side of bacon chat I have to keep for a while, particularly the mild-cured kind, I hang it in my smokehouse for a couple of days and make sure that the blowflies don’t get at it. Before I put it in the smokehouse I rub on a syrup made by melting maple sugar in just a little water—honey would do just as well—and I daub it on because sugar makes meat tender while salt is apt to toughen it. One thing about smoking that you must remember is that you do not want too much smoke. It is not only smoke, but a little heat that does the job.
Every fall the Chief smokes quite a few geese. He plucks and cleans them, rubs a little salt on the inside, and hangs them up in a smokehouse made of birch bark laid over a sapling held up by short shears and blocked at each end with pieces of bark, leaving vents at both ends near the peak. Last year I saw him use an old hollow log buried in a trench to carry the smoke from the fire. In the old days the Indians built a little staging near the top of their tepees where they hung strips of meat and whole fish to cure slowly in the smoke that drifted up from the fire in the center of the shelter. In many ways that was a fine method, for slow smoking is good smoking.
When the Chief smokes venison or moose he cuts the lean part of the meat into strips about an inch thick and hangs them on a wire in his smokehouse. Usually in the early fall when there is not much rain he keeps a slow smudge going for about four days. The Indians do not use much salt, which, generally speaking, is right, and when their dried meat is done it is about as hard as rawhide; but if you cut it up in small pieces and boil it a while it’s mighty tasty and nourishing. That is what they used to call “jerked meat.”
As I said, rotting birch is a good wood for smoking. The main thing is to keep away from pine, balsam, and spruce, which give an unpleasant and bitter flavor. If you have any hickory handy that is fine, and I know that down in the farming country apple wood and pear are used, not to mention corncobs.
Smoked partridge to my way of thinking is wonderful eating. I like to skin the bird, rub a little salt and pepper inside after cleaning it, and hang it up by its feet in the smokehouse for twenty-four hours. It is the white meat of the partridge when smoked that tastes the best.
I have been smoking meats for years and I have discovered certain little tricks that are mighty handy in a pinch. Supposing you have a chicken and you are hankering for the smoked flavor. All you have to do is to boil it for the usual time until it is tender, set it aside to cool, and then hang it in the smokehouse for about an hour. When you bite into the meat it will have that wonderful smoky flavor that people will go a long way to find.
If you are fond of smoked cheese cut it up in small chunks and spear them on twigs to hang in your smokehouse for about an hour. Don’t have much fire when you smoke cheese, for heat melts it. All you need is a whiff of good smoke from damp wood.
Salt is another thing I smoke because it gives a fine flavor to my foods. It is especially good in soups and stews. What I do is take a cup of salt in the bottom of the bag it comes in and hang it up in the smokehouse. I wet the bag, for the dampness seems to carry the smoke through the salt better than if it is smoked dry. By the time it is smoked through the salt is a hard lump but it breaks up again easily by running a rolling pin over it. I have no wooden rolling pin but a bottle does the job for me in all my cooking very nicely.
If you want to try smoking things you can easily do it in your own back yard; and a friend of mine who lives in an apartment in the city smoked his in the flue of his fireplace and got fine results once he located some hickory which he had to soak in his bathtub before it gave off enough of the right kind of smoke. If you want to build a temporary smokehouse all you need is a few flat stones and a little ground flue to carry the smoke to the bottom of a stack which can be made of a piece of stovepipe or even wood if you make your ground flue long enough so it won’t catch fire. Then you can hang your salt and other things to smoke on a wire across the top of the stack.
The Indians who have spent the summer on Snow Goose Lake are heading north for their trapping grounds and most of them have already passed up Cache Lake with their canoes riding low with heavy loads of winter supplies which are chiefly flour and salt pork. Their traps, snowshoes, and hunting sleds have been cached all summer on stagings at last winter’s camping places for they are not needed during the summer and to cache them saves a lot of heavy packing.
The Indian women generally take back with them quite a lot of cotton goods for making dresses, especially the brightly colored calicoes. One of the most important items of the trappers’ supplies is ammunition for their guns, although any Indian worthy of the name could live on the land without ever firing a shot.
As they pass Cache Lake they nod to me, for Indians don’t show their feelings very much, but the children wave and shout as all children do. No matter, I am proud to know that I would be welcomed as an old friend in the lodges or cabins of any of the Indians who pass my way.
I remember one Indian I called Joe who came to me last summer and told me without complaining that his wife was sick and he needed a few supplies until he could replenish them. What he wanted most was tea, which the Indians love, salt, sugar, and for himself, a little tobacco. I started to make up some packages for him, but he shook his head and spread out his red bandanna on the floor. Then he asked me to pour about a half pound of salt in one corner, some tea in the other, sugar in the third and tobacco in the fourth corner. He knotted each corner to make a little bag, rolled up the big kerchief into a ball and left without a word. Not that he wasn’t thankful, but that was his way. On the trip north sometime later he paddled up to the shore, called me to come down, and handed me one of the finest pairs of snowshoes I have ever owned. His wife and little boy smiled at me and then he nodded and pushed off without further conversation.
Sitting around the stove one night when it was chilly enough outside to make the fire feel good, we got to talking about our experiences in the woods. I recalled the time years ago when I capsized while running rapids in a strange stream when I was traveling alone. I had a ten-foot birch bark trapper’s canoe, the kind the Indians use, broad and flat in the middle with the ends drawn in pretty fast. They are light and small, but carry a lot of freight. I was on my way south and in a hurry to get home so I decided I would rather take a chance on running the rapids than carry around them. I was almost through when the canoe swung sideways, hit a hidden rock and over I went.
I made shore all right, for my clothing was light and I had moccasins on. I never wear anything else in a canoe for if you go over with boots on your chances of landing are pretty slim. When I began to round up my belongings in the dead water below, all I had left was the canoe with a hole in the bottom, a little can of tea and about a pound of prunes that I had wedged up in the bow to keep them dry during a rainstorm. But the important thing was that I had a little watertight bottle full of matches in my pocket, so I knew I could get along.
After I had patched up the canoe with spruce pitch and bark and got under way, it took me five days to get back to civilization. On an island in one of the lakes I found gulls’ nests and, not being a man to turn down anything edible in case of need, I took some of the eggs. Once I got myself a mess of trout by damming a little brook with close-set stakes and driving the fish down into a small pool. Another time I got a single fool hen, knocking it off a spruce by swinging my paddle edgewise so she couldn’t see it coming. As luck would have it after I lost my outfit I never laid eyes on a porcupine, the starving man’s meat, although usually there are plenty of them around. What I missed most was a little salt on my victuals. As all my pots and pans were gone I had to boil my tea in a little birch bark rogan. I roasted the gulls’ eggs which, I can tell you, do not please a man’s appetite, since they are so fishy in flavor.
I am not a superstitious person, but from that day on I have always kept some tea and prunes and a little salt wedged high up in the bow of my canoe, and I lash my packs to the thwarts before going into lively water. I also learned from that experience that a long portage is often the safest and shortest way home. When going into new country a man should make allowance for what people tell him about traveling conditions. A woodsman who knows his country may overlook the fact that a rapids he can shoot without any trouble may be dangerous for a stranger. A river can be safe during times of high water and just the opposite when the level drops.
I have started Tripper’s training as a sled dog. He is not very big yet nor very strong, so I made him a little deer hide harness and I am teaching him to get used to the feel of it by pulling a little piece of dead spruce pointed at one end so it will not catch on roots and discourage him. As I have said before, he is a smart little fellow and already he is getting so used to the feel of the drag that he doesn’t even turn around to see what he is pulling. It weighs only a few pounds and in a month I will have him ready to hitch to my hunting sled for the next step.
The Chief and I have been clearing out a few trees down in front of the cabin so I can get a better view of Faraway See Hill. To make sport of it we had a contest to see which one of us could drop a tree exactly where we wanted it. One thing is to size up a tree and if it is leaning more in one direction than another the wisest thing is to drop it on that side. The wind also has something to do with where you drop a tree. The notch or kerf on the side on which the tree will fall should be cut first and must be a little lower and deeper than the notch on the opposite side. The Chief taught me long ago to make sure before I started chopping that all nearby brush is cut away, for you can have a mighty dangerous accident if your axe catches on anything when you begin to swing it. The Chief won the contest by dropping a tree across a piece of birch bark which he had laid down as a target.
