SNOW lies deep on the land and the lakes, and the branches of the hardwood trees are gray skeletons swaying in the wind. In these parts a blizzard comes like a stalking lynx, quietly at first, then striking with whirling fury, screaming in the hills, clawing at the tree tops. At last it moves on with a wailing sound, leaving the land white and hushed, with sharp-edged drifts and deep wind rings around the trees.
There is no sign of any living thing on the white blanket that stretches away across the lake, up and over the Cache Lake hills, on and on through the dark woods into strange valleys and over other hills that few men know. I wouldn’t enjoy flat country where one always knows what lies ahead as far as the eye can see. I want hills that lead you up to look beyond.
When I get up in the morning now the windows are covered with frosty crystals that sparkle blue and white if the moonlight strikes them. Some of the designs on the glass are like little curving plumes, wonderful miniature fern fronds, and leaves. Others are small balsam twigs on the end of a branch and many are miniature spruce trees of shimmering ice. I have seen some that looked like the spreading tail of a peacock and many that made me think of the geometry problems I had in school many years ago.
You need a microscope to see the real beauty of frost crystals, for some of the lines are too small for the eyes. Last night I picked out oak and maple leaves, the blossoms of tiny flowers, and even a spider web with what looked like a spider near the center. And there were grass blades and moss and many other designs.
If you want to see how frost pictures grow, go into a cold room on a midwinter’s night when the window is coated with frost and hold a candle near enough to the glass to melt the frosty coating. You can do the same thing by blowing your breath on the glass for a few seconds. The warmth will cause the melting frost to form a thin watery film. As soon as that happens step back and almost at once the frost begins to draw new designs. You will notice them beginning to form around the edge of the melted spot. Often they take the form of slender lances or glistening stars, working out toward the center of the clear spot as if some invisible hand were drawing them with white fire.
These designs will form only where the glass is wet and stop at the edge of any dry place. If you observe closely you will find that between the larger designs very fine pictures gradually begin to appear. Some of them look like pieces of coral and others may look like finely cut gems. In time the frost begins to cover the dry places with an even white coating that shows no design and looks at first like sanded glass. This is a granular form of frost and it always keeps away from the beautiful designs as if it didn’t want to spoil them.
Various combinations of temperature and moisture affect the formation of frost crystals and for that reason the designs are never exactly alike. The thickness of a pane of glass or its finish, and whether it is clean or dusty, have something to do with the kind of frost crystals that form on it.
Looking at the wonderful designs on a window pane, it is hard to realize what a powerful thing frost is, for it is frost freezing the moisture in the trunks of great trees that splits them in zero weather with explosions like shots out of a cannon.
We are so used to frost that we don’t often stop to think that it is constantly changing the shape of the land, breaking up the rocky formations, loosening the earth in valleys and on the hillsides so that very gradually through the years the face of the earth changes in localities where the winters are severe. One good example is the long frost crystals that raise the soil several inches in sandy or gravelly places. And you find another kind of frost, fine-grained and very white on the undersides of rocks and logs and often under leaves on the ground. The Indians call December Yeyekoopewe, the Month of the Frozen Mist.
Once in a while I hear the lynx that lives in the tamarack swamp on the other side of the lake and if you look you are pretty sure to see its tracks although you seldom catch sight of the animal. Do you know the difference between a lynx and a wildcat? Well, the lynx has little tufts on the tips of its ears, and a black-tipped tail, whereas the wildcat has no ear tufts and its tail is black-tipped only on top and is white underneath. Furthermore, its legs are shorter and its feet smaller than those of the lynx which has large, furry foot pads that act like snowshoes.
Weasel tracks are plentiful and often mixed in with them you will find the tiny foot pads of a white-footed mouse which is one of the weasel’s favorite foods. The weasels which turn white with the first snow are known as ermine in winter when the pelts are very valuable. They are brown in summer but are known to turn white within a few hours after the first snowfall. It is pretty much the same story with the snowshoe rabbit.
Did you ever stop to think why they change color? Well, of course the white is a protection so their enemies can’t see them so easily against the snow, but the white is also warmer than darker colors, for it lets less heat escape than brown or black. An engineer who came up here to fish once told me if city folk painted their steam radiators black instead of white they would get a whole lot more heat out of them. But womenfolk don’t like black, so you cannot get them to change.
Getting back from women to weasels, maybe you have noticed that though the body of the animal turns a cream color or almost pure white, the tip of the tail is black. The same is true of the snow buntings and ptarmigan, which have dark tail feathers. Now at first you would think those dark spots would show just where they are, but as a matter of fact they keep the enemy’s attention away from the animal. I have proved it by covering the tail of a weasel (he was dead) with snow and just as soon as you do that you begin to make out the outline of the rest of the animal. It is the black spot that catches the eye and fools their enemies. The way nature takes care of its own is something to think about.
The tiny footpads of a white-footed mouse
This is the time when the fur of the animals is at its best and the northern trappers are out on their lines. The fur is now dense and rich in color. You don’t live in the old north long before you discover that under the regular outer fur the animals grow a sort of underwear of soft dense hair that helps to keep them warm. I have read about mountain goats in India that grow a soft fur called pashm, used to make the wonderful soft Kashmir shawls and other fabrics.
The birds that winter up here also have an extra winter covering. The outer feathers lie closer, overlap more, and underneath these feathers they grow a wonderful coat of down—little soft feathers that prevent water from reaching the skin and keep out the cold winds. You see it best in some of the ducks and geese. When winter is over and they shed their underwear the waterfowl pick the soft down from their breasts to line their nests. That is where eiderdown comes from. The eider duck not only lines her nest with the down, but covers up her young ones with it on cold spring nights.
And it is interesting to see how little extra spikes grow on the toes of the grouse to help them walk over the snow and dig deep for berries in the winter. Some birds, like the ptarmigan, have an extra covering of feathers on their feet in the cold months. Almost any day up here you can see grouse running over the snow hunting for berries, cones, catkins, and the like. And they will dig deep through the snow to find such choice food as wintergreen, partridge, and snowberries, as well as the various cranberries you find in certain places. They know just where to dig, too.
Another thing you will notice, when the leaves are off the trees, is that the buds of those that break out their leaves early in the spring are covered with a protective sheath of scales which fall off and release the buds when the first warm days come in April or May.
This is the time of year I think about helping some of my bird-friends, especially the little chicadees. They can take care of themselves in almost any weather, but when an ice storm coats the trees and bushes they can’t get at the bark where they find dormant insects and the like. That is where I come in and they know me for miles around. During the summer I raise lots of sunflowers and dry the seeds and later on I gather the ripe seeds of the wild plants. Then when winter sets in I put up bird-feeders, logs with holes bored in them, covered boxes and brush shelters. I even have a little box with a glass top outside my window. A friend of mine always sends up a bag of wild-bird food, including split pumpkin and squash seeds, which the chicadees love. I also feed them nut meats and the like. For meat I hang an old bone or a piece of bacon rind on a limb and stuff venison suet in the cracks in the bark of pine trees. Smart and cheerful fellows the chicadees are, and full of courage.
One thing I am really proud of is my squirrel-proof feeder. It is a piece of cedar log about three inches in diameter with a pointed top and holes bored here and there to hold the food. It hangs from a piece of wire which is attached to a screw eye in its tip. So far nothing unusual, but here is the squirrel-proofer. Punch a quarter-inch hole in the exact center of an old pie plate and run the wire through it so that the plate, upside down, balances on the point. The minute a squirrel slides down the wire and touches the plate it tips on its side. There’s nothing for him to hold on to and try as he will there is no way to get around that teetering pie plate. The only thing left is to make a jump for the ground or climb back up the wire and if there is one thing that is funny it is a squirrel going up a slippery wire hand over hand and slipping back every few inches. So far not one has passed the plate—for himself.
On Christmas Hank, the Chief, and I always decorate a big spruce with bits of the favorite foods of all the birds that stay with us, and sprinkle seeds beneath the boughs for the ground feeders.
One of the little problems of living in the woods in winter is coming home and having to get a fire going and wait for a meal to cook when you are hungry enough to chew rawhide. Well, I’ve got that one beaten, for I made myself a fireless cooker and now when I am away for a day I come back to a hot meal ready for me the minute I step in the door.
I don’t know who invented fireless cookers, but they have been used for a long, long time, especially in the Scandinavian countries, where they were usually insulated with hay or straw and called “hay boxes.” A fireless cooker is simple and inexpensive to make, for any kind of box that is tight or even a keg or a barrel will do. The important thing is plenty of good insulation to hold the heat in, and you can find the right kind wherever you are. I used well-dried sphagnum moss, but sawdust would have been all right. In addition to Straw or hay, crushed paper, wool, ground cork, excelsior, or cotton batting are all good for insulation. Many of the materials made to keep houses warm, especially mineral wool and fluffy asbestos, would also do well as insulation for a fireless cooker.
The first step in building a cooker is to decide on the pot or pail you plan to use regularly, for on its size depends the kind of box you will need. Make certain the pot has straight sides so it will slip in and out of its compartment easily, and it must have a tight-fitting cover. Enamelware, aluminum, or stainless steel utensils are all fine for the purpose. The best type of pot is one which is about as wide as it is tall, for you don’t want any more surface to radiate heat than you can help.
A fireless cooker does a much better job if you use a preheated round, flat stone, the diameter of the pot and about an inch thick, at the bottom of the cooking hole. Sometimes you can find a soft stone that can be chipped to size, but I cast one an inch and a half thick by mixing a little cement with sand and pouring it into a circular cardboard mold. I made a little hollow in the middle and set in a loop of wire so it could be lowered into place with a hook.
Once you have your pot you will know how big a box is needed, for the cooking well that holds the pot must be surrounded by at least four inches of insulating material, top, sides, and bottom. Before doing anything else, line the bottom and sides of the box with heavy paper, and then fill the bottom with four or five inches of insulating material. Next place the pot on top of the heating stone on the insulation in the center of the box and pack insulation evenly and not too tightly around the pot until it comes up to the rim and no more. Then work the pot around carefully until the hole is slightly larger, so it will slide out easily. Now slip in a cylindrical liner of cardboard to form a smooth wall for the cooking compartment.
When the insulating material has been packed to the top of the pot, cover it with heavy building paper or cardboard with the edges turned down and pasted to the sides of the box, the edge around the cooking hole turned down and glued to the cardboard liner. Then you make a cloth cushion four inches deep to fit the top of the box and stuff it with four inches of insulating material, for this top pad is very important. The last step is to make a hinged lid for the box that presses down snugly on the top insulating pad. Make a hook to hold it down, for the tighter the cooker the better it will work. If you want to make two cooking compartments make a partition in the middle and have a separate top insulating cushion for each side.
Once you have a fireless cooker you must know how to use it properly to get the best results. Of course you start your food on a stove and bring it to a boil, meantime heating the stone for the bottom. Then get it into the fireless cooker as quickly as you can—instantly is none too fast. That’s the real secret!
Another important thing to remember is that you will get much better results if the food fills your cooking pot instead of being half or three-quarters full, for wherever there is an air space, heat will be lost. Beans, cereals, stews, and soups are best cooked from eight to twelve hours, but many foods need only two or three hours in the cooker. You don’t know how good food can be until you have tasted it from a fireless cooker, which keeps in all the fine flavors that usually steam away on a stove.
And if you are interested in fine flavors you would surely enjoy my overnight buckwheat griddlecakes. I would not want you to think I am taking credit for them because they are made by a recipe my aunt gave me.
But I don’t want you to take my word for it, so I am going to give you my aunt’s rule to try for yourself. Every year she sends me up a few pounds of buckwheat flour and I have griddlecakes almost every Sunday morning. Here’s her rule:
2 rounded cups buckwheat flour
1 rounded cup white corn meal
1 cup boiling water
¾ cup milk
1 teaspoonful salt
½ yeast cake
¼ cup milk slightly warmed
½ teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon molasses
The first thing to do is to dissolve the yeast in about a quarter cup of lukewarm milk. It really should be fresh milk, but I find evaporated milk works pretty well. Be sure it is only warm and not hot, for heat kills yeast. Then take three-quarters of a cup of milk and mix it with a cup of boiling water. The next step is to mix the buckwheat and corn meal, which should be white if possible, and after adding salt, stir into the hot water and milk mixture. Now add the dissolved yeast and beat the mixture for about ten minutes.
All this is done the night before and when you have the batter mixed you put it in a warm place where it won’t be chilled and let it stand overnight. Just before you cook the cakes add the baking soda and molasses and give the batter a good beating. The only thing you need is a good hot frying pan, but I want to warn you not to over-grease it. That is what spoils most griddlecakes. If you have butter it is extra nice. Put a little on a wad of cloth and rub it on the frying pan after each batch is cooked, but if you have no butter, bacon fat or lard will do a good job.
My aunt cooks her cakes on a wonderful oval soapstone griddle which just covers two holes of the old wood stove. It is bound around the edge with an iron strap and has a bail for lifting it. To be sure it takes a while to heat through an inch of soapstone, but once it is hot it makes the best cakes you ever tasted. A soapstone griddle needs no grease whatever and the batter never sticks, so you get the full flavor of the buckwheat.
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 when 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.
The night before Christmas there will be a candle in every window
While we were unloading the pack of Christmas parcels fine snow began whispering in the still air and in a few minutes the outlines of the trees across the lake had disappeared in a white smother. Jack was moving fast now for he knew the signs. The engine roared and he swung the plane into the wind to take off to the north. We couldn’t hear his words, but we knew he was shouting “Merry Christmas” as the plane picked up speed and the propeller sent clouds of dry snow whirling back. In a few seconds he was lost to sight, but we heard the beat of his engine to the westward on its course for home.
On Christmas Day when we sit down to our dinner here faraway in the north woods we will be thinking of all our friends. And just before we begin Chief Tibeash will motion Hank and me to come to the door, as he has every year for a long time, and when he opens it he will lift his arms with his wrinkled brown fingers spread wide and say as near as I can write it: “Aslam nene-ti-une-non e-stays a-nouch-ke-se-cow!”—which in his language means “Come near our own brother today.” And so he speaks to all our friends, near and faraway, on Christmas Day.
