Me n Len: Life in the Halibuston Bush 1900-1940 (Dundum local History Series)

Me n Len Life in the Haliburton Bush 1900-1940 By Richard Pope

with Illustrations by Neil Broadfbot Dundurn Local History Series: 4

Tbronto and London Dundurn Press

1985

Acknowledgments The writing of this manuscript and the publication of this book were made possible by support from several sources. The author wishes to thank the Canada Council for an Explorations grant. The author and publisher wish to acknowledge the generous assistance and ongoing support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. They are particularly grateful to York University for a Minor Research Grant, and to the Ontario Heritage Foundation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture for a grantin-aid-of-publication. J. Kirk Howard, Publisher

© Copyright Richard Pope, 1985 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press Limited. Editor: Elaine R. Beemer Design: Ron and Ron Design Photography Typesetting: Q Composition Inc. Printed by. Les Editions Marquis, Canada Dundurn Press Limited P.O. Box 245, Station F Toronto, Canada M4Y 2L5

71 Great Russell Street London, England WCIB 3BN

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Pope, Richard. Me W Len : life in the Haliburton bush 1900-1940 (The Dundurn local history series ; 4) ISBN 0-919670-90-3 1. Pope, Richard. 2. Haliburton (Ont. : County) - Description and travel. 3. Haliburton (Ont. : County) - Biography. I. Title. II. Series. FC3095.H27Z49 1985 F1059.H27P66 1985

971.3'6103'0924

C85-099326-1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Pope, Richard Me n Len : life in the Haliburton Bush, 1900-1940. - (Dundurn local history series; no. 4) 1. Ontario - Social life and customs 2. Ontario - Rural conditions I. Title 971.3'03'0924 F1057 ISBN 0-919670-90-3

Me n Len Life in the Haliburton Bush 1900-1940

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Author's Acknowledgments

9

Note to the Reader

11

Introduction

13

1. Meeting Len

17

2. Huntin with Len

27

3. Hunting in the Ol Days

42

4. Trappin

55

5. The Far Camp

72

6. Fishin: The Buck Lake Days and Stocking the Lakes

83

7. Life in the Logging Camps

94

8. Life on the Farm and Other Jobs

Ill

Afterword

128

Glossary: Of Snyes and Snibbies, Gads, Swales, and Gibby Tongues

130

Illustration and Photograph Credits

132

7

for Len Holmes hunter, trapper fisherman, woodsman and friend on his eightieth birthday 10 November 1983

8

Author's Acknowledgments search Grants, and Peter Oliver even wrote an unsolicited letter to the Ontario Heritage Foundation. Peter supported the book from start to finish. Ida Holmes deserves special mention because she fed me and put up with me not only during the writing of this book, but also during the many years leading up to it. She also helped me out with a number of minor details and dug up all kinds of old family photographs for me to use. Len's oldest sister, Mildred, gave me quite a lot of useful information on Len's early childhood, and she too provided me with a number of wonderful old photographs. Susanne Jeffery gave me much good advice on how to evaluate and select old photographs and she took some new ones for me as well. Murray Agnew of Agnew's Red and White in Wilberforce not only confirmed the spelling of many personal names, but also actually produced such items as Beef, Iron & Wine and Zam-Buk's Medicated Ointment for me. The late Gertrude Miller, author of an unpublished manuscript about her life as a Red Cross nurse in Wilberforce, kindly provided me with a tape that she had made of Isabelle Shay which I quote from when discussing Len's school days. Last but not least I want especially to thank Len himself who served as the inspiration of this book. Through Len I have been able to experience vicariously a lifestyle that has always attracted me greatly, although in the second half of this century it is regrettably becoming a thing of the past. Len's integrity and independence reflect the best of this lifestyle, and his extraordinary narrative abilities and sharp memory enable him to describe it vividly and authentically. This book is an attempt to share Len and what I have learned from him with other people - something I have felt obliged to do. When I finally had to tell Len that I was writing a book focussed on his life and times, he really entered into the spirit of the thing and gave unsparingly of his time. We had a lot of fun working on it.

Neil Broadfoot and Derek Hayes encouraged me to write this book, and the two of them, together with Gordon Holmes and Andrew Magee, encouraged me to finish it once I had begun. Neil Broadfoot, for reasons that sometimes escaped me, was unfailingly optimistic about the book's chances of publication, and he provided all the marvellous illustrations which to my mind really make the whole book. Susan Hayes and Peter Martin both assured me that the finished product should be published and were very helpful during my search for the right publisher. Marion Magee carefully read the entire manuscript in its first full version and made countless thoughtful editorial suggestions. She put a lot of time into the book. Gordon Holmes and his sister Marilyn both read the manuscript for factual accuracy and made many useful comments. I am also grateful to Brenda Hanning for her excellent tape transcriptions and Marlyn Aitken, my typist, for her invariably superb work. Marlyn is an indefatigable typist who works with great speed and accuracy, even from my nearly indecipherable, crabbed handwriting. She never once complained about the constant changes that I made in the typed manuscript and she frequently inconvenienced herself to keep me on schedule. Blaine Beemer, my editor, helped me to carve the bulky manuscript down to publishable size. He instinctively seemed to know what to omit and his editing made the book a considerably better read. I would like to thank the Canada Council for giving me a grant under its Explorations Program so that I could take a leave of absence without pay to write the book, the Ontario Heritage Foundation for a Grant in Aid of Publication, and York University for giving me time off to write the book and for awarding me a Minor Research Grant to help defray the costs of my work. I am particularly grateful to all those who wrote letters in support of my project. Leon Major, Peter Oliver, and Robert Turnbull wrote for me to the Canada Council, Archie Campbell and Peter Oliver wrote to the York University Faculty of Arts Committee on Re9

Wilberforce area ca. 1920

Keyed Locations 1. Jimmy Robertson's Cabin 2. Bill's Lake Camp (Trapping) 3. Far Camp (Trapping) 4. Len's Camp (Fishing & Trapping) 5. Trough Roof Camp (Ram's Pasture) 6. Ken White's Camp (Trapping, Fishing) 7. Cross Lake Camp (Hunting)

8. Barnum Camp (1918) (Hunt & Trap) 9. Pine Lake Camp (Hunt & Fish) 10. Lindsay Camp (Hunt) Peterson Landing 11. Red Camp (Logging) 12. Tom Robert's Cabin 13. Laking's No. 7 (Logging) 14. Spears and Lauder's Camp (Logging)

10

15. Still (Godfrey & Earle) 16. Still (Stringer Archie) 17. Still (Godfrey & Scott) 18. Colbourne's Marsh 19. Ire's Camp (Logging) 20. Dunbar's Camp (Logging) 21. The "Dippo" (Logging Camp)

Note to the Reader "than" and "in," but the specific meaning is always clear from the context. "Yas" and "yeah" are both variants of "yes." "Ya," "ya's," and "youse" are variants of "you." Many non-standard and dialect forms are spelled phonetically, e.g., acrost (across), aholt (ahold), alls (all), aree (area), bought (brought), citern (citron), crick (creek), et (ate), holla (hollow), nahrras (narrows), oncst (once), pahradise (paradise), pore (poor), patridge (partridge), etc. The less readily guessed ones appear in the glossary. I would like to have been able to indicate the many unusual intonations (often Celtic) and stress patterns (e.g., "I didn't think very much of it"), but any system of accents and italics would only have confused the reader and encumbered the text. Every effort has been made to ensure the correct spelling of place names and personal names, but sometimes I have been reduced to educated guesses. When presented with a choice, I invariably opted for the variant preserved in the Registry Office in Minden or on the tombstones in the Deer Lake, Essonville, and Wilberforce cemeteries. I have usually preserved Len's pronunciation of names when quoting him - e.g., Ivory Johnson shotgun (for Iver Johnson), or Lakings's Lumber Company (for Laking Lumber Company) - but I have always rendered the names correctly when Len is not being quoted.

To my mind Len's speech is the cornerstone of this book and I have attempted to reproduce it as faithfully as possible. Both Len and his wife were a bit shocked to see some of his racier expressions in print and wanted it known that Len does not speak that way in front of women and children. I could not bring myself to tone this language down, but I assured them that I would make it clear that Len's speech represents that of an old-timer speaking as men spoke in the bush in Len's day. The colour of the language has been fully preserved to underscore the authenticity of the narration, and all the distinctive colloquial pronunciations, words, and turns of speech have been maintained. The glossary at the back of the book includes little-known words, common words used with special meanings, and the standard forms of many words rendered phonetically in the text according to Len's pronunciation. Readers may wish to use it as a reference tool while reading through the book. To avoid cluttering the text, a number of common abbreviations have been spelled without using an apostrophe in place of the omitted letter(s), e.g., aroun (around), bout (about), im (him), prett (pretty), spose (suppose). Because of their great number, verb forms ending in -ing have often been written in full, although Len, of course, pronounces them without the g. Apostrophes have been used in all cases where abbreviations might be mispronounced, misunderstood, or seem odd without them, e.g., Chris' (Christ), c'mere (come here), col' (cold), couldn' (couldn't), 'd ("would" as in Fred'd, the guy'd), d'ya (do you), fin' (find), hin' (hind), '11 ("will" as in Fred'll, the guy'll), t' (to as in t' see), and so on. The letter "a" frequently stands for "of" (e.g., kind a, lots a, out a) and also for "have" (e.g., he'd a, might a, must a, should a). In both cases it is written as a separate word, "a" also frequently means "to", but in such cases it is appended to the preceding word (e.g., gonna, gotta, hafta, oughta, wanna). "An" and "n" both stand for "and" and are spelled with no apostrophe. " 'n" stands for both 11

Len 12

Introduction just exactly like what I had thought ginseng pickers must look like. Imagine my surprise, then, when I happened to ask Len what he and Ken White had been doing, one time, way over the other side of Kennabi Lake, and Len replied, "Diggin jinksen." Although I immediately recognized "sang" for what it was in Kentucky, I had to ask Len to repeat what he had said here in Haliburton, where I have spent a good part of my life. From his description I immediately realized what he was talking about. I had known that it had occasionally been farmed in southern Ontario, but I had no idea that it had been found wild all over Haliburton and widely picked and sold in the old days. Kentucky I was familiar with, but not Ontario. The same thing happened with moonshine. I have always loved all the stories about moonshiners and revenuers in South Carolina, Tennessee, and the hills of Kentucky, but that there might have been the same activity in Haliburton never even flitted through my mind. I knew that most of eastern Haliburton had been dry since at least 1910 and that people used to go to Gooderham by train to get liquor, but I never suspected that the area had once been very active in moonshining. Surely I would have heard about it. One day, however, during a perfectly routine conversation on the local place names - Newbatt's Hay Marsh, Flour Barrl Lake, Johnny's Marshes - I asked Len how Whisky Bay on Grace Lake came by its name. "That's where they had their still there Charlie Earle and Clarence Godfrey — a long, long time ago. They made moonshine in there for years. Both good drinkers, ya know. There's a cove in there going through to Farquhar Lake. You just go in there, I'd say two hundred yards, and you come into this cove, and there's a wall of rock on your right hand side comes straight down and the same on the left side. It was a death trap on deer. But anyway, before you come to this cove, they had their still in there on Little Pine Crick, I'd say roughly fifty yards from where it empties into Grace Lake. You couldn't see it

Originally I planned to write a book about how I built my log cabin in the bush. What, I thought, could be more enthralling? I soon found out. Fascinated as I was with the project, everyone I talked to seemed to have trouble maintaining interest in the subject for more than sixty seconds - unless I was talking about Len, in which case they would listen attentively, hanging on every detail, and say what an interesting old fellow he must be. All my good stories seemed to be about Len. People would say, "You really ought to write a book about him." I came to the conclusion that they were right. In the end, I decided to write a book about life in eastern Haliburton in the early decades of this century with Len's life and times as its focus and Len's memory as its main source. It has always seemed ironic to me that folklorists so often travel far afield to do their collecting. They rarely look about on their own doorstep first. It took an American from Texas, for example, to unearth a genuine vampire cult near Barry's Bay, Ontario. It just seems to be human nature to assume that faraway places are more interesting and unusual than our own backyards, and often we know more about other cultures than our own. Ask someone from Ontario about logging and river drives, and he'll tell you about French Canadian lumberjacks and the famous draveurs, but he probably will know little or nothing about how things were done in Ontario. I, too, have been guilty of this. Once, while cruising the backroads along the Kentucky-Indiana border, I picked up two old characters in grubby clothes and carrying large, low-slung leather pouches. Asked what they were doing, they said, "Deegin sang." Although this was about the only thing they said that I could make out, I was very pleased with myself for understanding this in particular. Having read extensively about the customs of the area, I knew that "sang" was the local variant of the word ginseng. I had read all about the plant and how it was gathered, and these two old fellows looked 13

bottle from the upstairs window of the Spears and Lauder bunkhouse?" "No," I said, "it doesn't mention that." "Well that's your real church history," huffed Len. "I can tell ya all about that. A bunch a lads was up there on Sunday night, celebratin, and one lad says, 'Here comes the preacher.' Preacher was jus like ol Flannelfoot down here, ya know. Both a them were death on drink. So they got the window open and everything ready, all the empty whisky bottles lined up, and I guess they jus plastered him, one damn bottle after the other. One bottle pinned him right in the back of the head. Knocked his hat right off and damn near knocked him out. They had quite a time over it. Big fuss. There was talk about it for a long time afterwards. That's church history, ain't it? That's what "you should put in your book." I came to agree with him. To understand the times, one needs oral history, stories, and even legends. This is one of the strengths of Nila Reynolds' book, In Quest of Yesterday, which is devoted to all of the Provisional County of Haliburton and records quite a bit of local oral history. This became the aim of my book: to record things that might otherwise not have been recorded. It is only after completing this book that I fully realize what an exceptional informant I have had in Len. He has spent his whole life in or around Wilberforce. He goes to Bancroft and the town of Haliburton occasionally, less often to Peterborough, and has only been as far away as Toronto a few times in his life. He hates the city. After spending several days in Kitchener when his daughter got married, he told me that he'd had "a bellyful of the city. The way they move down there, you'd think there was a forest fire after them." Len rarely even goes to "downtown" Wilberforce. Dudley and Harcourt Townships are what he really knows - the east half of Dudley and the west half of Harcourt to be exact - and no one will ever know them again the way he does. Len has exceptionally good recall, perhaps because his mind is free of trivia unrelated to his daily life. He can even remember things like the very words his bunkmate Wheeler Patterson said during a nightmare at Willows' lumber camp in the twenties! Nor is his memory narrowly selective. Once he has told you what he thinks is interesting, you can press him for all manner of minute details, and he will usually

from the shore and, of course, at that time there were no tourists arsin aroun to see your smoke either. But don't try it nowadays. You wouldn't be in there half an hour and some bastard'd report ya. They had everything there - worm, kettle -1 seen where they made it. The old ashes and the stones are there yet longside of the crick." "Oh hell," Len went on, "they weren't the only ones aroun here makin shine." Story after story about moonshining followed (see chapter 5, "The Far Camp," for a sampling). The more I talked to Len about the past, the more I came to realize that all kinds of interesting activities that were associated in my mind with other places had gone on right in Haliburton. Not only were ginseng and illicit whisky very much a part of early life in the area, but Haliburton also had its own log drivers and mad trappers. I found that the social and oral history of early Haliburton was every bit as complex and colourful as that of anywhere else. What worried me, however, was that much of it was fading away unrecorded. Not that there had been no interest. For the centennial of Monmouth Township, for example, a worthwhile little book called Monmouth Township 1881-1981 was put together locally. I showed it to Len, thinking he might be interested. "What does it say about Wilberforce?" he asked. "It tells about life here in the old days and talks about some of the old families in the area." "What does it say about our family?" asked Len. "Well," I said apologetically, "there isn't a section on your family, but it does mention your dad here and there." "Hell," said Len indignantly, "my old man ownded the whole village at one time and sold off all the lots." "It does mention that," I replied, already regretting the direction the conversation had taken. "The people who put the book together naturally wrote about the families they happened to know best." "What the hell else does it say?" asked Len scornfully. "Well, you know, a lot of church history and stuff," I answered evasively. "Church history," snapped Len. "Does it tell you about the time Frank McCully pinned the preacher on the back of the head with a whisky 14

be able to remember everything you want, right down to details of dress or speech. If he forgets something, he does not try to invent, but simply tells you that he cannot remember, and then goes and broods on it, often coming up with the answer a week or so later. A last thing that makes him a reliable informant is that he has no tendency to self-aggrandizement. He tells you all about other interesting people, but often has to be pressed for information about himself. For example, even his son, Gord, knew nothing of Len's Hemlock Camp at Buck Lake, although he had been within one hundred yards of it many times. Len had shown him and told him all about the Ram's Pasture, which was built by Ike Austin, but he never thought to mention the log cabin he built all by himself with only an axe. On one level, of course, this book is about Len and is often presented through his eyes. On another level, however, I hope that it transcends the personality of Len and catches something of the fabric of his times. Through the prism of an individual, I have tried to present a picture of the general life of the time. While about Len Holmes and Wilberforce, this book is also about life in backwoods Ontario between 1900 and 1940, a life which had many things in common with life in other parts of rural North America, as well, of course, as unique differences. I hope that readers — wherever they may be — will enjoy making the connection with their own early lives or those of their parents and grandparents.

15

This page intentionally left blank

One

Meeting Len He had noticed the ominous humming outside the car. There is nowhere blackflies and mosquitoes like to lurk better than around gravel driveways choked with lush wet milkweed. Heat sensitive, they had swarmed about our hot car in eager anticipation. I made it very clear there was no way I was going up to the door alone, so Lionel grudgingly agreed to come with me. "We better go soon or the bloody mosquitoes will fly away with the car," he said, opening his door.

GRRrrrARFARFrrrr. Whatever it was just couldn't wait to get at us. Lionel hesitantly unlatched the car door and prepared to stick out a sandalled foot, but just as he was about to make his move, another round of furious uncontrolled barking started up. Turning pale, Lionel jerked the door closed just in time to prevent his foot from being savaged. "My God that was close," he said. "Where is the brute, anyway?" The barking had subsided to a low growling, difficult to pinpoint. Expecting the Hound of the Baskervilles, Lionel swivelled his head around rapidly, trying to spy out the dog's hiding place, but neither of us could see anything for the tall grass. "Geez," said Lionel, "all you want to do is look at a piece of property and have a little fun, and you gotta put up with this kind of thing." Lionel and I were checking out a piece of property that had looked very promising in the newspaper. We had called a Derek Hayes ("Realize a lifetime dream! Call Derek ... ") and been told that all we had to do if we wanted to see the property was to drive to some place called Wilberforce, go to the last house in town up on the hill at the big curve, and ask for Len. This Len would apparently take us in and show us all. We passed a blue and white sign bearing the illustrious surname of William Wilberforce, and seconds later spotted a pleasant little white frame house with green trim up on the hill. We turned off and drove up a long gravel driveway lined on both sides by tall grass and weeds. Lionel stopped the car about thirty feet from the house and said "Why don't you go up and see if he's home? Save me turning off the car."

It was at this moment that the dog had launched his attack and made his first pass at Lionel's foot. The disturbing thing was not being able to see it, though it could obviously see us. Every time Lionel moved the door handle, the barking would start up again, seemingly just outside the door. "Rich, I can't see the darn thing," said a progressively more concerned Lionel. "He's got to be right around the car, eh?" I suggested to Lionel that he roll down his window and try to get a look. He did so, cautiously, and then, to my surprise, burst out laughing. "You're not going to believe this. It's a little wee mutt only about a foot high." "Well," I said, "go ahead and get out then. You know how to handle dogs." I was playing on his pride. He has always been proud of his way with dogs. "Yeah, dogs don't scare me," said Lionel, as if trying to convince himself, slowly reopening the door a crack. SNAPPETY SNAP SNAP. It was all clicking ivory and horrendous growling. Sensing a coward on the other side of the door, the dog was really putting on a show. "Come on up. Hell, he won't hurt ya," said a voice at once disdainful, amused, and encouraging. 17

We looked up, and there coming down the driveway was an old guy with white hair and a heavily tanned face, shaded by a faded green long-billed cap. He was wearing a pair of work pants and a work shirt, both of which had at one time been green and neither of which were any strangers to the washtub. Leaning slightly backward and tucking in his shirt while hitching up his pants, the old man repeated, not without a shade of contempt, "He won't hurt ya's. Jus get right out. Ol Perk don't bite, less he figgers you're ascared of him." "The heck he doesn't," muttered Lionel to himself, adding to me, "Tell the old gaffer to call his mutt off and then we'll get out." I opened my door, hopping out in my long pants and leather boots, and said: "Hi, you must be Len Holmes." "Yeah," answered Len, "is your partner scairt a dogs?" "Heck no. He grew up with dogs," I said. "Don't look like it to me," said Len, watching Lionel peering out the window and holding the door open just a crack. Len walked around the car and casually drop-kicked Perky about forty feet down the hill into the long grass and said, as if nothing had taken place at all, "I spose youse is the fellas from the city wantin to see the Hayes property." "That's right," said Lionel, now out in the driveway, adding in self-justification, "I've got shorts on." "I see that," said Len, apparently having no idea that Lionel was making a pathetic attempt to re-establish the old dog-trainer image, now gone forever from my mind. Had we come to see the Hayes property? How much of it did we want to see? When did we want to see it? Nascent growling in the nowmoving grass. Lionel anxiously shooting glances over his shoulder and swatting mosquitoes. I knew right away that I was going to like this man. I can still remember standing in his driveway watching the blackflies crawling unhurriedly over that white forehead, while he got launched on "the ol days", telling us how he first took Derek Hayes' parents into the property that they eventually bought. At first, I was lost in admiration at how he treated the flies with such utter disdain; then I realized that he was not even aware that there were any flies around. Interested as I was in Len's story, I found it difficult to concentrate on it, since Lionel, whose legs by now looked like a bunch of grapes, was

smacking fly after fly in a losing battle against the bloodthirsty hordes. Finally noticing Lionel's dilemma, Len asked, "Is the flies bothering ya? We could go up to the house." "They don't normally bother me, but I have short pants on," replied Lionel. "Yeah, I can see that," said Len, with a completely impassive face, although I was sure that I saw just a trace of a crinkle in the crow's feet around his eyes. Eyeing Lionel's bleeding legs, Len advised: "Before ya's goes into the bush, youse should put on some of that there bug dope you got in them spray cans in your car." "They're pretty bad in the bush, eh?" asked Lionel. "Oh Christ, they'll chew the preem piss right out a ya," said Len. "The deer flies'll rip pieces out a ya and then fly up onto a branch to chew em." Genuinely disturbed by this prospect and willing to avail himself of serious advice, Lionel produced two containers of leading-brand bug spray and asked Len which of these two products he considered the most deadly. Feeling a bit sorry for Lionel and unable to do him on any further, Len decided to give him some serious advice. "Well, you go into the bush, and fin' two stumps and spray them with that stuff, and then run for cover, cause the goddam flies'll swoop down like hell out for recess. No, there's no use a using that junk at all. Come on up to the kitchen and I'll see if I can get the old lady to give us some tea." It was no accident that he specified the kitchen. Over the years, much of my time at Len's house has been spent in the kitchen, sitting around the table eating meals or drinking tea, trying to get as close to the wood stove as possible in the winter and as far away from it as possible in the summer. "This here's my wife, Ida," Len told us as we entered, and then pointing at us he told her, "These is the chaps from the city who come up to see the Hayes' property." Ida is a tall woman about fourteen years younger than Len, with short curly sand-coloured hair and glasses. I have come to know her well. She makes the best mooseburgers and butter tarts in the world and loves to play cards. In fact, she is one of the craftiest euchre players between Tory Hill and Bird's Creek and has the trophies on display to prove it. 18

description of her travails with the flies, and he made an intelligent comment about every sandfly bite she could muster on her arms and legs. Frankly, I couldn't find any marks at all, but Lionel seemed to see each one clearly. "It don't do no damn good to just say ya seen it," Len explained to me later. "You gotta have a look and a good close one at that. Gawd, I'd like to see her back in the bush at my Far Camp for a few days. Then she'd whistle Redwing, I'll betcha." While Lionel and Ida were engrossed in discussion of fly bites and their remedies, I had a chance to get a better look at Len, who now had his cap off, revealing a milk-white forehead permanently protected from the sun, and was enjoying a cup of tea so strong you could stand a spoon up in it - "jus the way I like it." He has a full head of white hair, long on the top and cut very short on the sides, but the most notable feature of his face is his wrinkle-free smooth skin. Derek's mother, whom we called The Duchess, and who had known Len since the thirties when she and her husband, Charlie, had started coming up to the area to fish, always raved about Len's skin whenever we would talk

Ida always tries to persuade Len to go with her to the card parties, but he prefers to stay home "and watch television", as he puts it. "What," says Ida, "you watch television?" Then, to me: "He's sound asleep five minutes after I'm out the door." This, of course, makes Len wild. He claims that he doesn't ever sleep except in bed. What I have observed over the years forces me to admit that Ida is right in this case. As soon as dinner is over at five-thirty, they move into the living room to watch TV and within minutes, Len's head is down. "Le-en," says Ida in a firm voice. "LE-EN," she repeats, until Len's eyes finally open. "You're sleeping." "The hell I was," says Len. "Well it sure looked like it. You had your eyes closed. Didn't he Richard?" Ida gets all worked up about Len's drowsing in the evenings. I once pointed out that it didn't seem to me like anything to worry about since Len rises every morning at six o'clock, eats a large breakfast, is out on the trail by eight, spends all day outside working, and then comes home and eats a big dinner beside the wood stove, which is enough to make anyone sleepy. Unconvinced by my logic, Ida once consulted the family doctor about Len's evening napping, and she was quite miffed when all that he recommended was that she should try to find more interesting TV programmes. She had grudgingly admitted to the doctor that Len never falls asleep during hockey games. It makes her understandably bitter that right near the end of some gripping murder mystery, Len will get up and announce that he is going to bed. I remember one time when she asked him, "How can you go to bed right at the crucial moment?" "Well, ya see," said Len disdainfully, turning to me for support, "Hockey games is real, but this is all jus heifer dust." Lionel took to Ida right away because she was so sympathetic about his ravaged legs, immediately producing a bottle of Dettol and giving them a thorough swabbing to relieve the itching. This turned out to be a twofold blessing, because the one thing Perky hates more than anything else is the smell of Dettol, and he never came near Lionel again that day. Now, whenever we go to Len's, Lionel carries his bottle of Dettol. Ida, in turn, took right to Lionel, because he listened with close attention to her

The Duchess at Cross Lake with the seat of her pants torn

19

iburton. After some four miles of whacking and bumping - Len occasionally pushed it as high as twenty miles an hour - we suddenly turned off into some high grass and shrubbery, where a man with good vision could just make out two old tire tracks. "Is this it?" asked Lionel, crestfallen. "No," said Len, "this is just the beginning of the road in. I call er the Wildcat Trail, but it ain't all that bad. I cut er out near the end of the First World's War for a cadge road." "What's a cadge road?" asked Lionel. "It's a road used for cadgin," said Len, adding after a moment's thought, "for drawin in your cadge to your camps, d'ya see." "Oh," said Lionel. Not wishing to expose our ignorance, neither of us pressed the issue any further. I later found out that a cadge road was a wagon road used to draw provisions and supplies - cadge into hunting and logging camps. I will certainly never forget that first trip in. After Len nosed his truck down the first hill to a swiftly flowing creek and inched his way through the rocks in the foot-deep water and up the steep bank on the far side, he said to Lionel, "Too bad youse didn't bring your car." Missing the irony, Lionel, who had long since realized that his big convertible would barely have made the Burleigh Road (it just clears the white line on the highway), ingenuously replied, "I don't

Len (left) guiding Charlie Hayes south of Barnum Lake looking west towards Kennabi Lake

about him. Like most people in their eighties, the Duchess had her fair share of wrinkles; what she couldn't understand was how Len, who is outside all day long, winter and summer, and who never uses any lotions or creams of any kind - other than one special unguent for sunburn made from horse manure - could have that smooth baby skin. He is well preserved. No doubt about it. All my friends' wives rave about how good-looking he is. After Lionel and Ida had exhausted the topic of fly bites, Ida packed a tasty lunch and filled three thermoses with tea. Lionel and I then accompanied Len out to his old four-wheel-drive truck. Lionel took one look at it and cavalierly offered to take his convertible, but he did not demur when Len said that we would probably be better off in his truck. "Hope the old crate holds together," whispered Lionel with a smirk. "Better humour the old boy." If Len noticed that Lionel had whispered some remark, he decided just to let it pass. We swung out of Len's driveway onto the highway and turned left, heading northeast from town. After about half a mile, we turned onto the Burleigh Road, which runs north from Wilberforce to join up with the old Kennaway Road that comes across from Fox's Corners near Hal20

We bumped methodically along in "mocassin low".

think it would have made it." Atta boy, Lionel, I thought to myself, way to humour the old guy. It was kind of like being on safari. In the open places the grass, Joe-Pye weed, tall meadow rue, and jewel weed were over five feet high. Where the underbrush threatened the road, which was most of the way, the raspberries and elderberry bushes had grown up so densely that at times you could hardly see where you were going. After crawling along for about a third of a mile, we passed two large piles of twenty-foot hardwood logs that Len said had been "jus layin there rottening" for about five years already. Just beyond these derelict logs, we descended a steep hill, crossed a second small creek, and then began a seemingly endless climb up what Len appropriately called the Big Hill, all the while maintaining our initial speed of one mile an hour in "mocassin low". "I could have walked in faster," Lionel told me later with a smirk. At least twice on the Big Hill I went rigid all over as we drove along on what seemed to me to be about a forty-five-degree cant with a steep drop-off on the downhill side. I still can remember my relief at reaching the top of that hill and getting off the side-graded road. There was a lovely breeze, and the view out over the valley was staggering.

From the top of the Big Hill, the quality of the road sharply deteriorated, becoming a long alternation of uneven rock and swampy ground. "Should put a bulldozer over this," said Lionel peevishly, as he lurched from side to side like a rag doll. "Bulldozer wouldn't do no good," said Len. "Oh, why not?" challenged Lionel. "They's two things a bulldozer ain't no good in," said Len, "bedrock an loonshit bog and that's what you're lookin at right here." "Well, that's true," allowed Lionel, as if he knew something about it. At the end of the high ground we had to go along "Len's cutoff". There was no choice. The old part of the road was grown up with saplings and cluttered with fallen branches. Len cleared this short cut with his first chainsaw, and so as not to damage the chain and get dirt and grit in the saw, he cut all the trees about three inches from the ground. Over the years, tires had scratched the earth away around each stump so that they now stood up about five inches in many spots. But Len didn't seem to mind. He just slowed down a little - you can't slow down much when you're only doing one mile an hour - and we bumped methodically along until we came to a 21

As Lionel looked at me in disbelief, Len, without looking directly at him, thrust the can into Lionel's unwilling hands and said, "Youse might as well start bailin while I get the oars." "Geez," said Lionel, when Len had left, "he doesn't expect us to go in that old tub, does he? We'll never get the water out of it." As we stood in confusion, contemplating the two onetime rowboats, we heard a sound that was music to our ears - the sound of aluminum being dragged over rock. "If youse guys can't bail faster 'n that, we better take my little alumium boat here," said Len, deadpan. "What the hell?" whispered the now thoroughly bewildered Lionel, eyes darting back and forth between the wooden and aluminum boats, "I thought... " "Better humour the old boy, Lionel," I said, "better humour him." After we had put the aluminum boat into the water, Len disappeared into the trees again and returned a minute later with a set of oars, kept cunningly hidden in case of uninvited visitors. Soon we were out from shore, rowing around the lake, admiring the property, and Lionel's and my spirits picked up considerably. I still remember what a beautiful day it was and how the sun sparkled blindingly on the water. The smell of pine and hemlock was allpervasive. Lionel and I scrutinized every inch of the shoreline, imagining cabin sites here and fishing spots there. After rounding the first big point and getting most of the way down the lake, Lionel spied an extremely attractive little point and said, "Geez, that'd be a dandy place to have lunch." I later learned it was even called "Hayes' Picnic Rock". "Bit early yet," said Len, "we'll find a good spot down the next lake." "O.K.," agreed Lionel unenthusiastically, mastering his hunger perforce. After we had pulled the boat over the beaver dam "acrost the nahrras" between the two lakes, we rowed out of a bay and into the main part of the second lake, heading up the lake and into its long north arm. I began to question Len about the local wildlife as we laboured slowly down the lake. The conversation somehow quickly swung onto wolves, and being a longtime admirer and supporter of the wolf, I was delighted to hear there were quite a few in the vicinity. I spoke long and passionately about the noble though much-misunderstood wolf, stress-

corner where the road just seemed to disappear. In actual fact the road simply dropped precipitously and swung sharply to the right. During our descent, Len had his head out the window, the better to see the road. Or so we thought. "Still a few deer left in the country yet," he said. "Buggers has been crossin here again. Doe an a fawn." As Lionel put it later, "He was looking for bloody deer tracks while we were going over that cliff! I thought we were goners!" Not long after this drop-off, we came to a short but extremely steep climb called Boundary Hill because, as Len informed us, the line between the townships of Dudley and Harcourt crosses the road right at the top of this hill. More important, at least from my point of view, was the fact that at the top of this hill we entered the Hayes property - soon to become mine and Lionel's. After stuttering up Boundary Hill, Len nudged the old truck around to the right and began the long gentle descent to the lake. A good half a mile further we saw the lake up ahead, none too soon as far as Lionel and I were concerned. After Len had parked his truck in a little clearing by the lake, Lionel and I jumped out, glad to be alive, and rushed down to the shore, where we found an extremely decrepit old dock made of rotten inch-thick barnboard nailed crossways over four enormous cedar logs. We carefully picked our way out onto the dock and, as we were admiring the view, we noticed two ancient green wooden rowboats with rusted chains, one of which was completely sunken, and the other of which, while not actually on the bottom, was floating with only its oarlocks above water. Len arrived carrying the lunch, some cushions, and a large empty can, evidently to be used as a bailer.

Wolf kill on Big Straggle

22

Wonderful deer country, ya know.

ing not only his physical grace and beauty, but also his crucial role in the great scheme of nature. Fortunately I had not yet gone too heavy on the beneficial role played by the wolf in maintaining a healthy deer population before Lionel asked if there were many deer in the area. "Would be if it wasn't for the goddam wolves," said Len matter-of-factly, as if he had not heard anything I had said. "They're hell on deer, ya know. Kill the deer out on the lakes in the winter and run the does in March when they're heavy with fawn. Christ, I seen me fin' three kills out on the ice of this lake in one day. Yeah, get rid a them bastard wolves and you'll see the deer come back quick enough. Wonderful deer country, ya know. Pure cat's arse." "Uh, how's the fishing?" asked good old Lionel, for once sensing it just might be time to change the topic of conversation. "It'd be a damn sight better," said Len testily, still exercised about the wolves, "if it weren't for the Christly loons and herring." "Herring?" I asked. "I wouldn't have thought there'd be any herring in a lake like this." "See one practically every time I come in," said Len. "How big do they run?" asked Lionel, his curiosity peaked. "Oh, bout three or four feet," said Len. "Three or four feet?" exclaimed Lionel in disbelief, probably already dreaming of a worldrecord herring on his cabin wall. "Yeah, or bigger," said Len; then, sensing something was amiss, he added, "Some people calls them cranes, ya know." "Oh, you mean herons" said Lionel. "Yeah," said Len, "but some people calls them cranes." It turned out that Len had a culprit for anything that was not quite as it should be in

the area. The wolves "pruned hell" out of the deer. The loons ate the young fish in the deep water, and any that they missed were cleaned up by the great blue herons in the shallows. There would be plenty of partridges if it weren't for the damn hawks and owls. You can hardly expect to see lots of rabbits if you're going to let your foxes just run around like they owned the place. Being a great lover of wolves, loons, herons, owls, and foxes, I decided just to keep my mouth shut and wait until something came up that we could really agree on. It wasn't long in coming: neither of us, it turned out, think much of bears. I dislike them because of the problems I have had keeping them away from my food when camping out, and Len actively hates them because they chewed up several of his bark canoes and because they always rip the tarpaper off his various camps scattered through the bush. He's never forgiven the species for the bark canoe that was destroyed at his camp on Bill's Lake in particular, and he never will. That kind of thing does not endear the bear to a woodsman. When the conversation later returned to deer, Len expressed the view very forcefully that to bring the deer back, they ought to just close down the hunting season for five full years and when they reopen it, "close off the damn dogs". Here was something else we could agree on. As a matter of fact, as the conversation progressed I realized that not only would he never bother to shoot a loon or a heron, but also that like all real oldtime trappers he was a conservationist of necessity. It turned out that the only thing on which we really disagreed was wolves. I like them. He doesn't. However, I must say I became a little more understanding of his view after he told me the following story. 23

While dawdling down that second lake, talking about deer and wolves, we passed at least six dandy picnic sites, each one duly noted and commented upon by the now-ravenous Lionel. As we drew near the end of the long arm, however, the lake began to shallow out, becoming very weedy, and the shoreline became swampy, changing from white birch to speckled alder, pincherry, and cedar. Landing right in the middle of perhaps the least hospitable spot we had seen up to that point on the whole grand tour, and sending up clouds of angry flies as our boat nudged the shrubbery along the shore, Len announced, "We might as well eat our fixins here." Practically gagging from the stench of swamp gas as we pulled up the boat, Lionel, not yet resigned to the idea, said, "Why here?" "This is the beginning of the portage up to Rock Lake," explained Len. "Ya's said ya's wanted to see it on account of it's part of the property, didn't ya's?" "Oh yeah, definitely," said Lionel, "but I was just thinking that maybe we should get over to Rock Lake and have lunch there so we could

The damn wolves was so close you could hear their teeth snappin.

"I mind when my father was working for the Harper Lumber Company up at Benoir's Lake. He was millwright for the firm there. I used to go in on Saturday nights and get him, with the buggy n horse. And you'd hear these goldarn wolves, and the horse, if it started to snort, you knew damn well there was a bear not too far from ya. At that time, you know, there was a lot more animals - lot more bear an wolves - in the country than there is today. One time, goin acrost the Long Crossway there before Elephant Lake, the damn wolves was so close you could hear their teeth snappin in the bush. Ol horse danced the whole damn crossway from end to end on his back legs. I was only a young gaffer an I didn't have no gun with me. I was scairt out a my wits. Figured them buggers was gonna come and get me for sure. By gol, I didn't think too much of it." 24

told no lie. The mosquitoes in that tall grass were frightening. You'd need a transfusion if you spent more than ten minutes there. Consequently we lost no time getting out on the lake in the breeze where we had a blessed respite from the flies for an hour as we examined the shoreline at our leisure. At about three o'clock, Len began to dig in his pants' pocket and eventually drew forth an ancient tin pocket watch - "my ol Waltham" and announced that it was time to be getting back if we were to be home for supper. At the mention of this, Lionel noticeably perked up, and since we had pretty well seen the whole property now, we readily agreed to go back. Exactly two hours later, after the trip back down the lakes and another harrowing ride over the Wildcat Trail, we pulled into Len's driveway and were delighted to be told by Ida that we had better make it fast if we wanted something to eat. We were all at the table in one minute flat, and Len, digging right in without a moment's delay, said, "Git at er, boys. I'm waitin on ya like one hog waits on another." Len can really put it away, and not just for a guy his age, either. He's a real meat-and-potatoes, nofrills eater who likes venison, moosemeat, and beef in that order and lots of it on the table. After stowing away two incredible helpings of first course, Len declined a third helping, saying "No thanks. I know my limits." "He knows them, all right, but he never stops at them," volunteered Ida. "Hell," said Len, in mock offence, "the doctor over in Minden tole me, Tor a man your age,' he says, 'y°u're definitely underweight.' " "You lie like heck," said Ida. "Well, I ain't the eater I used to be," said Len in self-defence. "Thank God for that," said Ida. "Pore ol Len. Hafta stan twice to make a shadow," said Len in mock self-pity, pretending to feel hard put-upon. These give-and-takes, as I later learned, are a ritual at the Holmes' table, almost like saying grace. Whenever I sit down to dinner with them, Len will try to get Ida's goat by saying something like, "Ya might as well give Richard the biggest helping. Ya always do." This, no matter how carefully Ida has divided everything into exactly equal portions. He then proceeds to go on pitifully about how hard he works around the place and all he sees is "favouritism" and that it's a wonder he gets enough to keep

watch it while we're eating." Lionel then whispered to me under his breath, "I can't hack these flies, can you?" "We could," said Len, "but there's an awful lot of flies over there." "Great," said Lionel with bitter irony, "we'll eat lunch here." "Sandwiches, boys?" said Len, passing a package neatly wrapped in wax paper to each of us. "Dig in fore they go bad." Lionel wasted no time acting upon the advice. He took nearly half the first sandwich in one bite. There was a look of growing concern on his face as he slowly chewed it and then surreptitiously pried open the bread and peered inside. Finally swallowing, Lionel said to Len as nonchalantly as possible: "What kind of sandwiches are they?" "Head cheese," said Len. "Head cheese?" said Lionel. "Yeah, head cheese," said Len, eating with relish. At the time, neither Lionel nor I were sure just exactly what head cheese was, but even thinking about it nearly made Lionel sick. "I can't eat this, Richie," whispered Lionel, disposing of his sandwiches on the sly behind a log and feeling very sorry for himself. Finally, fed up with the flies, Lionel decided he would at least go in for a wade and cool off. Lionel is a water dog. "I wouldn't wade out there if I was you," said Len, as Lionel quickly sank up to his waist in black stinking muck. "Smells like somebody took a crap around here, don't it," he added to me, clearly enjoying the situation. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so pathetic: poor Lionel up to his waist in muck, hungry, with clouds of flies swarming his head, enviously watching old Len sitting on a log in his faded cap, loudly munching on his second sandwich, enjoying every bite and totally oblivious of the flies. How I ever later persuaded Lionel to help buy the property, I'll never know. After a long lunch - Len likes to relax and savour every mouthful of tea - we hiked over to Rock Lake for a look at this corner of the property. Beside the landing at Rock Lake was a large grassy clearing which we learned was once the site of a two-storey bunkhouse for loggers. There was hardly a trace left other than some old rotten boards and pieces of a rustedout iron cookstove, but even this was enough to fire the imagination. As for the flies, Len had 25

alive. He will never trade, however, if you say, "O.K. crybaby. Let's trade. Here, take mine," because in actual fact he always has the biggest helping and knows it. Instead, he'll say, "I don't want your dirty old dinner. Ya probably already licked it, ya son of a bitch. Go ahead. Make a hog of yourself." Eating dinner is never dull with Len around, particularly when it comes to pie time. I do not say dessert time, because for Len this means pie time. A meal without pie is hardly worth eating as far as he is concerned. He can eat it every day and never tire of it. At that iirst meal, Lionel and I made the mistake of going too heavy on the first course and could only eat two pieces of pie each. Len raised a terrible fuss over who got the biggest piece and over not getting a third piece, "spite a my two being the thinnest ones". In reality, his two had comprised almost a whole pie, although he swore up and down that they had not. While we were drinking our after-dinner tea, Len began to reminisce. It did not take long to realize that hunting, trapping, and fishing were his main interests. Lionel and I sat there spellbound for over an hour as one hunting story followed another. That night on the way back to the city, I confessed to Lionel how much I would like to go deer hunting with Len to see how it was done in the old style. Somehow or other, I told him, I was going to get myself invited on a hunt. I just had to figure out how. "Good thing you finally shut up about those wolves," said Lionel. At last - one point for Lionel. My defence of wolves had certainly not bettered my chances. I was, in fact, a long time waiting for that invitation, but eventually it came and in the end my wish was fulfilled.

26

Two

Hunting with Len "Yeah, deer is damnable scarce anymore aroun here," he said, "but, I'd kind a like to have one more hunt. My legs ain't what they used to be, an if I don't go this fall, well, there might be such a thing as I won't be able to go next year. Can't take the walkin like I used to, ya know." Len had apparently decided to play up this angle, hoping thereby to convince Ida that he should go hunting this year. He talked most of the evening about deer hunting and how it might - indeed probably would - be his last chance to go, and it became clear that he was going come hell or high water. His plan was to go in and stay at Derek's cabin on Pine Lake for six days and to hunt Derek's and my properties and the four hundred acres north of them, which were owned by a woman who had given him hunting rights. To my surprise, I was not only asked to come along myself, but even to bring up my neighbour, Remo, with whom Len had talked hunting the summer before. Although this was my big chance, I was of two minds whether to accept or not. On the one hand I certainly wanted the chance to spend a week in the bush with Len. On the other hand I had always made it abundantly clear to Derek's wife, Susan, that I was in full agreement with her strong anti-hunting sentiments and with her view that anyone who could even countenance killing helpless animals was a Neanderthal. Moreover, during lengthy discussions with Len and Gord, I had done nothing to dispel their assumption that I was not only a keen deer hunter but also had taken quite a few deer mainly bucks - in my day. I had shot groundhogs ... once.

"Oh there was a lot more bear in those days," said Len. "My God, you can go up - well it was back some years ago - why you went through that hardwood between Watt's Lake and Lakings's Number Seven and in those places where there was beech flats up in there, my God! Prett near every beech tree ya come to was all tore to hell where they'd been up and down it after the beech nuts. We never even bothered goin after them. Most a the lads shot em cause they were watchin for deer and the bear come out to them. I never had a gang come up here jus to go for bear themselves. Jus the deer hunters. But I hunted all over through there towards Lakings's lumber camp there — I was in that section for three, four years - an prett near every year somebody killed a bear over in there. I seen me one year — we had a great big bear one of the hunters shot and I think it was four deer — we had to take two horses in. Took my dad's horses in there; skid em out single file. And one horse there - oh, he was an awful good horse, but boys he hated the smell of a bear - he just walked most of the way out to the wagon on his hin' legs. I had to hold im. If I'd a ever fell down, he'd a got away on me. He'd a been going about sixty miles an hour, likely; he hated bear, the smell." "He felt about bears just about the same as you do, eh Dad," said Len's son, Gord, and we all laughed. It was an October evening, five years from the time when I vowed to Lionel that sooner or later I would get to hunt with Len, and Len and Gord and I were sitting around in the kitchen talking about hunting. Len kept turning the conversation to deer hunting in particular, and I soon discovered why. 27

In the end, I accepted Len's invitation, unable to resist a golden opportunity to see how the real old-timers used to hunt. (Only later, after I was introduced to the fine art of "doggin", did I have second thoughts about his reasons for wanting to include me in the hunt.) I comforted myself with the knowledge that there were precious few deer around and that my chances of seeing one, let alone having to shoot at it, were almost nil. As for bears, I knew that shooting one would cause me no emotional trauma. Later, when Len told me that bears in front of dogs tend to run at you almost as fast as deer, "teeth just aclackin", I got cold feet about bears as well. But it was too late. I was committed. I solved my initial dilemma, first by explaining that I was probably a bit rusty, not having hunted all that much during the past few years, and second by making it quite clear that Susan Hayes was not under any circumstances ever to find out I had been involved. On the first count, I was exposed almost immediately. On the second count, I was rather more successful: no one breathed a word to Susan about any hunt at all, let alone my having participated in one. As it turned out, fortunately for me, Len and Gord (the latter only when sober) run a bit scared of Susan too. Len was very pleased at the prospect of having Remo and me accompany him and Gord. This would give us three men to do the "watchin" and one man to do the "doggin", as Len put it. Although I had no idea what this meant, I nodded knowingly in agreement. I shall not render a full account of the endless tiresome innuendoes and wisecracks about my reluctantly admitted relative lack of experience; little did they know it was total. It was clear that this kind of thing was half the fun of the hunt for the old man, so I decided to be a good sport and defend myself as well as I could. "Don't forget your rubber pants," yelled Len from the porch the next morning as I left for the city to arrange things with Remo and try to get the next week off. I phoned Remo first thing, and he ecstatically accepted my invitation to go hunting and immediately subjected me to a whole barrage of stories of past successes and difficult shots made. Much of this I forgave, because in actual fact Remo really had shot a deer. One deer, but a deer is a deer, and this put him well ahead of me. Mind you, after a bout with homemade wine, Remo had once admitted to me that he had shot

his deer at rather close range - like about forty feet. He had gone with a gang to hunt in the Caledon Hills and the "guide", actually a local farmer, said, "You sit here and wait," and Remo sat there and waited. About an hour later the farmer, riding a tractor, drove the neighbourhood deer herd past all the hunters and Remo shot the old deer that grazed by closest to him, doubtless heading to the barnyard for a good feed of corn husks. (The frenzy of the hunt!) Of course by the time we reached Len's place and began to swap stories on the evening before heading into camp, Remo's story had undergone such a complete metamorphosis that I began to wonder if he hadn't perhaps shot two deer - one some skittish two-year-old buck that he nailed as it soared between two trees in a remote backwoods glade, and the other that geriatric fleabag with the sweet-tooth for Caledon corn. It was arranged that I would pick Remo up around suppertime on Saturday, so that we would arrive at Len's on Saturday night, leaving all day Sunday to get in and set up camp before the opening of the hunting season on Monday morning. I arrived at Remo's as dusk was falling and was somewhat nonplussed not to see Remo on the porch, packed and ready to go as promised. I walked up to the door and, as I went to ring the doorbell, a voice right beside me asked if I wanted to carry the stuff out to my landcruiser or if I wanted to come in for a cup of coffee. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Peering intently, I could just make out Remo in his camouflage hunting outfit and no-glare skin makeup about two feet away from me. "God, you scared me," I said. "Mister Pope," he replied, "no deer gonna see Remo until... ," and he menacingly raised his arms, aimed, and dropped a beautiful buck right on his front lawn. I later discovered from his wife that he had been dressed like that for the last two days and had been sitting on the porch ever since lunchtime. Remo takes his hunting seriously. We arrived at Len's around ten o'clock, and I decided to confess my lack of experience right away before things got out of hand. I told Len that I had never hunted deer with dogs and a gang before - hoping that he would assume the old deerslayer had done most of his deer hunting alone on foot, Indian style - and asked for a full rundown on how it was done. This turned out to have been a brilliant manoeuvre: not only did I get to find out all about what I was sup28

so fast..." was the leitmotif of his conversation for the next six days. This is what I learned that Saturday evening about how Len hunts deer. The men are all taken out into the bush and put on watches. A watch is anything from a log or branch to a rock or old wooden crate upon which a hunter sits and watches the surrounding area. Deer habitually travel the same paths and, when running before dogs, do not just tear around at random, but regularly race along one of a number of traditional runways. Thus, if the man running the hunt really knows the area, as Len knows his, all he has to do is to put a man on every possible runway; then, if the dogs start a deer, someone is going to get some shooting. I began to understand those old photographs of Len leading bunches of men into the woods, obviously taking them out to station them at their watches. "Watchin" having been made clear, "doggin" was now explained to me - all but one important detail. One or sometimes two men take the hounds on leash and make a wide cir-

Len (left) taking hunters to their watches, Cross Lake

posed to do, but also the desire to tease me was considerably dampened, superseded by the natural desire to instruct. Gord was particularly helpful in this instance, and I did not mind taking pointers from someone who had shot as many deer as he must have. After all, I reasoned, as Len's son he would have spent plenty of time helping his father run his big annual hunting parties. It did not occur to me until later that, having been born in 1956, he would have been too young to carry a gun until the late sixties which was just about the time the deer disappeared and Len gave up guiding hunters. I eventually discovered that the shameless creature had really only had one shot at a deer in his whole life and that he had missed that one by a country mile. One thing, however, was certain: there was no great intellectual debate tearing him apart as to whether he would be able to pull the trigger or not. I have never met anyone so eager to slay a deer. "If I see one a them suckers, I gonna drop him 29

cuit around the area so as to face the watches, and at a pre-arranged time, the dogger releases the hounds and begins to walk back towards the row of hidden hunters. The hounds range ahead and off to both sides, covering as much ground as possible, but keeping within calling distance and checking back with the dogger at intervals. The dogger himself makes as much noise as possible, both to put out any deer ahead of him and to avoid being mistaken for a deer, a thing that has been known to happen. "There was a huntin camp up at Fishtail Crick and they got Jack Dillman to guide them and be damned if he didn't get shot," said Len. "Don't suppose he lived more 'n a couple of hours. Shot in the stomach. I guess some damn fool took him for a deer. There's no excuse for that. You can't see what you're shootin at, don't shoot. It could be a man; you never know. That time, it was a man." If all goes as planned and there are any deer in the area, the dogs soon pick up the scent of a deer that has moved out ahead of them and they start up a wild howling and yelping known as "tonguing" and take off at full speed after the poor deer, which is by now heading as fast as it can go right towards one of the watches. I asked Len what would happen if the deer got smart and made a tight circle and headed straight back in the opposite direction. Stupid question. "Hell, that's when the pore ol dogger has some fun. Lots a times I seen me shoot deer coming right for me whiles I was doggin." "Okay," I said, "so what does the guy on the watch do when he sees the deer coming?" "Well, sometimes he shits his pants and sometimes all he has to do is pull the trigger," replied Len. "There might be such a thing, d'ya see, as more 'n one deer'll be comin at ya. "I mind one time my brother Les was workin up near the head a Grace Lake - late fall it was - an he tole me he seen deer tracks on the ice along the lakeshore, where the deer had been feedin on the cedar. I'll bet ya what you like,' I says, 'they're holed up in that little swale there just above Bob Walter's cottage.' I knew the runway up there, see, so up we went the next morning to see if we could get some meat. That was the fall nobody got any deer. There were plenty around, but they weren't takin the runways. "Les had a little perky-dog, a little wee lad didn't stan much more 'n a foot high and only run about five minutes, but that was all we needed. I went up to the point there on the south

side of Dunbar's Bay and watched up in the hardwood. There's a forks in there: one run goes off across the Burleigh Road, and the other goes right up over a pennacle. I watched right there, but I didn't watch for long. Les, he went down the lake and let the dog go and sure enough, they started comin. I seen seven deer comin at me. An eighth one took off across the ice and I never seen it at all. Anyways, I started shootin - had my little 30-30 Winchester carbine - and I dropped the first one, and the second one, third, fourth, by Jesus, I got six of them, one after the other. Seventh one got away. When I was through shootin, the barrl on the gun was hot. I started to work and had em all stuck when Les come along, an he says, 'Did you shoot?' 'Yeah,' I says, 'I shot.' And then he noticed a deer layin there in the snow an he says, Veil, you got one, anyway. But I heard quite a bit a shootin.' Then he looks around and sees another. 'Christ,' he says, 'ya got two.' Then he sees a third, and a fourth, fifth. 'Holy God,' he says, 'ya got five!' 'No,' I says, 'ya didn't count that one over there. I got six. Missed one. Not bad for a greenhorn, though." Ol Les nearly shit himself. He couldn't believe it. We dragged them all down to Bob Walter's cottage and skinned them in his icehouse. We never tole Bob about it. A lot a people got deer meat out a that. Ol Billy McColl, we give him two deer. He had a big family, ya know. Nobody went hungry that winter. Every speck of meat was cleaned up. But oh Christ there was a lot a deer in the country those days." I asked Len if there were any little tricks of the trade I should know that might make it easier to hit a running deer. "Well, what I often do," said Len, "is stay hid till the deer is well in range and then give a little yell, an they won't know where it come from and they'll stop just for a second to fin' out. Crack it to im right then. That's the time to use your shootin stick. Let im have it. Pour it right to im. That's your chance." So the trick obviously was to stay cool until a deer was practically upon you and only then to show your hand. "Yeah, ya have to wait until they're pretty close nowadays, cause in most places the bush is so thick ya can piss farther 'n ya can see. Not like the old days when the timber was still standing. You get into a country where the timber's never been taken out, why hell, you can see for - if it's not hilly - you can see for a quarter of a mile in the open hardwood. Now 30

Marsh hay n mud jus fly in

adays, with the timber gone, it's all grew up with brush. It's a mess, and a firetrap, also." Even with a twelve-gauge shotgun and SSG (the modern name for buckshot), you still can't be sure of downing a deer at long range. But rifle shooting is pretty well out of the question, not just because bullets tend to deflect too easily on small twigs and branches, but because stray bullets tend to lower the dogger's chances of survival, a thing most doggers are not too happy about. The last hour or so before bedtime was devoted to the subject of moose and bear. I had specifically asked about moose because, season or no, there was the occasional moose in the area and with my luck I figured I might run into one and I'd rather do time for shooting a moose out of season than be pulverized by the battering hooves of some antlered juggernaut. Would SSG bring down a moose? I was comforted to hear about the last moose Len had shot. He had used SSG and shot it with his old single shot "Ivory Johnson" shotgun, from which, according to Gord, he could get off three shots faster than most men can work the pumps on their repeaters. "Generally in the fall a the year I'll have a duck smock on and a sweater underneath it. I'll have SSG in one pocket and partridge shot in the other. But make sure they don't get mixed! You don't wanna be thumblin around, partridge 31

shot or SSG, with a bull moose standin there in front of ya." "Well," I said hopefully, after laughing a little louder and longer than was normal, "you're not likely to get charged away. I mean don't moose as a rule try to get away from you?" "Generally," said Len, "but not always. You shouldn't count on it. I remember when I was just a young gaffer seein two big moose strung up by the hin' legs on our barn floor, in the cow stable. Oh they were moose! One of them didn't try to get away. Yeah, that was Charlie Kelly and ol Davey Lee and Big Dave Pollard. Kelly, he was head boss at the Virginia Graphite Mine down here in town. I think it was Charlie shot those moose, right over here in Bick's Marsh. They were stayin in Bick's old lumber camp. I think Charlie Kelly had a salt lick out for deer in Bick's Marsh that summer. Anyway, why he shot this cow moose right at the salt lick. See moose is very fond of salt. Oh Christ, worse than a cow. They get a feed of salt, you can figure on them bastards gonna come back. But he shot the cow, and she let a roar or two out of her and the ol bull, he wasn't too far away, and this goddam bull jus come up the marsh pawin brush right and left and oh, mad as old hell. Marsh hay n mud jus flyin. By Jesus it was gonna at-

tack him, so he lit in with the rifle to it and he downed it just before it got him. Ol Charlie, he didn't want the second one, the bull. It was a case of have to. Him or the bull. Head on, by Jesus. Cow started to bawl, an the ol bull come rarin up that marsh, tag alders jus flyin. That was one moose that didn't run away." By now I was sorry that I had asked. I had always been led to believe that moose were very shy animals and would run away from you as fast as they could. This last story did nothing for my confidence. My only other secret worry was bears. I didn't like to bring up the subject myself, since they might get the idea that I was afraid of them, so I was relieved when the conversation just naturally swung onto bears. "You take your bear, now," said Len thoughtfully, perhaps reading my mind, "you can knock him down with SSG too. My oldest son Jim, he was death on bear. He was like me he liked to get after the bear. And by gol, I'll tell ya right now, if you heard that gun crack, why you knew damn well that bear wouldn't get away from im. Oh he shot different bear, but I mind one fall we were hunting in on the Wasman property north of Farquhar Lake and he shot a big bear there. I think that bear would a went over four hundred pounds. We were tuckered out. I don't know, but there must a been around nine or ten of us take turns draggin the bear out that night. He was a big bear. "Another time he shot one come out of a den there not too far from Kennabi Lake, between Yankton and Kennabi. I was up in there looking for beaver and I said to Jim, 'Well, let's go over to the Company's west line,' I says. There's a pond and a swamp over there and I

want to check it.' So we'd just left this marsh and going along this side hill - hardwood side of the hill - I just happened to take a glance down, and this big bear's head is stuck up there. It was through the top of a big turn-up there. And I said to Jim, I says, 'Look.' - Jim was carrying the shotgun; single barrl shotgun at that - 'Lookit there, Jim. Look at that lad.' Course soon as Jim spotted him, up come the gun. Took a peck at im. By gol, he missed him. Yeah. Anyway, the bear, he jumped from the top of this den down onto the ground and by that time Jim had another shell in the barrl. He didn't miss him the second time. I said, 'Make damn sure. Give it to im,' and Chris' he just, old bear just took a somersault right around, right upside down. It was a big big hide it was. An that was SSG. Knocked him stiff. After the bear was dead, we went down and I said, 'Now don't you go too close to im, Jim, just in case he's foxin.' Jim and I walked down to where he was and I give him a kick in the rear end and he never moved, so I says, 'He's all right.' And I says, 'Let's take a look at the den,' and by gol it was a nice place. Dry, up high enough off the ground that he's dry, and all dry leaves in there. Boy, he'd a been fine for the wintertime. He'd a never moved out a there till the snow went in the spring a the year." It was kind of a relief to learn that you could bring down even the biggest bears with SSG. It was also a relief to hear that Len had kept the local bear population in check over the years to the best of his ability. "Me, why I never had too much use for bears. Always tore my bark canoes all t' hell every chance they had. Yeah, bears is better when they're dead. I shoot any bear I can git my sights on." At this point Remo, clearly intrigued by these stories about bears, said to Len: "Bears are a very dangerous animal. You ever have any trouble with them or get hurt by them?" "No," said Len, "I never did. Animals never bothered me any. I never feared them. I figured, well, if I can't hit them that's my tough luck. I always made sure though I had a good rifle. A gun would jam was no good to me. "Oh I have met bears in the bush when I didn't have no gun with me. One time I met a bear comin up the winter road that Les and I put in from the head of Grace Lake up to Pine along the side-grade up over that bluff there. I jus got to the top of the steep part - I had a heavy pack on that day, too - and there was a

Ross Shaver and Frank Galloway (?) with a big bear shot on the Gobbler's Knob across from the camp on Cross Lake 32

The ol lady spotted me.

she-bear n two cubs comin down head on towards me. I spotted them as fast as the ol lady spotted me. I held my ground, but I took off my pack, because I didn't know just what was gonna happen. Didn't wanna be runnin with that on and I thought, well, if you want the food in the packsack, you can have it, ol lady. Then the damn cubs started to run and squeal to beat hell, an she stood right there on her hin' legs and held her ground, which I expected. Then the bastard took a couple of steps in my direction and I thought, 'Oh oh!' But she stopped, bluffin ya see, an when she figured, well, the cubs is far enough away now that I'll get down an follow them, she got down on her four legs and went off after the cubs, which I was glad of. I didn't feel too safe an the old bastard standin there lookin at me, specially when she started that goddam waltz towards me. They're pretty saucy animals. Sons of bitches'd tear ya to pieces, ya know. Front feet of theirs is jus like - might as well get kicked by a Clydesdale as get hit with one of them bastards. Lot of power there. No, the bes thing to do is just stan there and hold your ground.

"But you take your hunters now, some a them would get pretty nervous when there was bear around. Once in a while, one a them would get attacked, ya know." "Nice," I thought, "real nice." But Remo, sensing that his morbid desire for gory detail was about to be satisfied, said, "What do you mean attacked? They get hurt bad?" "We were huntin in west here - North Lake - one fall. One of the lads -jus down the other side of Sticky Pond there - there was a bear come out to him an he shot it. Least he thought he did. And anyway, he went down to where it was lay in down, but before he started off from where he was standing, he leaned his rifle up against a hardwood tree an then walked down where the bear was - supposed to be dead - to drag him or gut him I guess. And the bear got up and charged him, an he started to run for his damn rifle, an the bear got his teeth into one of his boots and then he grabbed him in the seat of his pants. Tore his pants for him, you 33

know. I don't think it hurt him - his butt - any fall, but he had him in the seat enough with his paw that it drew blood out of him. It's a wonder that the bear hadn't killed him; but with all the hollerin he was doing, a couple of the other lads came over I guess and finished him out. But that lad, he was scared an scared bad. He didn't know if his arsehole was drilled or punched or bored out with a round-mouth shovel, but, it's his own damn fault. He should a had better brains 'n to leave his gun." By now it was around midnight and, although Len was still going strong, we all decided that we had better get some sleep because we were planning an early start the next morning. I had been very tired on the drive up, but now when I lay in bed, picture after picture raced through my mind. I kept imagining Len with his old hat on and coloured suspenders calmly firing at moose from close range with his single-shot gun. I think I slept about five minutes all night and even that was taken up by a hair-raising hand-to-hand combat with a huge wounded bear in some swamp, God knows where. I will never again talk about hunting right before bed. Since I was getting no sleep, I got up around five-thirty Sunday morning to give Len a hand preparing breakfast. I was exhausted after the night's adventures. "You look kind a tired," said Len. "Been workin ya pretty hard down in the city I spose." "Yeah," I said, "I haven't had too much sleep lately." That was no lie. "Well, ya can get all the sleep ya want in at Pine Lake during the week," said Len.

Yeah, I'll bet, I thought to myself, but said nothing. After breakfast we loaded everything into the back of Len's pick-up - his 1942 right-hand drive Chev army truck used for hauling the big gangs in the fifties and sixties was by now defunct - and the five of us set out for Pine Lake. Chichi, Len's enormous grey-muzzled black hound made up the fifth, although what earthly use he was supposed to be to us, I couldn't figure out for the life of me: several days before we left, he had, after all, had a series of crashing strokes that left him pretty well immobile in his whole back end. Len was very bitter about this blow. "I feed the son of a bitch all winter fresh beaver meat every day; up an down the goddam hill every day through the snow with fresh hay for his bed - an then he goes an does a thing like this right before the damn huntin season." Unable to believe it wouldn't pass as quickly as it came, Len loaded poor old Chichi carefully into the back of the truck on a bed of blankets and off we went. After a harrowing two-hour trip on the Wildcat Trail in "creepin low", followed by a fifteen-minute paddle down the lake, we arrived at Derek's camp and got ourselves all set up. Since he built this whole camp himself, Len loves to stay at it. I never see Len happier than when he is puttering around his camp. As soon as we arrived at the main cabin, he immediately set about tinkering with the woodstove, lighting the fire in the fireplace, bringing in wood, topping up the lamps with kerosene, opening the outhouse, organizing all the food, and in general performing all manner of little chores unknown to people used to flicking switches and pushing buttons. After lunch, always number-one priority on Len's agenda, we stoked up the stove and fireplace and went out to do a bit of scouting around. We trailed along behind Len in the woods for several hours, while he peered at the ground and the shrubbery, muttering discontentedly to himself, and only occasionally pointing out a debarked sapling or twig and saying, "There's buckwork." This debarking, I discovered, is caused by buck deer trying to rub the last velvet off their antlers and to toughen them up. When we returned, Len declared that there were damn few deer in the country and delivered a tirade against the government whom he holds responsible for the lack of deer. Myself, I'm not entirely sure that the government alone can be blamed

Chichi 34

When I think about it, however, it is probably a good thing to be a bit afraid of guns. Familiarity often breeds carelessness, and you only have one mistake to make. That Sunday evening we made our final plans for the hunt and discussed the likelihood of any of us getting a deer or a bear. Though he knew our chances of even seeing one were slim, Len said he thought they were pretty fair. This, however, was said mainly to buck up Remo who had been a bit downcast ever since Len had announced that there were few if any deer in the area. I didn't really care, and Gord had seen for himself that there was precious little sign, and when it comes to sign, particularly droppings, Gord does know his stuff. He is a natural. He works by sight, feel, and smell, and this is what gives him his edge. After a pre-bedtime glass of grappa - a powerful wine-based Italian homebrew allegedly given to Remo by some friend - we all went to bed to try to get a decent sleep before the morrow's hunt. In spite of being wound up pretty tight, I did get a good night's sleep, as I usually do in the tranquillity of the woods. At about quarter past five the next morning, I heard Len yell, "If youse buggers don't get up, there won't be no breakfast left for ya. No sense lying aroun in bed till your ass is blue-moulded. C'mon. We're waitin on ya." It was Gord and I who were being so rudely addressed. Remo is used to rising early and had gotten up with Len. Gord and I, we like our sleep, particularly between five and eight in the morning. We both staggered up, however, and sleepiness abandoned us immediately as thoughts of the impending hunt flooded in. As I sat down to breakfast, Len passed me an enormous pot of oatmeal porridge and said, "Go ahead, clean er up, Richard. I had all I want." He knows that I am not a big porridge eater and that I am always amazed at the amount of oatmeal that he eats, so he likes to get me off my guard right at the start. "I'm no hog like some people I know," I said in self-defence but amused at his high spirits. I had to admire the old guy sitting there at fivethirty in the morning in a fresh green shirt, clean shaven and hair neatly combed, lustily stowing away a huge breakfast of porridge, fried eggs, bacon, and toast, and raring to go on the repartee. The two things about Len that made the biggest impression on Remo were his appetite

for the depletion of the area's deer herd in the late sixties, but I certainly agree with Len that they should close off the hunting now for at least five years to give the deer a chance to come back. There are so many hunters in the bush now that it is not safe for man or beast to be in the woods in hunting season. One thing about hunting with Len, he is a real stickler for safety. As far as Len is concerned, when you aren't actively hunting, your gun should be empty and that's that. Otherwise, you can expect trouble. "One fall, there was an old fellow come up with the Simcoe gang there - oh he was a big lad; I'd say he'd go around three hundred - and anyway, why, him and another chap, they come out to the truck grove one night and the other chap said, 'Is that gun loaded?' 'Oh no, no,' he says, 'the gun ain't loaded. I'll just show ya,' an he cranked the goddam thing and, sure enough, it was loaded. The damn gun went off right beside this other fellow and he damn near shit himself I guess. He was scared. If that gun had been pointed at him, he'd a got it right in the stomach. It was jus by luck the end of the barrl was pointed away from him. That old fellow, he never went hunting with me again. No sir. He was left at home." Nor does Len tolerate any drinking before or during the day's hunt. You can do what you like in the evenings when the guns have been put away, but the hunt itself must be dry. "I used to tell my hunters right the beginning of huntin season, 'No liquor in the bush now. If I catch any of ya's with liquor in the bush,' I says, 'ya's won't be here next fall. I'll see to that.' They knew that what I said, I meant. I didn't give a damn what the hell they drunk in the evening, long as they never touched it in the morning or in the bush." Len's admonitions served only to intensify my fear of guns, and by the time the hunt began I was almost afraid to sit on my watch with the gun loaded. About every two minutes I would check to make sure the safety was on and I was always relieved to be able to unload it and relax between stints of watching. Moreover, the gun Remo had lent me was what they call a semiautomatic shotgun and the three practice shots I fired had come out so fast that I was stunned. Remo had neglected to mention that you have to release the trigger quickly to prevent the next shot from going off. Had I known that, I could have spared by shoulder quite a hammering. 35

and his fastidious morning ablutions. Each day of the hunt Len got up at four o'clock, awakened by the obscenely loud ring of his trusty old tin alarm clock, which he always allows to run down on its own. He would then fuss around and rattle the woodstove until he got it going and immediately heat up water for his morning wash. When the water was hot, he would head outside to the washstand with his enamel basin, the kettle, soap, and a towel. Having filled the basin half full of cold water from the pump, he would then carefully add the desired amount of hot water from the kettle and begin to soap his face and neck and arms to the elbow. After washing, he would carefully shave and then comb every white hair into place, peering into the faded outdoor mirror and squinting at his part. All this in the half-dark at about forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. These are habits he picked up in the bush when he was young and, contrary to the usual jokes, many old bushmen are like him. They had to be or they would go downhill quickly. I think it was a matter of integrity and pride. I remember mentioning this once to my friend Hal Bowen and he told me about an old prospector he had met in northern Saskatchewan who had lived alone in the bush for thirty years and who dressed for dinner every night — dinner jacket and black tie! A man like that never has to worry about getting "bushed". That first morning we did not tarry over the breakfast table. As soon as we had eaten, Gord and I cleaned up the dishes, and by fivethirty we set out for our hunt. All of us were anxious to be on our watches by legal daybreak. Len and Remo and I went off to the northwest and Gord and Chichi, who had made a truly miraculous recovery - although his back legs were still a bit shaky - gave us half an hour and then set off in the same direction. Len and Remo and I walked for some time up a long wooded draw and at the far end of it, Len pointed to a log and told me to sit there. He then disappeared for about ten minutes with Remo before coming back past me on the way to his own watch. While passing, he stopped to have a look around my watch and sure enough he found a small maple sapling with some bark scraped off about a foot above the ground. Although I was encouraged by this sign, Len was not too excited by it, but only later did I discover why. He figured that there were a few deer around, but that one of the gangs hunting in the neighbourhood had been through our property earlier in the

week chasing the deer over into their own area. Before he left to go to his own watch, Len explained to me in some detail which direction a deer was most likely to come from and where he would go. As he was walking away, he turned around and called, "If a bear gits by ya, get right on after him. Ya's don't have to worry about getting lost. We'll fin' ya. Jus hafta follow the brown streak. Har, har, har." Left to my own devices, I first thoroughly checked out my gun and figured out how I would sit. Then I planned out such things as at which range I would slip the safety off and how close I would let the deer get before I gave my yell. It occurred to me that Len had said nothing about what I should do if I did shoot a deer. Was I supposed to drag it somewhere, start skinning it, or what? I resolved that since I had no idea where I should drag it to or how to clean and skin it, I would simply wait for Len. But then I got to thinking about what I should do if I just grievously wounded a deer. What if it started to crawl around in agony, blood streaming down its sides and mortal anguish in its large brown eyes. Do deer cry? While myriad scenarios were rushing through my mind, I suddenly heard a twig snap. Instantly alert, I smoothly slipped the safety off just in case. Seeing as I had only been on the watch for several minutes, I was quite sure it wasn't a deer. But, I reasoned, you never know. Maybe it was one that had heard Gord coming from afar and was trying to sneak out ahead of him unnoticed. Len had told of just such sneaky old bucks. "Some a them ol bucks is real cute." Well, I thought, already offended, if he thinks he's sneaking by me, he's in for a big surprise. I strained to hear any further sounds from the direction of that snapped twig, but all I could hear was a muffled pounding like kettle drums in my ears and I noticed that my blood was rushing and my heart working overtime. All thoughts as to whether or not I should pull the trigger had somehow vanished. I think I would have shot anything that appeared. I never did find out what made that twig snap, but then I never found out what made the next three thousand twigs snap either. Calming myself down with an effort, I put my safety back on, thoroughly checked out my gun, and began to try to think like a deer. What would I do in his situation? Where would I run and at what speed? Would I be crawling? Len said he had seen old bucks crawl past men on watches on 36

was just dragging himself along, surely any selfrespecting deer would be putting as much distance between himself and that damn howling as possible. It just didn't add up until the thought crossed my mind that if a deer were clearing out at top speed, he would be keeping a pretty high profile and they do not survive by being that dumb. It became crystal clear to me what was going on. My buck was on his knees just as Len had said it might be. Abject thoughts began to torture me. There was a huge old mossback pine log down across the draw and I began to ponder whether or not a buck down on his knees would be even partly visible above the log. Had he already long since made a fool of me by sneaking past me behind that old log? Surely I would at least have seen his antler tips. But if he had, would there be tracks clearly indicating that I had been duped, in one stroke making me the laughing stock of the week? Do buck knees leave tracks was the question. I racked my mind to remember if there were any knee tracks in Ernest Thompson Seton. None came to mind. In the midst of all this, I was momentarily distracted by the swooping arrival of one of my all-time favourite birds - a pileated woodpecker. As luck would have it, he did not see me - possibly because I was sitting motionless in my camouflage suit in the middle of a clump of shrubs - and landed about thirty feet above me where he promptly began to drill inside a cavity in the beech tree overhead. Just after I had gotten used to the pattern of twigs and beechnuts, the action for the next half hour switched to a steady shower of wood chips and punk dropping all around me on the dry leaves, so that it might as well have been snowing for all the chance I had of seeing any deer sneak by even at twenty feet. The high point of the morning hunt came when old Chichi could not have been more than three hundred yards from me and I knew that if that old buck had not slipped by me and really was crawling just ahead of the dog, then I was about to get some very heavy shooting in the next thirty seconds. I heard a twig snap and a voice say, "Pope, you bastard, don't shoot. It's me, Gord."

their knees. He'll be damn sorry if he tries that on me, I thought. Surely I could hit him if he was crawling. But perhaps if I was a deer I'd be high-tailing it out of there as fast as I could go about five feet off the ground. While I was thinking about all this, I suddenly heard a long drawn-out howl followed by several others. Must be old Chichi, I thought. He must have got the scent of a deer. The only thing that bothered me over the next hour was that Chichi only seemed to be howling about every three or four minutes, and although the howls were definitely closer each time, they were certainly not coming this way as fast as you would expect for a dog tearing full out behind a deer. Then again, it occurred to me that the spacing might be just about right for a dog who had just had a stroke and only possessed partial control of his back half. I decided to maintain a stance of full alert until I got to the bottom of this, so I checked out my gun yet again and began to concentrate on where I might first catch sight of my buck. Suddenly, something crashed on the ground behind me! Scarcely able to believe that buck had managed to crawl so close without my having noticed a thing, I whirled around to empty my gun, but no matter how hard I looked, I could see nothing. Again something crashed right behind me, this time right where I was supposed to be watching. I whirled, prepared to shoot from the hip if necessary - after all, it was more likely a bear with badded paws than a deer, since I would surely have heard a deer's hooves pounding against the humus. Suddenly, right before my eyes, a branch with three or four beechnuts on it fell to the ground at my feet with a noise suspiciously similar to the last two noises. I had heard of buck fever striking novice hunters, but Chicken Little syndrome? I was relieved to hear a loud angry chrrrrr above my head and to see a little red squirrel up in the tree taking just enough time off his nut-gathering to give me a thorough scolding. Normally I love these cocky little squirrels but that day the thought of drilling this one with a load of SSG did cross my mind, however fleetingly. I quickly mastered myself, however, got back into position, gave my gun a thorough checkover to be sure it was properly loaded and the safety was on, and then began to concentrate on the spot where Len had said I would first see an approaching deer. That howling though was really starting to get to me. Even if old Chichi

"I know. I know," I said. "I heard you com-

ing." "Not a goddamn thing, eh? Chichi never got a start." 37

"No," I said, trying to still the quaver in my voice, "it's been pretty quiet around here, except for all that bloody howling. What the hell was Chichi on to, anyway?" This was a fatal mistake. "That was me, pinhead," said Gord, "ya always do that when you're dogging." "I know," I said, desperately trying to undo the error. "I was only kidding." I thought I had saved myself, but of course the first thing Gord said when we walked over and got Len was, "Hey Dad, guess what? Stupid old Pope thought that was Chichi doing all the howling. Har, har, har." "The heck I did," I said, but it was too late. Let them have their laugh, I thought. Boys will be boys. Even old Chichi, who was lying panting under a balsam tree beside Len seemed to have a shadow of a smile on his face - something about the way his lips were parted, I thought. I soon came to rue the day that they had omitted to describe this one point about dogging to me. We went over to get Remo and I said, "Hi Remo. How... . " But before I could finish my sentence, a loud and abrasive voice said, "Hey Remo. Guess what? Pope thought Chichi had a race going. Yuk, har, splutter." He couldn't wait to get back to Wilberforce. As Ida came out on the porch to greet us six days later, I heard that same voice, "Hey Ma. Guess what?" One more cross to bear. We made a little fire to heat up the water for our tea and we disposed of our lunch rather quickly. Everyone wanted to get back hunting as soon as possible. Len's plan was to work the northeast end of the property with the big swamp in the afternoon. Len said the swamp was "an ample place for bear. I don't think I ever seen me hunt that swamp without startin up a bear." Len took Remo and I out, put us on our watches, and then disappeared to go to his own. I found myself stationed in a dense clump of cedars about thirty feet from the lip of a hill running down into the swamp. While the swamp was choked with black ash, cedar, and various shrubs, the hill itself and the area between the crest of the hill and me was more or less clear, except for the dense ground-cover of bracken and grass. Surveying this, I realized that if a bear were to come my way, I would not be able to see it before it topped the crest of the hill and was less than thirty feet away. This, coupled with the fact that bears run like jackrabbits,

was not exactly comforting to think about. Len had cautioned me to pick out a good big tree to climb, but all that I was surrounded by was fifteen-foot cedars. It didn't much matter in the last analysis, for as Len had also taken the trouble to point out, "The buggers climbs trees like squirrels." The only thing to do was remain absolutely calm and fire for the whites of the eyes assuming, of course, bears' eyes have whites. It wasn't long before I heard Gord begin to howl, and checking my gun over for the twothousandth time, I prepared myself for action. Teddy Roosevelt Pope. I was determined to hang tough and not disgrace myself like that other unfortunate who panicked and started to scream. Inasmuch as this swamp was only about thirty acres in size, hunting it usually took about thirty minutes, according, to Len. When, therefore, at the fifteen-minute mark I heard crackling noises near my end of the swamp, I was pretty concerned, the more so since I could hear Gord off somewhere in the middle of it and I knew by now that Chichi as a rule stayed fairly close to him, rarely ranging ahead more than fifty yards. I was almost certain that what I had heard was a bear sneaking out ahead of the dog while the going was good. Why should it wait until Chichi "was tonguin to beat hell". Get a head start; that's what I'd do. I strove to hear more sounds so that I could divine the direction of its escape, but once again I could hear nothing except the blood wildly pounding in my ears. Suddenly I noticed some shrubs near the edge of the swamp starting to shake and I realized that the bear had cleared the edge of the swamp and was either tearing along the bottom of the hill or was on his way up the hill heading straight for me. Knowing Len would not have stationed me where I was had this not been the more likely course, I slipped off the safety and raised my gun to firing position. Down the end of a wildly gyrating barrel, I saw the bracken ferns part at the crest of the hill directly in front of me and a big black muzzle thrust menacingly out of the grass. I can remember noticing as I was squeezing the trigger that the ears somehow were not quite right, the muzzle too grey, and the eyes too friendly. God stayed my finger. Old Chichi never knew how close he came to being blown to kingdom come. Boy was I shaken. I would never have gotten over it if I had shot that lovable old hound. I suddenly could understand why every year 38

keep my gun handy if I left off watching to "have a dump". "I remember one morning one of the lads was in watching there the other side of Rock Lake, up on the high ground - what I call the Sap Kettle Run; got a great big kettle out of Spears and Lauder's old lumber camp at this end of Rock Lake and put it up on one of the watches on a big rock there - and there's a deer come along ahead of the dogs. Old Harry - yeah, Harry his name was - was about thirty feet off, I guess, from where he should a been watchin, an when he got back, the deer had gone by. He was cutting his initials into a tree with his jackknife, see. Damn deer went by him just aflying. He never got a shot at it. It was out of sight, time that he got back to where his gun was. But that's crazy. If you gotta have a crap or anything, you want to take your gun with you. I never ... I've had craps many times in the woods, an I've heard the damn deer coming, and I'd just stand up with the ol gun ready there, and when he'd come along, I'd let him have it. I figure I can always pull up my trousers when he's laying on the ground. By Jesus, they don't wait on ya any. You keep your gun where ya's can get at it." I took Len's advice to heart and tried to keep my gun handy, for I realized that in that hemlock scrub I wouldn't be able to see a deer unless he was practically on top of me. But I hadn't been there ten minutes before the first cramps struck. Only by effort was I able to keep control of myself. To make matters worse, precisely at this time, someone to the south of us got a race going, and although I knew it was not our race, there was always the chance that the deer would swing up our way, so I had to keep alert. Then the next cramp struck, and deer or no deer I knew darn well I had to get my pants down and get them down quick. I carefully laid my gun down on some moss, safety on and barrel pointing away, and madly reached for my belt. Only then did I remember with a sinking feeling that I was supporting my combat pants with suspenders and that I had my camouflage jacket, wool coat, and two sweaters on over my suspenders. I started trying to tear my jacket off, but there was no time for this. I fumbled momentarily trying to undo the buttons and then just put both hands in my pockets, reefed the pants down to my knees, and let her rip. Something cracked in the hemlocks nearby and I considered leaping for my gun, but then

some hunter shoots his best friend. You just lose control at the last moment and fire, hardly aware of what you're doing. I treated that old mutt like royalty for the rest of the trip. Little did he know why. As I lowered my gun, Chichi came running up and jumped on me, madly licking my face. I hugged him like a child. Five minutes later, Gord came over the hill and said, "Oh, you have him, eh? Chichi got away on me a bit in there." "So I noticed," I said dryly. "Nothing, eh?" Gord asked. "Nope," I said, "not a darn thing." I certainly wasn't about to tell him of all people what I had nearly done. I could just hear it - Gord, breathless, "Hey Mom, guess what Pope nearly did." He would have just loved to have had something else to snitch on me about to his mother. Although I never saw a single deer or bear during the whole six days that we hunted, there was never a dull moment on the watch. Once you get used to the idea that nothing is likely to happen and that if anything does, you will be warned well in advance thanks to the dog, it is very peaceful out on the watch and it provides an excellent chance to observe nature. One day I spent the whole morning watching a mink work a little creek-bed not fifty feet from me. He was completely absorbed in his work and couldn't have cared less whether I was around or not. He poked away for about three hours before ambling on. Another day I saw a gorgeous snowy owl float right over my head. I had not even known that they ever came that far south in early November. On a third day I spied and collected a lovely old transparent blue-green medicine bottle from the pre-screw-top days. It must have been there for the better part of a century. God knows how long some of those watches have been used for. The only really unpleasant day for me was the second day out. I had not yet got hold of myself after day one's traumatic events and near canicide and, moreover, I had contacted a touch of the flu. Len stationed me on a watch in the thickest bush imaginable, just east of the south end of Twin Barnum, and told me to be specially alert, because the last time he had hunted the area with one of his gangs, they had shot five deer — all of them bucks — in one morning, precisely in this corner of the property. Len knew I had the runs but he strongly advised me to 39

said to heck with it. I spent the best part of the next three hours pulling my pants up and down and was too weak to care if something got by me or not. When Len finally arrived, the first thing he said was, "My Gawd! Something stinks around here." "Yeah," I said, "must be deer shit. Let's get out of here." That evening I went to bed without supper and slept all evening and all night. Len was very worried about me and fussed over me like a mother hen. He has seen enough cases of sickness in the bush to know it is no joke and he did his best to take care of me, plying me with spoonfuls of vanilla, which he said would stop up the runs. Perhaps it did, for I woke the next morning refreshed and even hungry. Whatever it was had passed. I considered myself lucky and took one lesson to heart out of all this: never wear your suspenders under your gear when out in the bush.

him. It was a classic instance of the halt leading the blind. Crossing that swamp I spent much of my time trying to keep my hat and clothes on and prevent the dense spruce growth from stripping me naked. At about the centre of the swamp, I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be howling repeatedly at short intervals, and since it was not that far before I was going to be within shooting range, I started up baying with a vengeance. At first I felt a bit silly and led off with a series of constrained barks and yips. Soon, however, I hit my stride and was delivering myself of long, drawn-out, throaty howls that sounded very authentic, as far as I could tell. I was making sure that everyone knew just where I was, even if I myself did not know. With no one around to watch me, I got over my embarrassment and really began to act a bit like a dog. You can understand how I felt, therefore, when having just gone through a whole gamut of howls, head thrown back, a voice about four feet from me said, "Youse is really gettin the hang a that howlin," and I turned to see Len standing right beside me, very pleased with himself that I had not noticed him. Everyone, particularly Gord, declared that they were not only fully satisfied with my dogging, but even that I seemed to have a special talent for it. I felt rather pleased with myself and mildly flattered, but I knew that most of the praise was offered because no one else wanted to take my place. Much of your time dogging is spent struggling through dense swamps and well over your boot tops in water - a dubious thrill. More to be a good sport than anything else, I volunteered to dog out the big area on the south of the property that afternoon. Len gave me detailed instructions on where to walk to, when to release Chichi, and what route to follow back. Chichi, though failing rapidly, adamantly refused to stay in camp when we tried to leave him behind, so the two of us set off, both determined to do our best. Most of the way to the point where I was to unleash the hound was a downhill series of steep rocky hills, occasionally developing into drop-offs that we had to skirt to get past. The route back followed the boulderstrewn shoreline of Grace Lake for a way before it started the steep uphill ascent back to Straggle Lake. Poor old Chichi expended his last strength walking that shoreline and two or three times I saw his hind legs slip down between the rocks, bruising his hindquarters painfully. The

By Thursday, when I was already an old hand at hunting, it was decided that I could be trusted to do some dogging, so that poor Gord could have a chance to watch for a while. This seemed fair to me because I knew the area pretty well and, in actual fact, I was rather glad to get the chance to plough around in the bush for a change instead of just sitting and waiting. To break me in gently, Len decided to have me dog the small swamp behind the old Smith place, a job that would only take about half an hour. If this worked well, he planned to move me on to greater challenges. I was glad to get broken in gently because I was somewhat concerned about how to handle the hound, never having done it before. As it turned out, I hardly had to worry about that, and if anything, the concerned party was old Chichi, who was afraid I might go the wrong way or get lost. He got out in front of me, but not so far that he couldn't see me, and began sniffing furiously from side to side, every once in a while looking back to make sure I was still behind him. The poor old dog had as much trouble getting through that swamp as I did, though, because his back legs were by now in pretty bad shape. Every once in a while he would get stuck going over a big log and I would have to lift his hind end and walk him wheelbarrow style until he was on firm ground again. But he sure knew where he was going, which is more than I did. I just followed 40

In retrospect, I think perhaps more than anything else, I enjoyed sitting in camp in the evenings around the open fireplace listening to Len talk about the old days. It never took much to get him started and I could never get enough of his stories.

problem was that his rear end was coming along about a foot to the right of his front end and, although he could see where to step, he could not compensate in time for his erratic hindquarters. By the time we swung northwest and were ready to climb back onto the height of land, Chichi was finished. He swung his old grey muzzle around and looked at me and I could see that he could go no further. I shall never forget carrying that eightypound hound up the Bull's Run, staggering under the weight and trying not to drop my gun, which I had wisely unloaded. Every once in a while Chichi would look up at me and roll his eyes, as if to say, "Lord, I never thought it could come to this'' and then out of gratitude he would give me a lick on the cheek with his long pink tongue. I felt so sorry for him that I even did deep kneebends on occasion when he thought he smelled something, so that he could at least keep up the pretence of sniffing out the trail and doing his job. Since he had been top hound in his day, I felt that this was the least I could do for him. Just before we came out at the watches, I put him down, having reached a clear eye-to-eye agreement that nothing would be said about what had gone on. I couldn't blame him for not wanting to be humiliated in front of Gord and Len. I knew how he felt - "Hey Mom, guess what? Chichi played out on Grace Lake Hill."

Len telling me about the old days

I didn't say anything until much later when Chichi was out of earshot and then I told Len, so that the dog would not be expected to do any more hard work. Len said that he had kind of expected that Chichi might play out, and it was agreed that we would only take him out on a few short flat runs during the last two days, and that only if he were able. Len really liked that dog. Chichi was one of the few sick dogs Len ever had that was not put out of his misery in the bush. We brought that big mutt out in style in the back of the truck on a blanket which, I think, surprised even Chichi. Nothing changed during those last two days of hunting, except the weather. It turned very cold and started to snow, which continued, albeit lightly, for the whole two days. I really enjoyed being out in that spare and desolate bush watching the first snows of winter cover the dead leaves on the ground. I realized that even though we never got a single start - or perhaps because of it -1 would not have missed that hunt for the whole world. 41

Three

Huntin in the Ol Days "I mind one time ol George White the deputy game warden come to search my camp at Cross Lake. One a my hounds got away on me and they was no hounds allowed that year. No dogs in the bush, see. I had a man on the watch there at the Bull's Run, and he would a had shootin if he'd stayed put, but I guess the bastard got lonely or something, and he started to walk back to camp. Hound went right through there after a deer and pulled for Farquhar Lake, and he got to tonguin down there near some cottages. I said to myself, 'Oh oh. That's no good.' And by God didn't somebody report me to the game warden. Oh I know who it was. He tole George White about hearin this dog and said, That's Len Holmes's country.' I think he was jealous or somethin. "Anyway next day aroun lunch time — we were dinnerin in that day - Monty Swinterman and Harry Graham come into the cookery and tole Ken White, who was workin with me, some ol guy with a beard was walking up the trail. Ken looks out the window and says, 'I know that lad. That's ol George White the deputy game warden. I know what he's after.' And Ken looks down and there's ol Blackjack - biggest damn black-and-tan hound I ever had -just layin down quiet like under the table, so Ken grabs the ol bugger an shoves him down cellar in the storeroom just as ol George walks in the door. He had a search warrant an everything. Oh yeah. An he says to Ken, 'Is Len aroun? I got a complaint about dogs.' 'Dogs?' says Ken, 'I thought the bastards was illegal this year.' 'Well,' says George, 'somebody around here's got hounds, cause people has heard them.' So Ken goes off to fin' me and whiles he's gone, Harry Graham and Monty Swinterman said to ol George, 'Say George, would ya's like a drink of somethin while

you're waitin?' 'Don't mind if I do,' says George, and by God they put the liquor right to him. That glass was never empty. "I come over and give him a real big lunch and got talkin, ya know, an whiles we were eatin Ken White slipped out an tole my two doggers to stay out in the bush and keep the damn hounds hid. Had another hound down in the bay and Ken got - Bert McGrath I guess it was, to go sit with the bastard so's he wouldn't let out no howls. It was bad enough havin ol Blackjack in the cellar. I didn't need no more problems. "After lunch I took ol George out to the stable to show him some furs Ken White and I had, and Ken got ol Blackjack on a lead an took him out around the cookery, stayin real close to the wall so's ol George wouldn't see him if he looked out a the stable. Anyway, after lookin at the fur, ol George says, he says, 'Len, I hafta take a look at your kennels,' an he looks all aroun the kennels and he says, 'You don't have no dogs here. Them kennels is old.' And I says, 'Well, I heard dogs was illegal this year.' Ol George — he was pretty well loaded by this time -1 think he knew. He didn't wanna fin' no hounds. I always bought my camp licence and all the huntin licences from him, ya know, and that brought him quite a little bit of money every fall. We knew each other pretty well. "01 George had another glass a whisky fore he left and just as he was leavin, he took out his pencil and rubbed my name off the search warrant and put ol Tom Miller's on. Tom had a camp that year over on Yankton, and George went off to search him. Oh he thought that was a great joke. Laughed to beat hell. Ken White took him off down the trail on the wagon. Fore he left, Ross Shaver give him two, three bottles 42

shot a deer in the summertime - which wasn't supposed to be done - well, the hair's full then and they'll go down like a stone if you don't get them right away. So, if you did any summer huntin, you'd have to drive em to a sand beach and shoot em in shallow water - make sure not to lose them. "Fred was a dandy lake watch. He had a good eye in his head. Hardly ever a deer get away from ol Fred he had any chance at all with

of beer for the road, and I guess several a them must a fell out a his pocket, cause I found them later on down on the trail through Bick's Marsh. "Soon as he was gone, I says to the lads, Tm sure glad ol Blackjack never let out a peep.' Later on I went down cellar to get something for supper and be goddamned if he hadn't et half a side a bacon! That's what was keepin him so quiet. But, I figured I still come out ahead. They was quite a stiff fine at that time if you was caught usin dogs." Len seemed to have no end of hunting stories, and most of them were about deer. Hunting to Len means deer hunting and it always has. "My oldest boy Jim, he liked duck hunting or patridge hunting - anything like that. Gord does too. Myself, I never had too much likings for duck hunting, but when it come deer hunting season, that was different. I was ready." Len began hunting so early in his life that he cannot even remember when it was. Nor can he remember the first deer he shot. He simply began hunting when he was "old enough to carry a gun", and he has yet to stop. As he once told me, "Huntin — I don't know — hell, I guess it was born in me. My dad, he paddled a canoe but he never hunted much. He never liked hunting or trapping or anything like that. I didn't get it from him." The most important factor shaping Len's hunting career was his friendship with Fred Barnes, one of the most successful deer poachers the area has ever known. It seems to have been under his tutelage that Len became an accomplished deer hunter. "I used to do a lot a deer huntin with ol Fred Barnes," Len told me. "He's dead now. He was a lot older than I was. He was a farmer, but he'd rather hunt than work on the farm. You ever wanted to go huntin or fishin, all's ya had to do was ask ol Fred, and he'd always fin' the time. He loved to hunt and fish. Good hunter, too. He done all the lake watchin, and I done the doggin." I wasn't too sure what Len meant by lake watching, so I asked for an explanation. "Years ago, why you often killed your deer in the water, d'ya see. One guy'd do the doggin, and the other man'd watch the lake, and when the deer would take the water, he'd paddle after him, head im off. You don't need to worry about shootin deer in deep water in the fall of the year. Deer won't sink in the fall. The hair's holla. A deer in cold water'll float like a cork. But if you

Len and ol Fred Barnes with their hounds

A doe swimming for shore 43

huntin down at the south Buck Lake. I guess Salem was doin the doggin and Billy was watchin the lake. The dogs put a big old buck into the water and Billy took off after him, and by Jesus that old buck turned on him! Upset the canoe and drownded him. Salem heard the lad hollerin in the water, but he couldn't get there soon enough. He didn't have no boat, d'ya see. Some of them ol bucks can be ugly. They'll turn on ya in the woods too sometimes, if they get the chance. They turn on ya in the lake, you wanna know how to paddle a canoe and shoot. "Fred, he was good in a canoe. Damn good. He knew how to handle one in rough water too. Ol Farquhar was no pet lake. Any time in the summer or fall it gets a swell on it, gets rollin, if you didn't know how to handle a canoe, you'd be on the bottom in no time. And ol Fred couldn't swim. Tole me different times he couldn't swim a stroke. "Fred and me used to hunt deer right in the summertime. At that time in the summer you'd never meet a soul on Grace Lake or Farquhar. There was nobody around the country. We'd bring the deer right down home broad daylight. Never take the deer out a the canoe. Pull the canoe an everything into the boathouse an skin the son of a bitch out. "Fred'd come down and stay at our house Saturday night, and we'd get away early in the morning. Fred'd set out with the canoe up the

Watchin er close

the canoe. By Jesus, they took the water, he didn't let them out on ya. Ol Fred'd be on a stand someplace on the lake lookin around, watchin er close. He maybe wouldn't hear the deer comin, but he'd see the bugger swimmin in the water. If there's only a black speck that's a long ways off, say a mile or more, the way that you can tell whether it's a loon or a deer's head is just watch the black speck. If it stops in the water, you know it's a loon. But if it don't stop, get down there. Head im off. Ol Fred'd have the canoe goin like hell. He wouldn't head for where the deer was. He'd head for the shore the deer was headin for - then he'd beat im. If you head for the deer, you're losin time. But you head for the spot he's headin for, then you're gainin on him. See they cut through the water pretty sharp. Oh yes. Them bastards can swim. An you get close to them, you hafta know wha.t you're doing. Billy Hughey, he got too damn close. Him and Salem Cornell, one of ol Nelson's boys, they were 44

splittin it and stuff - and my dad got Fred over with his drag saw one day to saw up a bunch of drags he'd drew down beside the house. Come meal time, ol Fred come in, took his clothes off, and mother had a pot of potatoes on the stove and they weren't quite cooked. Ol Fred took one of the lids off the goddamn stove and spit chewin tobacco into the fire right over top of the damn potatoes. Oh boy my mother was mad about that. She never forgot it. "He had a lot of good ways about him too, though. He was a good worker, good farmer just a little bit on the filthy side with this damn old chewin tobacco. He smoked a pipe too, but he never bothered liquor. I don't think he ever bought any liquor or beer, but if somebody come along with some, why to be sociable, he'd take a drink. 'I shouldn't,' and at the same time he'd reach his hand out for it. Quite a lad you know. "He married one of the Kidd girls - Celestia. She died way before ol Fred - thirty years anyway. He had five daughters. Alma was the oldest. Died here just last year. Then there was Edna, Mabel, Hazel, and Olive. I think he had a son too, but he died at birth or shortly after. Fred was quite a bit older than me, but we were awful good friends. I was a pallbearer at his funeral. Oh Christ we had a lot a good times together. "In the summertime, we'd often hunt deer right in the marshes. There's lots of beaver marshes around and deer'll come into those marshes in the summertime, see, water, to get rid of the flies. They'll get right in the water with their head jus stuck out. There's a place back in there — it's on Wolf Lake — I've seen as high as three or four deer around there in the evening. An they'd get right down in there where the cattails was, where it was good and muddy, and, buggers, there'd be just the head stuck out

Grace River and up Grace Lake over to the island and set himself up watchin. I'd take the dogs from home and go up the Burleigh Road and start them in around North Lake or maybe in Bick's Marsh, any place in there. Didn't have to walk far to get a start in those days. That was a good run to Grace lake. At that time, there was a fire went through there. Somebody had burnt down the lumber camp at North Lake took the lumber and touched a match to the rest of it. The fire got away and all that hardwood ridge above Grace Lake was burnt off. There's wonderful feed for deer on those fresh burns. Goddamn weeds come up, sasparilla, rabanna leaf - all good feed. "Fred was watchin on the island this one morning, an he said, 1 could hear the dog and then all at once I heard two shots.' And that was me. I'd started the dogs and they pulled down towards Cedar Lake and circled down there and then come back right to where I was havin a crap. I had my gun right where I could put my hand on it. Anyway, this deer come along I could hear him, thump, thump, thump, thump, - and by Jesus, I said, you son of a bitch, you keep comin. I was beside a big maple tree there and never even buttoned my pants. Reached and grabbed the rifle, pulled the hammer back, an I shot the bastard with my pants down. Nice yearlin buck! I stuck him there, gutted him, put his front feet through his hin' feet and saddled him jus like a packsack. I struck across the Burleigh Road and down over the hill from Grace Lake opposite the island, and when I hollered, Fred come over an says, 'Did you shoot?' 'Yeah,' I says, 'I got the lad right here.' So we put him in the canoe and the two dogs and we were home before eight o'clock that Sunday morning. There was nobody up, not even my mother. By the time they got up, the deer was in the boathouse and already skinned out. By Jesus, that was quick service. I don't think we were ever out of venison in the summertime. Fred, he liked his meat. "Ol Fred had quite an appetite. He was a big man, ya know. He'd come by our place right after eatin dinner someplace else, an if my mother asked him if he'd eaten yet, he'd say, 'Oh, I guess I could eat a bite,' and by Christ he'd sit down and eat another whole meal and take second helpings too. He once et three Thanksgiving dinners. He was kind of a funny ol bugger in some ways. He used to have a drag saw run with gasoline - had to have two, three men to keep it supplied, rolling the wood on the carriage,

Len and ol Fred with their guns 45

of the water. This is right in fly time, when the flies is really bad. That's the only way they could get out of the reach of them, I guess. "Yeah, years ago, when deer was plenniful, they'd come in marshes that beavers flooded, you know - where there was lots of water in them. We never even used dogs. That was where to look for them. In fact, they'll come to the lake shores too, on a real hot day. Sometimes they'll come in around noon, but generally they come in in the evening before it got dark - fool around for a while. They have to have drinks same as any other animal. Specially if ya had the salt out, ya know. An by the way, don't bother to use that red or blue crap. It's not worth the powder to blow it to hell. Use the white stuff. Fifty-pound blocks. That's what they like. An anyway, come evening, why you could just paddle along the shore, an if you see a deer in the water, the proper thing to do is to sneak up on him. When he puts his head down for a drink, ya put it right to the paddle to beat hell, see; and when he reaches up and takes a look all around, why don't paddle. Let the canoe coast. Just keep the canoe head on straight for him, cause he won't - an animal won't notice a canoe comin straight for him same as he would if it was broadside. An once you got close as you can — fifty, sixty yards, maybe a little more, depends a lot the way the wind is too - why let im have it, an drag im into shore before you lose im."

You keep comin.

Len putting out salt 46

began to suspect that I was writing a book about all this. When I asked him how many deer he and old Fred would average on a good summer evening in a marsh, he hummed and hawed and finally said, "Oh, I don't know. That's all goin down in history, you know. God knows who in hell'll read that. I never did no huntin in the summertime. The guns I used to have never went off in hot weather. Fall guns. Never did any huntin out of season. Didn't believe in it." I hastened to explain that he need hardly worry even if I did write about it, and Gord, who ironically is a conservation officer, explained the statute of limitations, which says they cannot go back further than six months. After that, you're off the hook. Still unsatisfied, Len thought for a moment and then pensively said, "Yeah, but there's the reputation that you'd have after you're dead and gone." I told him that his reputation was already pretty well shot, which seemed to please him and he said, "Well, okay, tell em I joined the church here back a few years ago. I don't do anything bad now." "You? - Joined the church?" I asked, incredulous. "What church is this?" "The round church," said Len, adding after a sly pause, "the Devil can't catch ya in the corners, ya see." Now that he was back in a good mood, I decided to ask him about market hunting. I had heard him speak about the subject many times and knew that certain people used to hunt deer regularly, particularly during the Depression, and take the meat and sell it as far away as Bancroft. Apparently, they would just leave the meat in the milk boxes at night to avoid being noticed by the game warden or one of his cronies. Game wardens at the time, however, were pretty scarce. "Back in those days, why, if you seen the game warden, you'd be lucky," Len told me, adding, "Either that or unlucky, one or the other." "This old fellow I used to hunt with, ol Fred Barnes, I know where some of his meat went... and I had a share in on it too. Some of it went to Sanderson's tourists' place down here on Poverty Lake that they call Wilbermere Lake today. Used to be called Poverty Lake, cause the farmers around it was all poor as Job's turkey - so poor they christened the Christly lake after it. Old Ed Sanderson, he changed the name when he started up a tourist business down there. But

The more Len talked about hunting in the old days, the more I came to realize that much of it was done in the summer, rather than during the brief two-week season in November. So I asked Len how early they used to go after the deer. "Soon as the cedar was out a them. Eat cedar all winter, you know, and they taste of cedar. Same as a rabbit. You shoot a rabbit in the wintertime, why he'll taste of cedar if you don't put some salt and soda in the water overnight, see; that takes the cedar taste out a the meat there. But I wouldn't wanna shoot a deer in the wintertime. The meat'd have a damn cedar flavour on it, you know. But come the month a June, you could start huntin; but, you should know something about your deer. Old does is shabby, see, that has fawns. If you seen a deer in the marsh that was shabby, you could make up your mind the fawns was hid somewhere in the tag alders along the edge of the marsh, an the ol doe out there just drinkin and feedin on cattails or something. Don't shoot a shabby one, cause the meat wouldn't be as good. You get a couple of fawns sucking off ya - shabby deer'd have one fawn, most time two fawns — why the meat's not so good till later on in the summer, towards fall. But deer that's red in the middle of June or a little after, why, as a rule they're good deer. They're yearling does or bucks, see, and they'd be good to eat. Might not be much fat on them, but they'd still be good eatin. Yeah, shoot the red ones; shabby ones is greyish. But, generally speaking, by the fifteenth of June, deer'll be in their red coat an ya can go after those deer. "Orangemen's Day, twelfth of July, everybody started to hunt. That was sort of the unofficial opening day. That was the day we started runnin dogs. If ya started earlier, the damn dogs might get started on a suckin doe, which was no good. Twelfth of July was a damn good day to start huntin, cause, as a rule, when you'd go out, you were pretty near always sure of the game wardens attendin the parade in town, an you had the bush to yourself. Sometimes the parade'd be in Wilberforce and sometimes it'd be at Gooderham. If it was at Gooderham, you felt all the safer. It made it worse for those birds down there, though." Although Len had repeatedly told me about summer hunting in the old days, when I pressed him for details, he got very cagey and I could hardly squeeze information out of him. He had 47

Walter Kidd and his large family; Walter Jr standing right; Bob and Bill in the doorway; Archie in the hat; Fred Barnes' future wife Celestia fourth from left in the front row

Len with his American foxhound named Rex at the second Barnum Camp around 1920

48

anyway, Sanderson fed the tourists good venison, but they didn't know what the hell they were eatin. Thought it was beef. Fred, he made some money out a them there for three, four summers. I helped him get the deer and I got my share of meat for my parents. Helped eat a lot of it too. Course I never sold any myself... . "Now you take Fred's father-in-law, old man Kidd, ol Watt Kidd - he was a school teacher lived down at Kidd's Corners. Quite a hunter. Kept lots of dogs. Used to hunt out around Eel's Lake and Big Monmouth. Knew the country around there for miles, ya know. He used to take his meat up to Bancroft, peddle it up there. Sold it so much a pound. He had a big family to look after. Some way or another the game warden got wind of it - thought they were gonna get im, I guess, at his house. Maybe somebody tipped the old fella out, I don't know, but they never caught him anyway. When he'd be out in the bush and he'd know the game wardens was out after him, he'd leave little paper signs for them here and there: 'Kidd's in the bush. Catch him if you can.' Course they never caught him. He knew the country too good, I guess. "All his boys used to hunt - Watt Kidd which used to buy furs from me, and Bob which worked with me and Ed Earle cutting pulpwood for Black Archie Scott, and Bill which used t' fire range on Hook Lake Mountain tower, and Archie, but Archie got drownded in Eel's Lake. Him an this other chap were out in a canoe in the fall, lake watchin, ya know, an I guess they come out from behind an island an she was rough, too rough; over she went. The other chap, I believe he made it to shore. But ol Archie, he didn't make er. No sir. He got perished. There was another brother, Dunk, but he wasn't too bright. Never shaved. Had a big long beard an used to wear a heavy overcoat in the summer. All the daughters was good hunters too. The old man once promised a piano to the girl that shot so many deer in a year. I guess none a them got that number, cause they didn't get the piano. But they got quite a few deer, so he bought them an organ each. Oh he had lots a meat to sell. 01 school teacher. Smart." If Kidd, Newbatt, and Barnes were the best hunters of the older generation, Len was certainly one of the best of his generation and certainly the best known. He began his professional hunting and guiding career when he was only fourteen, going onfifteen- his birthday falls in hunting season.

dark day, it was a dark hole in there. But this camp had a bigger window to let more light in. And I had two wide bunks. Didn't have a big cook stove in it but it was a good one. It threw out lots of heat. Oh this second cabin was just like gold to me. Nice n warm. Come a wet day, we wouldn't bother going out hunting, cause we didn't need to hunt hard. There were lots a deer for the dogs to run at that time. Not like nowadays when you gotta walk for miles to get a start. "But that fall Tom Watt come up from Toronto and he brought up four other fellows ... one was Fred Witherspoon ... Bill McKenzie - I forget the names of them now. Anyway, they all stayed in the new camp I had built there in 1920 and I guess that was the first real gang I had. Pretty good size gang it was too. I had Lome Frye and Ed Covert in there helpin me. Three slept in the bottom and three slept in the top, and some of us -1 know I slept on the floor. Les, my younger brother, come in there. He was only a little gaffer, a little wee lad, you know. He couldn't walk too far in a day but he used to come out anyway. If we were going to come back for lunch, why he'd come out with me and the dogs in the morning. Lots a times going through thick spots, I'd have to wait on him, cause he couldn't go through the woods like I could, see. But, he was jus like me, he loved the huntin too. Yeah, those was my first two camps.

Len (with coffeepot), Frank Galloway, Ross Shaver in front of the second Barnum Camp

"I started my hunts in the fall of 1918 at the end of the First World's War. I'd got a little log camp built at the head of Barnum Lake spruce and balsam. I used a one-man handsaw and cut the timber right there. All saddle corners done with an axe, but I didn't have no floo in it. It was only small, maybe about ten by twelve, and I just had a small window in it for light and a pole roof. I used poles about three, four inches at the butt. To make the roof level, I put one pole butt down and the next pole buttend up. I put tarpaper on and heavy roll roofin afterwards. It took a lot a poles, but I never had to worry about the snow cavin it in in the wintertime. I had one bunk in there and I had a little box stove that I got from home - parents give it to me. That was my first camp. Two years later, I built another log camp there at the head of Barnum and used the first one just to keep the dogs in at night. This one was a bigger camp - spruce and balsam logs again and saddle corners, but I had a floor in this one and a board roof. Got the lumber out a the old office at Ires's ol lumber camp. Enough for the whole roof n floor and a little shed for gas and coal oil. The first cabin had only a small pane of glass - I'd say roughly ten by twelves inches - and on a 49

Original cookery at Cross Lake; note the three deer at left

Len (second from right) with his gang in front of the Cross Lake Camp; Lloyd Bowen on far right

Built them all by myself. Just the foundations is there now, as far as I know. "But anyway, the gang kept gettin bigger. Ross Shaver and some others had been coming up here to fish with me, and they wanted to come up huntin too. That's how I got started in with the Burlington-Stoney Creek gang. I needed another camp, a bigger one, so around 1921-22, I built my main camp which was at Cross Lake, and several years after I built, I bought the land, which was a hundred-acre lot, from the guys at the Dysart Land Company - Canadian Land and Immigration Company it was then. First, it was called the English Land Company, but then it changed names a number of times. Nowadays, of course, a man'd have to be crazy to build somewhere before he bought the land or someone else'd buy and then you'd be skunked. But back in those days, nobody thought anything of it. Part of that lot went into the Barnum lot where my first camps was - I bought that lot too several years after I bought on Cross Lake - and the other part cornered on Cross Lake which was where I put my camp, you know - the south shore. I moved to Cross because of the damn deer. Hell, the deer'd water in that lake all summer long. I never seen the beat of it. Maybe that's why they called it Cross Lake - cause all the deer'd cross there - less it was some man's name. "Anyway, I built my cookery first. I hired Lome Frye that summer, and he helped me build it. He was just a young lad then, no more 'n fifteen. The studding was all pine and the lumber in it - the roof, thefloor,everything - was pine. That lumber come out of a little camp over on Bill's Crick. Used to be a sawmill there belonging to Amborst Dillman. He sawed several

winters for Alf Willows - jobbin for him, ya know, cuttin by the thousand. Had a little timber dam there and the water for the boiler come right out a the crick. Dillman ownded the machinery, but the timber and the camp was Alf Willow's. Small camp, ya know, jus where the men ate and slept - but hold eight men nicely. I paid old Alf Willows twenty-five dollars for that lumber and there were pine boards in it two feet wide and sixteen feet long. All that pine was cut right there at the foot of Bill's Lake, Bill's Swamp, you know - lovely pine, the very choicest of white pine. None left around here like that, I'll tell ya. So I tore that little camp down and hauled the lumber over to Cross Lake and built my cookery with it. "I used that for several falls an then, I bought some lumber from the Dysart Land Company — the lumber from Willow's old logging camp at the Burleigh Corners; Willows was through in there by then. I built myself a bunkhouse — big bunkhouse, added it right on to the cookery and I built myself a horse stable, which I also used for a boathouse, and I built a woodshed there too. That was a nice camp. Oh Yes. I had it really set up. I loved it up there. That was my one luxury. I had that whole country from Cross Lake right through to Buck Lake and out through to Watt's Lake - almost to Lakings's Number Seven. I used to hunt big sections, you know, and dinner out at noon. Then over east, I had all that country right through to, oh, practically to the head of Johnny's Marshes and right through to Farquhar Lake. Wonderful deer country in those days. "But there was a hell of a lot of hard work attached to them hunts. I always made sure I 50

had lots of wood there. My kindling wood and hard dry maple was right in the shed; it never got wet. I drew it in October see - early part of October - and put it in before the fall rain started. Then I had to put up all the bedding and I had to have lots of it. Oh, some of them would bring in maybe a couple of blankets or something like that, but on the whole, I had to put up everything. Then there was the food. Oh Christ yes. I had to haul all that stuff in. I used to take in enough bread to do me two weeks, and meat and eggs - everything like that had to be taken in. Oh you had to have sides of bacon, goddamn sides two, three feet long; have maybe four, five of them. I used to try to get sides that wasn't too fat - order them specially. Yeah. I had to pay for all the food and pay for the gasoline and oil for the outboard, and pay for the cook and pay my helper. Never had a helper for the cook, just my helper in the woods. "Then there was the picnic of gettin the damn meat out of there. My helper would always bring the men in off the watches, cause normally they'd have deer to be dragged in. Sometimes they'd clean their deer out in a kind of half-ass way, but lots a times I've seen me after supper at night finish it up out in the woodshed. "Dogs is a lot a work too, you know. Hell, I've seen me have eight, nine dogs in there. Each day, generally, I'd take about two out with me, and then the next day give them a rest. You can't run your dogs every day, cause they'd play out, see. But you leave one at home, like that old redbone I had, and even if he can't drag himself to the kennel, he'll cry all day. I can handle two dogs myself, without that they get tangled, but the third one, why it's too much. Son of a bitch's getting around brush all the time. If I took a dogger with me, well then I'd take an extra dog. But if you take too many, you're liable to get them tangled on the same race, see; and maybe lose them, too, cause one dog'll come back a hell of a lot quicker 'n two. But, if you start a dog alone and let him get out of your hearing before you pull the collar off of the other one, as a rule they don't get mixed up on the same deer. Pay attention to which direction he's travelling, though, when he's going out of your hearing, and you can let the other dogs go on different courses. Also, if you let two dogs go together, lots a times they'll start coming back to the starter, to the man that puts them out, see. And don't start your damn dogs

Len at Cross Lake

Bringing home the deer with Walter Clark's team

A successful hunt

late in the afternoon, after say three-thirty. That gives em time - if they go astray, an he's anyway a fast dog - he'll be back before dark, see. If he doesn't water his race at the lake that you've got your camp on, why he'll go water it in some other lake, and long as he can get back before dark, why you'll have him then for the next day if you're short of dogs. "Every once in a while, one of your dogs is going to get away on you and then you hafta go lookin for im. City dogs is especially bad that way. If you do get a city dog that'll run deer, 51

the son of a bitch hasn't got brains enough to come back to the starter. Too well bred, ya know. Christ, I seen me look for those damn city dogs till eleven, eleven-thirty at night. Walk the bush all day, by Jesus, startin dogs, and then spend half the night out looking for them. See if you don't fin' your dog, someone else will. Put a collar on im. They'll say, 'Well there's another goddamn dog we can use for ourselves.' I lost several that way. "I once spent a whole night in the bush lookin for two of my own dogs. They were both good dogs. I left Cross Lake one Saturday morning, early. Headed up to Buck Lake to the Lindsay Camp to see if they had my dogs. It was about nine, nine-thirty when I got in there, but they hadn't seen my dogs. Cec or Les Frost — I forget now which one it was - invited me to stay there and have lunch with them, and I says, 'No, thanks just the same. I've got my lunch with me.' I wanted to fin' these two dogs and get back to Cross Lake by night, see. "Anyways, to make things bad, I just left Buck Lake and it started to rain. I went in north of Buck Lake about half a mile and I hit the Peterson Road where it crossed the crick comin down from this little lake that runs into the bay behind my fishin camp, and I followed the old road - which was grew up bad - over pretty close to Kingscote Lake, and there was some guys watchin there, just about to go back to camp. It was startin to get dusk - dirty afternoon it was - and I said to them, I said, 'Would there be any chance of stay in overnight?' I says, 'I don't care where.' I didn't give a damn where in the hell I slept, as long as it was out of the rain. I was soaked right to the hide. 'Well,' they said, 'we're filled up. We couldn't take nobody.' "Whether they thought I'd eat them out of house and home or what, I don't know. Anyway, they turned me out. Bastards! And it was a hell of a dirty night. I asked them if they'd seen anything of stray dogs. 'No, no.' So I kept on on this old Peterson Road until I hit the wagon snye comin out from Kingscote Lake and goin down toward Kennaway where old Tom Scott lived. Course as soon as I got out on the clearing there where there was an old farm at one time, then I could see better. But while I was in the bush, it was black as seven black cats and it rainin! "Anyway, when I got out on this clearing, I could see a light not too far from me, and it

was a bunch of hunters from Hastings stayin at Tom Scott's old house. I asked them if they'd seen my stray dogs and they said no, they hadn't. But one fella spoke up and he says, 'I think there's two dogs over on this farm above Fishtail Lake.' I says, That's ol Sime Siple's place.' And he said, 'Yeah, that's the old fellow that has these two stray dogs.' You see the dogs, when they went out a my hearin, they went north, but then they broke to the east and south again to Fishtail, and of course ol Sime got ahold of them. In those days, I always marked an H on the left side of my dogs with scissors. Soon as they come to the farm, ol Sime says, 'Them's Len Holmes's dogs.' So he kept them tied up for me. "I asked this gang was in Tom Scott's old house if they could put me up over night. I said, Til pay for it.' 'No,' and they said, 'Did youse have any supper?' 'No,' I said. And they could see that I was drownded right to the hide, so some of them give me dry clothes and a couple of other guys got somethin to eat there for me and, Geez, I appreciated it. I slept on the floor but I didn't give a shit. I was close to the stove. Dried out my riggin there. Oh that Hastings gang was damn good to me. But that first bunch up at Kingscote, they were sons of bitches. "Next morning I went over to see ol Sime and I got my dogs. I knew ol Sime for years — quite a lad, ya know. He's the one that walked with his snowshoes on backwards to fool the game wardens when he was trappin in Algonquin Park. Bout the same age as my dad. They knew each other well. Sime used to live in a shack in the pinery close to Benoir's Lake south of Avey's mill. That's where I first met him. I was up there many a time lookin for dogs. That's the first place I ever had green tea. Sime always drank green tea, you know. Green tea and venison in the summer to eat. "But oh, dogs is a lot a work. Gotta take care of em, see. Always had lots a dog feed in. Oh yeah. And we'd gut some deer, why used to feed them maybe the heart and liver, insideses, lights, and stuff like that, you know, clean up. That's a lot better than this goddamn stuff you buy out a the store. Hell of a lot cheaper and it stays with them better. They can work on it better, you know. "Lot more to huntin than meets the eye. Lot a gettin ready, ya know. You spend a few days blazing trails first; you had to have your wood in the shed that you wanted for the season, 52

and some left over. And then the hunters had to be moved in, had to be moved out and all their riggin. There was a lot of work attached to it, but I liked it, nevertheless. Yeah, I liked it, and that camp could talk, it'd sure have some history stories. "In the evening, most of the guys would drink. I didn't give a damn what the hell they drunk - there was no women at the bunkhouse - long as they drunk only at night. My biggest problem was keeping the cook from getting drunk. It was pretty hard on them, cause, you know, most of the lads that you'd get that would go into the bush, why I don't think I ever hit one that wouldn't take a drink. Old George Anderson, why he cooked I think about three falls for me. He was a pretty damn good cook, too - as long as you kept the liquor away from him. "Ross Shaver stayed in, I mind, one fall there. He was a druggist from Burlington. Bald fellow. Didn't have enough hair to wipe a bird's arse. Anyway, he stayed in this day - he wasn't feeling too good, I don't know why — but anyway, he was going to give old George a hand. "That day, we decided to hunt out east. We'd hunted close to Cross Lake for about three days and by Geez, we didn't have anything. The deer was wild that fall. Lots of deer, but they weren't taking the runways. Lots a men in the woods, but the damn deer wasn't going to them. They were just pulling out wherever 'n hell they could get out. And I said - started to get a little bit hard to get starts even - so one night at supper I says, 'We gotta get the hell away from this lake. The deer is moving back. We've been doggin her too heavy,' I says. So anyway, this morning we done up a lunch for dinner and we went down - three boat loads of us went down - to the far end of Cross Lake and we went over past the south end of East Lake and over towards close to East Straggles. We hadn't been in there yet. Then, of course, the timber was all standing. Between East Lake and East Straggles was all hardwood; maples two feet thick. Always had to leave East Lake early cause the woods got so dark on account of those big tall maples. It was a lovely sugar bush. And anyway, why we got them all stationed on watches in there. At that time I didn't know where in hell the runs was, but it didn't matter; you could put a man any place on high ground and he'd see the white flag flying as soon as the dogs started to run. And talk about goddamn deer! I got in there with a

Deer hanging in the hemlocks; Lloyd Bowen with hound

pair of dogs, or three dogs I guess it was, and there were deer going in every direction. We dragged five deer to the head of Cross Lake that night. There was a pennacle in there, and there must have been four, five deer on top of this pennacle. Oh Christ, it was like war. The dogs, they got up on top of that damn hill and they went crazy. We didn't do too much in the forenoon, but my God you talk about guns going in the afternoon - made up for lost time. The hunters got their deer. You see they'd crowded back away from Cross Lake. Too much pressure there. But by Jesus they were over in that country there was no scarcity of them, and I can't remember ever going back in that section that I didn't put a deer off that high pennacle. "One night, we dragged these five deer to Cross Lake and it was after dark when we got to the lake, to the boats and motor there, and coming down Cross Lake - you never was on the lake, were you - but anyway, there's a nahrras in there, and we had to come down the damn lake for, I'd say, half a mile before we could see the lights of the camp. And comin round the goddamn nahrras, I couldn't see any lights of the camp and I said to the fellow next to me, I said, 'By Jesus, I don't know. There's something wrong. Them lights ain't shinin. No lights at the camp tonight.' I knew damn well, you know, that they should be, and I thought, 'By Jesus, I bet you what you like that Shaver and old George is both in bed.' So anyway, we got to the camp. No lights. I had to get the gas lanterns filled up and get the lights on and the stoves lit, you know. Old George's just drunker than hell. He got up, old George did, just staggering, though. He couldn't do nothing. He said to -1 think it was young Ed Scott that was there with me that fall, helping me to guide them and he said to him, he says, 'Ed, are you going 53

it. One summer there, goddamn deer pruned hell out of my turnips. But I fixed im. Shot that buck not too many feet from the shithouse door. It was a good deer. A nice head. That's the one I got hanging there in the hall. "In those days, Richard, there was lots of deer. At that time, when you were back in there on the ice, you could see where the deer had reached up for the cedar boughs off the ice as far as they could reach up with their necks. The shoreline was all trimmed up about five feet high. God there was a lot of deer in the country at that time. Never was too much of a moose country here to be honest with you. Moose ... I don't know, years ago there was nobody killing them, many moose. They never seemed to get plenniful here. It's not a moose country. It's a deer country. It was a good deer country for years and years until the property was sold out to Harcourt Park. They just seemed to disappear. Oh, I hunted at Cross Lake from ever since I was a young lad and right up to the time when I sold up there. And I always enjoyed the time that I put in deer hunting up in there. It was a wonderful place to hunt. Not like it is now. To go in there now, this end of Cross Lake, and look up the lake and see all those cottages along there is sickening, just sickening."

Hunter, Harry Graham, Ken White, Len

to help me to get supper tonight, or are you going to be a son of a bitch!' And young Ed says, 'I think, George, I'll be a son of a bitch.' Shaver, he was out. Out for the world. He couldn't get up. "Yeah, Shaver was a bugger to drink. I mind one time ol Ken White - he was quite a lad to drink at times too - this one time Shaver got him good and drunk and he painted Ken's lash with iodine and next morning ol Ken there, he went out to have a leak by the woodshed and all of us looking out the window and Ken, he was standing there pissing and he looks down and then down some more and comes back in an says, 'If I knew which one of your bastards painted my dick, I'd piss in his porridge.' He was pretty hot about it. We never told on old Ross. "Myself, I was never too bad that way, but they always tried to get me drunk on my birthday which was in the month of November and always came in huntin season. And this one time, I guess they got me pretty drunk and old Ross Shaver, he says, 'Len,' he says, 'pass me down that there coleslaw.' And I was talkin to somebody I guess, so he says several times more, 'Will one of youse guys pass me the goddamn coleslaw?'; so I pick up the bowl an I says, 'Youse wants the coleslaw, you're gonna, goddamn well get it' and I fired it right down the table past his head and into the wall. I guess they put me to bed after that. Next mornin, I had to part my hair in the middle to keep my canoe upright. I felt poor for several days. "That camp has had some awful experiences. But I loved it up there. Where I took the wood out there, I planted a few hills. First I grubbed up some ground fer to put some turnips in, and then I put in a few potatoes - right in the hardwoods; black soil, ya know; couldn't beat 54

Four

Trappin "As I got older, well then I went after the beaver and otter and fisher and marten. There was not much of that stuff down around close to home. You had to get back into where the marshes was and cricks n things. The only place, practically, that I trapped was in the Township of Dudley from Clement Lake right on through to Buck Lake and north of Buck Lake. After the Second World's War when the zones come in, why that was my zone." So Len has spent most of his life back in where the "marshes and cricks n things" are. This being the case, I thought I'd better get back in there with him and find out what sort of a life it was and what Len really did, and indeed, I've now been out with him on his trapline many a time. Moreover, although strictly speaking I do not approve of trapping, I always seem to have forsworn my disapproval while in the field and even to have gotten caught right up in the spirit of the thing. I can well remember the feeling of elation when, clearing the ice chunks out of a hole, we could suddenly make out the shape of a large chocolate-coloured beaver in a trap. I can also remember, however, the mounting disappointment of chopping through the ice over trap after trap only to find them waiting there undisturbed. It's no fun to walk twenty miles in freezing cold weather through the bush over hill and dale in deep snow and come up emptyhanded, but anyone who has a more romantic notion of what trapping is really like is sorely misinformed. I remember one time when Len and I went out together in late November. Since we were heading for the system of marshes below Watt's Lake, we drove up the Burleigh Road and left the truck just inside the gate on the old Buck

First and foremost, Len is a trapper. To some degree it may have been in his blood, a legacy from his maternal grandfather. "My mother's father, he was an ol trapper; used to catch foxes. He was a farmer, but every winter he'd go out and catch foxes. I guess my mother often tole me that when I was a kid. She'd say, 'You take after your grandfather.'" It's hard to believe that Len began his trapping career before the "First World's War", when he was not yet a teenager, but he did. He was still in the midst of his brief school career when he started. "It was just a little bit of spendin money for us young gaffers that was in school. We'd trap mushrats and mink and coon, stuff like that. "I fell through the ice of the beaver pond at McGregor's Marsh one spring when I was just in my early teens, and I guess I got a chill or something. Anyway, I got appendiceetis and I had to be taken down to Toronto. My dad took me out to the train at Kinmount on the trolley behind the section car the railroad men used for keepin the track in line. I was kind a worried. Had pains in my stomach, pains runnin over to my side. My sister Ruby died of appendiceetis when she was eighteen, ya know. They took me down to St. Michael's Hospital and boys that was good service. I was in St. Michael's aroun two weeks, and whiles I was layin there, I was kind a worried about my traps I had out at McGregor's Marsh and Sticky Pond. Then when I got back, my mother wouldn't let me walk in too early. When I finally did get in, I found a great big beaver in one of my traps at Sticky Pond, but it had seen too much sun - full a maggots. I jus left it there an picked up my traps. 55

network of forgotten backwaters and swamps until we finally reached the beaver dam at the head of the first pond, where Len intended to set a trap. After scrutinizing the dam at inordinate length and finally selecting just the right spot, Len set about breaking out the ice around the area where he planned to place his trap. After chopping a hole about six to eight inches deep into the beaver dam in order to get a good flow of water going and thus to attract the beaver, Len proceeded to chop out a hole about two feet square in the ice on the upstream side of the dam, and then cleared all the ice lumps out with the flow. "Yeah, the bastards is in here all right," said Len, as if I had doubted for even one instant that they were there. I knew perfectly well that they were not only there, but that Len knew exactly how many were there, what size they were, and how many fleas were on each beaver's hide. Len does not fool around. As I peered into the hole, I could see a number of clean, freshly debarked aspen twigs, a sure sign of resident beaver. "With a feedbed like that, they's probably a whole family in here," said Len, pointing not at these twigs, but up the marsh several hundred yards toward a snowcovered mound, which was the hump of a beaver lodge made of old sticks and mud. About thirty feet in front of the lodge was a whole mess of branches and twigs sticking through the ice, which an inexperienced eye would have taken for a small island or shrub-infested shallows, or even for just a whole mess of branches and twigs sticking through the ice; the experienced eye, however, would immediately perceive this for what it was - a beaver feedbed. Since they spend most of the winter in their lodges whose only exits are under the ice, beaver have to work long and hard in the fall cutting down trees for winter feed - mainly aspen (poplar), maple, and white birch - and then cutting off and hauling all the branches one by one to a selected area within easy swimming distance of their lodge. That is why in the fall before the freeze-up you can generally find beaver not too far from home. "Some of thems, they'll come down in the fall of the year and, if there's a hole in the dam, they'll fix it up; but, as a rule, after the cold weather sets in, they won't do any work on the dams. Git their feed put in for the wintertime and that's that. The older beaver, sometimes they'll swim away from the house a ways, maybe where there's a crick coming in, take

Lake Road, a one-time logging road scarcely navigable in four-wheel drive in the summer, and strictly for snow machines or snowshoes in the winter. Just before setting out, Len told me, as he always would, "if youse gets back to the truck first, the keys is in the glove department." Then, as if by way of an afterthought, he added, "I leave them there so's they won't get stole." I once remarked that I could not think of a better place to leave the keys if one wanted to get his truck stolen, except possibly right in the ignition, and this upset Len profoundly. Until the early seventies, people in Wilberforce were not in the habit of locking things up: houses, cars, garages, everything was simply left open. Nowadays, however, everyone locks everything. After Gord had his truck stolen right out of the driveway, even Len began keeping his truck tightly locked, carefully hiding the keys on the back step bumper or tucking them in under one of the back wheels. "It's getting to the point anymore when ya hafta keep your arsehole locked up so's it won't get stole," bemoans Len. Len and I set out that November day on foot, because there was not yet quite enough snow to need snowshoes or to warrant using the snow machine. I remember this day in particular because the snow was so white and unsullied. It had fallen the night before and there was about four to five inches of weightless feathery virgin snow. Well, almost virgin. What stands out most in my mind are the myriad bear tracks crossing the trail all along the road. Inasmuch as the weather had only just turned cold, the bears had not yet denned up, and I guess they must have been having their last fling before hibernation. Disappointingly - for me, anyway - we did not see a single bear that day, but it certainly kept me excited, expecting at any moment to see a sleek black bear, pelt just glistening with oil from having stuffed himself for the past month on beechnuts. It was a perfect day for photography - blue sky and white snow. Although I failed to get a shot of a bear, I did manage to get some good pictures of Len setting a beaver trap, which went a long way to compensate for my bad luck with the bears. On the nearly three-mile slog into our destination, we picked our way through the maze of old skidder roads and trails that crisscross this area and are often only noticeable in the late fall and winter. Then, having left anything that had any resemblance to a road whatsoever, we tramped cross-country through an incredible 56

Beaver lodge and winter feedbed

fresh feed in through the winter months, see you know, from where there's a bit of open water - but, as a rule, the kitten beaver, why they stay around the house pretty well. The feedbed's there." For a proper feedbed, there must be enough water so that when the branches have been anchored in the mud, a good part of each branch will be under the ice after freeze-up and therefore available for winter forage. When the beaver gets hungry, he slips out through one of the underwater doorways - presumably having taken a deep breath — and paddles off under the ice for a feed of twigs and bark. Although a beaver can stay underwater without air for up to fifteen minutes, he rarely has to, because the bottom of the ice surface is pitted with airpockets and holes where he can get a breath of air. Sometimes, if there are otter about and the dam is kept open after freeze-up - otter love to keep beaver dams open - there may even be anywhere up to a foot of open airspace between the water level and the ice. I have seen whole swamps like this where you could actually look under the ice and see mink tracks in the mud along the shoreline. When on such ice, you have the feeling that you are walking on eggshells or crystal. The ice of such a pond will sometimes crash in from the weight of the snow alone, and it is weird to arrive at a pond or marsh and see a jagged rim of ice all the way around it about twelve inches higher than the by then refrozen and snow-covered new surface. As a rule, in the wintertime beaver have few enemies to worry about other than man not even the cold. "They don't lay down n sleep in the water, ya know," says Len. "They got a nice dry room up inside their house above the

water - bit a grass, marsh hay n stuff like that to sleep on. And they always have more 'n one way to git out if anything tries to bother em from the top. But startin in late winter, they wanna be careful. Wolves will sometimes interfere with a beaver house, and they'll kill a beaver if they can get hold of im. Fisher will too. See startin in late winter, beaver'll come out and take a bit a fresh feed. Their other feed'll be sour by then. They like to get out, which generally they can around cricks, and get in fresh feed - tastes good to them - and that's where a fisher or a wolf 11 wait on them, catch em when they're comin out t' feed. I seen one place where a fisher had killed a beaver down on Holland's Crick at the head of the big marsh at Holland's Lake. He got this beaver away from the crick, d'ya see. If a fisher or a wolf can get between the crick and the beaver, they have their meat." Anyway, having established beyond all doubt the presence of beaver, Len and I set to work. We have a well-worked-out distribution of labour. Since I know nothing about how to prepare the area and I am terrified of setting those big steel doublespring traps, Len does all that. I do all the Joe-jobs. My main responsibility, for example, is to go and cut a "tally stick", to which the trap will eventually be wired. This entails selecting a small balsam about one and a half to two inches in diameter at the bottom. If it is any thicker, it won't pass through the loops of the springs, and it should be balsam, because "beaver don't like the taste" and won't be tempted to chew on it and spring the trap 57

before they swim into it. I have to strip off all the boughs leaving a smooth stick about six feet long with no little knobs on it where the branches were, needless to say. Len likes a tidy job. I then sharpen the thick end of it to make it easier to ram it into the mud. The next important job which can be entrusted to me is to collect all manner of dead sticks from and around the dam and deposit all of this carefully selected material beside Len. Avoid green poplar at all costs. The only time that you want green poplar is when you are setting a trap that has to be baited. Then you want green poplar and nothing else will do, "bambegilya" least of all. I know. I once fetched some by mistake and now, whenever I am sent to cut bait, Len always tells me, "Don't bring some of that damn ol bambegilya like ya's did las time," even though I only cut Balm of Gilead (balsam) poplar that one time instead of the preferred aspen poplar. Len uses nothing but the so-called humane traps for beaver now, so I am spared having to fetch a lodestone, which would have been necessary had we been using one of the old leghold traps. I am glad for myself and for the beaver that Len no longer uses these traps. In a leghold, the beaver is free to swim about, but as he instinctively heads back out for deeper water, he pulls along not only the trap but also the lodestone to which it is attached, and then, of course, the poor thing drowns because he cannot swim back up for air against the weig;ht of the lodestone. In a humane trap, the beaver is killed instantly. No doubt about it. Len calls them "knockem-stiffs" and that's just what they do. Some of them would snap a man's arm like a twig. That's why I hate to be involved in setting them. The beaver swims into one, touches the trigger, and BANG! It usually gets him right behind the head across the neck, probably smashing the medulla; but even if he manages to get halfway through, he is killed almost instantly by the shock. I rationalize my helping Len by reminding myself that this is a lot better than the old lodestone method. Every dam site in Len's zone has grim reminders of those days - several old stones, with pieces of rusty wire twisted around them, sitting nearby on the shore at the base of some tree. (It must be admitted, of course, that Len did not go over to humane traps strictly out of consideration for the beaver. He likes them because they are lethal. You never lose an animal once it is in one.)

By the time I arrive back out on the dam with the tally stick and branches, Len is intently peering into the chopped-out hole, waiting for the water to clear in order to see if he has mucked the hole out to the desired depth. You don't want it too deep or too shallow. It has to be just right, or in the end the beaver may swim over or under your trap. Furthermore, you must be very careful not to break the ice back too far from the dam or the beaver may surface before he comes to the trap and just swim over it on his way to the hole, perhaps even setting it off inadvertently with his tail. Having determined that everything is just the way he likes it, Len then takes my tally stick, scrutinizes it, and says, no matter how perfect a stick I have found, "I suppose ya's couldn't a found a crookeder one, could ya?" Then he plunges the stick into the water and down into the mud, pulls it back out, and wires on the unset trap at just the right distance below the watermark on the stick. Now the trap is ready to be set, and this is a hair-raising procedure if ever there was one. I particularly dislike lifting off the safety catch once the trigger has been set, but this is about the only part of the job that Len entrusts to me - for obvious reasons. As I carefully lower my steadied hand to remove the little steel catch, he says, "Watch it don't go off on ya and smash your arm all t' hell, Richard." Just what I need to hear at such a moment. Then, as I bobble the catch, "you're about as handy with that thing as a cub bear playing with his pecker." Vastly pleased with the success of this line as I dissolve in near hysterical laughter, occasioned as much by the tension as by the line itself, he adds, "Christ, I guess I gotta do everything myself." With trap successfully set, Len plunges the stick, trap and all, into the mud and then spends the next five minutes raising and lowering it, squinting into the hole, and muttering unintelligible words to himself, at least some of which, if my ear does not deceive me, are "cuss words". The problem is that you have to place the trap in such a way that, when the bottom side of the trap is close enough to the pond bottom to prevent the animal from swimming under it, the top side of the trap will be just far enough under the water to prevent it from getting frozen into the ice, but not far enough under to allow the animal to swim over it once the ice has reformed. This takes a lot of finagling during which the loaded trap occasionally suddenly goes off. A person of a delicate nature does not want to 58

his foot in such a set and he told me: "Well, you had to guess at that." Len's guesses were educated ones. He certainly knew how to place them so as not to get too many snaps. "If it was a pole set you were using, why you put your notch in your pole, set your trap in there, and set it in a way that he wouldn't knock it off when he comes in to take the feed. But you have to have it just so many inches below the ice too, you know, cause you see when he comes in for the feed, your trap is right there close to your upper spring. I never got too many snaps, just once in a whiles in the winter I'd get a snap. And I don't know, maybe as he conies in, maybe the side of his shoulder or something like that, or maybe a stick as he chewed it off would drop down onto the top of your trap, d'ya see. It don't take much to snap them — especially those Newhouse traps - they go off quite easy. But you won't see many snaps, not if you know what you're doing. "Mind you, sometimes you'll get rats when you're trappin beaver. Rats'll live with beaver, you know, right in the same house, and feed off the same feedbed too. They're chums, beaver n rats. In the winter months, they'll camp right in the same room. The rats get the heat from the beaver - keep warm. That pond that runs into Big Straggle on the south side - one winter I was trappin in there - I got more damn rats out a there! I had to trap the rats out before I could get any beaver. They'd skin my feed, the little buggers, right and left. I wish to hell I'd a had the same type of a trap at those years that I have today - these little 220fishertraps. Just put a piece of parsnip or cahrrot, piece a apple, on the tricker, and when they touch that parsnip, their name is Dennis. They won't get away. And you never get a foot. Here last spring I trapped rats at Flour Barrl, Del Fisher's Marshes, and along the Burleigh, and I used those 220 traps. They touch one a them, they're done diggin." Obviously you don't just drop a trap down somewhere and sharpen your skinning knife. It takes a lifetime of knowledge to be a successful trapper and you can't learn it all out of books. This knowledge includes knowing what beaver not to take, in addition to knowing what ones to harvest. Anyone who "skins" his ground in the first year or so is not a trapper at all, as far as Len is concerned. The whole idea is to farm your area year after year, always leaving behind enough animals to breed. "You gotta more or less farmer your zone, same as if you were

be around Len when this happens. The "cuss words" can be pretty vile. So who said trapping was easy? When the trap has been placed to Len's satisfaction, I then swing back into action, inserting all my carefully selected dead sticks along both sides of the trap and around to the dam, making a little barricade so that nothing can swim into the hole in the dam from the sides. Before we finally leave, Len spends a last five minutes peering and squinting, changing the angle of the trap slightly, or shoving down a bit on one of the sticks in my little barricade. Then he puts on his gloves. My fingers, needless to say, have long since frozen practically solid just watching Len fiddle with that cold wet steel. Every time his fingers stick to it, it sends shivers up my spine. I honestly don't know how he can stand it, especially when it's about minus twenty or thirty Fahrenheit. And it's just as bad when you are checking traps and you find a beaver in one. In order not to wet his gloves, Len handles both beaver and trap barehanded, fiddling with the trap, tightening wires with his steel pliers, and so forth, until I can hardly bear to watch. More than sixty-five years of trapping has done incredible things to those hands, things no amount of hand lotion could touch. As we leave the dam, Len always says, "Well, if we don't get a beaver, we might at least git an old mushrat or something." He would never dream of jinxing a set by saying, "Well, if that don't do the trick, nothing will," even though in his heart of hearts he is hoping for a huge dark beaver, or even an otter, if he is really lucky. That's one more good thing about the humane traps, as far as Len is concerned: they'll take otter and even "rats", if they happen along, whereas the old leghold trap - if it was set specially for beaver - would usually get nothing but beaver. You had to know just exactly how far back from the water's edge and how deep to place a leghold trap. Unless it was exactly at the spot where a beaver's leg would contact the trigger pan when he began to crawl out onto the shore, you could forget about Mr Beaver, unless you were just plain lucky. The fact that it helped to know such things as how long any particular beaver was goes unsaid. Even with pole sets, where you were using bait to attract the beaver to your trap while he was swimming from his lodge to the feedbed, you still had to know just how to place the trap. I once asked Len how one knew where a beaver would put 59

farming cattle or sheep or anything. There's more beaver now and otter in my area than there was in the old days, cause, if you have a zone, you can protect it. And if you go to work and skin your zone off, maybe you wouldn't make hardly your salt next year, if ya skinned er too close. And it's just the same as the farmer killing off and selling all his cattle. He wouldn't have anything for next year, see? So anyway, the fur market - why you got more or less to farm it too." Knowing his terrain is always very important for the trapper, and this entails a good deal of off-season scouting. You have to know where all the lodges and bank houses are, as well as

the exact location of all the entrances to each one. It is no good putting humane traps in front of two exits from a bank house if there is a third, concealed one that you did not know about. And the trapper has to know which lodges have beaver in them and roughly how many are in each. It also helps if he knows where the channels are and what route the beaver will take to their feedbeds. He can't just cut a hole through the ice in winter and hope that it is at a spot that a beaver will swim by. Generally speaking it is a lot easier to trap beaver in the spring or fall when there is no ice on the water. In the spring, for example, beaver come to certain places on the shore to "bog" or secrete their scent on little piles of marsh hay, and one can use scent to attract beaver to particular places where traps have been set. Len once explained to me how to make beaver scent. "You get it from the oil stones. Cut the end off a them and take a little bottle and dig out a little bit of the sticky musk - what they call bark musk from inside your castor and cut it up in fine specks and put it in your little bottle, and then, the oil that you squeeze out of the oil stones, put it in amongst there. It's a kind of a yellish colour. You mix the stuff together and then you can — like if you're going to keep it any length of time, like three, four, five years - you can get this oil a cummins from a drugstore, and you put a few drops a that in and that'll keep your scent from hardening in the summer months. Sometimes I'd use a little oil a rodium too. It was good for rats as well as beaver. But mostly I jus used oil a cummins. I got bottles of beaver scent; quite a bit of it down cellar there, and I got some of it in the woodshed, too. I've got enough goddamn beaver scent to do me for the rest of my lifetime and then some. Oceans of the stuff. I could take some with me when I die." This explanation was not all that enlightening to me, inasmuch as I didn't even know what a castor was and was forced to ask for an explanation. "Beaver castors? Well now each beaver, it don't matter if it's male or female, each beaver has what they call the oil stones and also a pair of castors, right between the hin' legs, underneath, and they are scent. You can mix those two together, if you wanta, and you can trap beaver with them. The beaver will come into them. But the best time of the year is the spring of the year; back long time ago, we could trap beaver in the spring of the year, in open

Len out scouting his terrain

A pile of marsh hay where a beaver has bogged 60

Obviously, when you give Len a hand with his trapline, you are going to be out in the bush when the snow is on the ground. Although raccoons come prime as early as late October and November, most of the animals Len likes to trap sport their best fur from December until about mid-March. While plodding on snowshoes from swamp to swamp, putting out or checking beaver sets, Len always keeps a very watchful eye out for any fisher, marten, or otter tracks. Otter tracks are especially visible, because their bellies drag in the snow when they ramble. When we see an otter track, he'll say something like, "that fella's headed up towards the boundary ponds. I spect he'll be arsin around up there for a week or so and we might jus pick him up in one of our sets later." As we walk along, Len will frequently stop at various little creeks and watercourses to check a mink trap, or to set one out in some crevice in the rocks, or perhaps to put an otter trap at some often-used crossing spot. For these types of sets Len still uses leghold traps, which he submerges in running water, so that they will neither freeze in open position nor give off any telltale smell. He then baits the set with dead fish, usually rock bass or suckers caught in the summer and kept frozen in his basement. The worse the smell is, the better the bait. "Mink likes fish. Otter does too. Don't matter what they is, long as they smell." My problem is that I get so interested in all the tracks and different techniques for setting the various kinds of traps that I have trouble remembering exactly where we were when we set any particular trap, let alone how we got from there to where we are at the time. In that bush you have to be concentrating full-time simply on where you are walking, if you are to have any hope at all of knowing just where you are and how you got there. I remember one time when I was helping Len in the south end of his zone down at the bottom of Newbatt's Hay Marsh. We finished setting our traps on the dam a little earlier than we had expected to, so Len suggested that we take a jaunt over to Sticky Pond, to "check it out". "How far is it to this Sticky Pond?" I asked Len, worried because there was about ten inches of fresh snow on the ground and we were on foot — not even on snowshoes. "Oh, just a buckjump," said Len, "not any more 'n that."

water, and they will come at that time to scent a lot better than they will in the fall of the year." Len was only too pleased to take me down in the basement and acquaint me with beaver scent first hand. I have to say that it is without doubt the most evil smelling mixture I have ever smelled. Naturally, half of the fun for Len is in trying to induce someone to take a good whiff of the bottle, and he is constantly on the lookout for a new sucker. Once, when my young friend Glen Pomeroy was planning to take up the fine art of beaver trapping and get rich quick, he asked Len's advice about how to proceed. Len told him that he had to use this special scent if he really wanted to clean up and, producing a bottle, he held it out for poor Pomeroy to smell. Intuiting that something might be amiss, Glen asked first what it smelled like. "Oh, it don't smell bad," said Len, straightfaced, pretending to take a sniff of the bottle neck. He then held it out to Glen, who, this time trustingly, lowered his nose to the bottle, which Len then quickly raised, so that Glen not only got a real good whiff but also got enough on his nose so that he could smell it for some three days. "See, I tole ya's it didn't smell bad," choked out Len, tears streaming down his face. "As the ol saying goes, 'a little scent's good, but a lot a sense better.' " I later found out that Len always collects the castors and sells them by the pound at the fur auctions, where they command a very good price. It seems that they are used in the manufacture of perfume and are, therefore, in great demand. Every trapper apparently knows this and sells all the castors, except the few that he uses to make scent for spring and fall trapping. The main drawback to taking beaver in the spring or the fall, when it is easiest to do so, is that the fur is not yet prime. "That's why the last few years - a few years ago - they closed the season at the end of March on beaver and otter, cause they're not as good. The beaver, after he's been in the house all winter, especially if his house is a little bit too warm, maybe a bank house or something like that, why the fur ain't so good and you won't get as much money for it. And don't start your trapping too early in the fall, cause that's not good either. I always figured that the best of your hides is in January. If you don't start to trap any beaver until after Christmas, from then on, until the end of February, you're going to get some nice beaver hides. Prime fur." 61

like an old bear from the strain of trying to pull himself back up on the log. I helped him back up and, after I had brushed him off and established to my great relief that the old gaffer really was unhurt and that he had not landed on some slumbering bear, I suggested quite firmly that we say to hell with Sticky Pond and any beaver that might or might not be there, and that we head back, the more so since it was already rather late in the day. "Well, I hate like hell to go back when we come this far," said Len, and I immediately realized that there was absolutely no question whatsoever of going back before we had determined what the situation was with the beaver at Sticky Pond. So we pressed on, only to arrive at the dam on the far side and discover that there were no beaver at all in the area. "Should be here," said Len. "I spect they went out a here south in a packsack." I replied that I had no idea which way the beaver had gone, but that I knew very well that we had to start heading back east in a big hurry, if we were to get out to the Burleigh Road by dark. Although Len almost never remains on the trail in the bush after dark - "I don't like prowling through the woods after night and I never did; I always try to be in by dark or shortly after" - he has no real fear of this happening because, if necessary, he could find his way out blindfolded. I too am not afraid of the bush at night, but this time I was afraid of not being able to find my way out for help if something happened to Len. That was the only time in our many wanderings that I was ever afraid that he might not make it out. I knew that he had been shaken up by the fall and it was a long tough walk back; moreover, it was beginning to snow hard. I realized that if anything did happen to Len, I could neither get out in time to get help nor bring help back to the same place if I did manage to find my way out. However, Len just plodded along like a tortoise, slow and steady, never once complaining about his bad knee, although I could tell from the way he was favouring it that it was causing him considerable pain. You haven't seen darkness until you've been in a hemlock and cedar bush at night in a bad snowstorm. Even walking five feet behind him, I could at times hardly make Len out through the thick snowflakes and near-total darkness. I was pretty relieved when I finally saw, or rather felt, the road with my feet that night. I

My heart sank, because by now I was well familiar with Len's buckjumps, which were like farmers' country miles, but since I was supposed to be helping, I could hardly say no. Besides, I knew perfectly well that if I didn't go with him, he would go in alone the next day, and I wasn't too keen on having him go into such a place by himself. My premonition of trouble proved all too true. It was a nightmare. The going wasn't too bad for the good mile or so across country to the near side of the pond, but when we reached the pond, we got into an awful "boar's nest" of fallen trees, flattened the year before by a cyclone that passed through the area and later demolished a trailer camp way over at Benoir's Lake. Of course the dam to be checked was at the far side of the pond, so that we had to pick our way right across this "jackpot" from end to end. I now know what an ant feels like in mown hay. Up and down. Up and down. Along and down. Up again. It was enough to drive you crazy. "Watch out youse don't drop down into a bear's den, Richard," Len called back to me. "He'll make short work of ya if ya do." I wasn't really sure whether he was kidding me or not, so I asked him if he had ever fallen into one. "Well, I never fell right into one, but I come damn close several times. One time, right near the crick that run into the big marsh close to my Far Camp there, up behind Lakings's old Number Seven lumber camp there, I was just going to step forward when I seen the snow was melted all aroun this spot, and then I seen steam comin out of a hole there. Sure as God made little apples, I says to myself, there's a bear in there, maybe a bear and two cubs. It was definitely a bear den. I didn't have no shovel or anything to dig the bastard out, but then I didn't have no gun with me neither, and I'd want a goddamn gun in case the son of a bitch come out on his own accord." Just after Len had finished his story, I suddenly saw his ample bulk disappear from view between two logs. I realized that he had fallen down into some kind of crevice and I was pretty worried. What if he actually had. fallen into a bear's den? I got over to the spot as fast as I could, tightrope-walking along a thin icy poplar at risk of life and limb, and I arrived just in time to see a white head - long-billed green cap knocked askew and covered with snow - emerge from between the two logs and Len grunting 62

up with a fisher, and Len explained to me that you would simply shoot him, preferably in the eye, so as not to damage the pelt. "I mind one fisher I shot one time. I hit his track - it was in the afternoon — not too far from Cross Lake. Didn't expect to hit the fisher track there, either. But anyways, there was a fresh fisher track, made sometime early that morning, and I went back to my camp which I had there at Cross Lake - over a mile walk back to the camp - and I got some food and a bit more ammunition to do me, and I had an axe - a light axe to take along - and I had my snowshoes. In those days, I used snowshoes all the time. I didn't have no snow machine. "I took after that fisher that afternoon and I followed him until dark; but, jus before it got dark - oh, I'd say half an hour before it got dark — he started runnin up trees. And I says, 'Uhoh, you're lookin for a den.' He'd go up a tree and it wouldn't suit him, and back down he come and start to run again, see. Anyway, he got into the top of a big pine stub, and he camped there overnight. It was lucky for me that he took the pine stub, cause there was lots of nice dry kindlin in it, see. I chopped away at it all night, between that and freezin. This was in February - lots of ice, and cold, goddamn, well, it was that cold the trees was snapping that night. Anyway, I cut wood and lay with my stomach facing the fire for a while; and then my back would get cold and I would reverse. I was laying on balsam brush. I cut some brush off a balsam there and

He got into the top of a big pine stub.

had been quite worried. I had to laugh, though, later that evening when, after having been pampered by Ida, who rubbed his sore knee with Dr. Thomas' Eclectric Oil, Len said, "Well, I wasn't worried about me making it, but I was real worried about pore ol Richard. I didn't know if he'd be able to tough er or not." "You liar," I said, sending him off into gales of laughter. He knew exactly what had been on my mind. In his younger days, Len thought nothing of staying outside in the bush all night if he had to. Fisher, for example, were worth so much money that if you happened across a really fresh fisher track, you would just set right out after him and try to stick with him. "You hit a fisher track, why foller him. And you stayed with him, you'd get him. But they'll show you a lot of country first, some of them. You take an old dog fisher, them buggers, they'll go like hell, through swamps, they don't stop fer nothin. I've seen them go all night. If they don't den up, of course, when it comes dark, you're sunk. You just pray that it don't snow. Cause if it snowed, you're sunk. You're done. You gotta go back home." When Len told me this, I got wondering about what you did when you actually caught 63

was, oh I don't think that winter there was any dogs sold, only the one I sent in to the fur buyer there - a guy named Charlie Turner, he was from Port Perry, out around that section there - and I got seventy-five bucks for it. Seventyfive dollars was top price for a good dog fisher. Females is worth more because females has finer fur. But, I was well paid for stayin in the woods overnight. Those days, that was the only way to get fisher cause they were too scarce to trap. "Now the Watsons, which was trapping up in the Township of Bruton, Clyde - this is old Jack Watson and Ken, father and son - they used to get quite a few fisher and quite a few wolves. Jack had a camp up there on Branch Lake. Had another son Harry which had a camp on Kingscote. But Ken there, he was in the bush too long. He went melancholy, ya know - was in the hospital several times. Las time, after he got out, he went back into Bruton there and froze his feet. Had to take him into the hospital in Peterborough. Died a gangrene, ya know. He seen too much bush. But him and his father, they found it the same way as me - fisher was just too scarce t' trap. You hit a fisher track, why foller im." For the most part, however, Len got his fisher and otter by setting traps in their favourite haunts. Fisher, like deer, run roughly the same trails year in year out, so that they always cut across trappers' trails in more or less the same place. The longer you have known your area, the more good fisher crossings you will know. Len has a number of favourite crossings, such as the one near Hughey's old hunt camp, where he likes to put his traps. Even if there

The ol .25 Stevens

lay on top of the snow on this brush. And the fire git down a bit, I'd get up and cut some more wood and stoke the fire up and I kept the fire on all night. But I didn't cut too great a lot off the tree in case that it would upset and I couldn't see him with the rifle, see. I made damn sure I didn't cut too much off. "And when it come daylight the next morning, I had my breakfast et - melted some snow for water, you know - and I was waiting for daylight there. And come daylight, why I started chopping at the stub and before the stub fell, he got on top. He went round a couple of times in a circle, and he was twittin. A funny noise you could hear him up in there. Maybe he was looking for another tree to spring out onto, I don't know; but anyway, I fell the stub, and soon as the stub started to go, I grabbed the .25. And it was only, I'd say, not any more than ten seconds, the fisher come out of the top of the stub and started to go like the devil. I pinned him right in the back of the head; an him runnin, yeah - with the old .25 Stevens. That type of a rifle don't make no hole of any size -just a small hole. And he was hit in the right place: he died rightaway. But you gotta shoot quick, mind. They don't wait on ya, you know. They keep going. They're good scrappers too. Anyway, fisher at those days was scarce, but if ya got one, you had something worthwhile. Females went for $125, $150, along there. This was a good dog. Dogs 64

and adhere to his quotas and the result has been an increase in fur, particularly beaver and fisher. When he comes to an undamaged fisher crossing, the first thing Len does is look for a leaning cedar or any kind of a sloping tree or old log wedged on an angle of about 30 to 40 degrees to the ground. Before he began using humane traps, he used to make little pens or put his trap in a crevice of a rock or any natural little cave, but now with the humane traps he looks for that leaning cedar. Having found an appropriate tree, he then plants two upright maple poles about eight feet long parallel to one another, one on each side of the log, so that they run up past the cedar, touching it about five feet or so from the ground, and he fastens each pole firmly to the sloping tree with wire and/or nails. A small doublespring 220 humane trap is now fastened between the poles at just the right height above the log to make it impossible for a fisher, or for that matter a marten or a raccoon, running up the log, to either run under the trap or be tempted to jump over it. Ah yes, you say, but why would any animal run up this particular sloping tree or log in the first place? The answer is easy: to get at the cluster of long-dead fish suspended by wire from an eight-to-ten-foot pole stuck in the ground and then wired to the tree several feet up from the trap, so that the fish

are no fresh tracks at a good crossing, you still set your trap, because you know that sooner or later a fisher will be along: "Fisher's a bugger to ramble, you know." Nothing disturbs Len more than arriving at a favourite fisher crossing and finding himself faced by a wasteland strewn with large tree crowns left behind after a particularly devastating timber cutting in the area, only the straight part of the trunks having been harvested, and the rest just left lying there, "rottening". Such cuts cause the fisher to change their age-old habits, and Len, in turn, has to start again from scratch in the area. At least there are lots of fisher around nowadays, which is more than you could say fifty years ago, and it must be said that this is largely the result of a strict government-imposed quota system that limits each trapper to a certain number of fisher based on the size of his zone. As Len often says, there's more fur in general around nowadays than there was in the old days, and this is mainly because of the imposition of zones and quotas. Before 1946, a trapper could go wherever he liked and trap as many animals as he could. "There was no zones at that time and you went wherever the fur were; where you could find a bit of fur." Since the zones came in, however, a trapper has to stay on his own ground

Fisher set

65

hang down just up-log from the trap. They hang so that they cannot be reached from any nearby branches, but could be easily reached if one could get through the trap. The only trick is to have them concealed if possible by higher foliage, so that ravens cannot see them when they cruise by overhead, because they'll clean up your bait in no time. This type of set is very effective and works equally well for marten and coon. "As a rule, you fix up a place on a leaning cedar — put your bait up above there - and there's a fishe come along, or a coon or a marten comes along, and your trap is set properly, why you'll get im. And there's no getaway to that type of trap for that size animal, whereas once in a while with the leghold traps, you'd lose them." With the possible exception of an otter, nothing makes Len happier than getting a good fisher in one of his traps. Although the smaller females are worth more, Len is always happy to see a big dog as well. Since marten are worth much less on the market, Len is usually not too thrilled to see a marten in his traps, unless it is a very good one with a large peach-coloured throat patch, which is supposed to add to its value. Now that raccoons are fetching a better price, Len has gotten more interested in them. He gets the occasional one in his fisher sets, but he gets them mainly in October and November, before they den up, in leghold traps set in creeks and baited with fish, a type of set that will pick up mink and otter as well. If you are going after coon, however, you have to be sure to attach your trap to a fairly hefty tally stick, because an old boar coon is a strong animal and he'll drag a tally stick ten or twenty yards before it finally gets tangled up or wedged and can be dragged no further. I remember Len telling me how he once searched up and down a creek bed for over ten minutes before he finally found a huge frozen raccoon - with only one toe in the trap - in a clump of bushes a good twenty-five yards upstream and over the bank. In general, I am always amazed that relatively puny looking leghold traps can effectively hold such large animals. It is true that animals sometimes free themselves by gnawing off a foot, but not all that often. Either way, I don't like these traps. If you have to trap, give me the humane traps anyday. I also dislike wolf snares; they're worse than leghold traps. Of course, I do not share Len's dislike for wolves. I like to have them around

and I feel the same about them as I do about any other animal, with the exception of porcupines (I draw the line at anything that eats plywood with gusto). Like most old trappers, Len hates wolves. "They're sneaky, you know, sneaky look on them. One time, I had traps over at East Lake - you know the East Lake there that's only a little ways from Cross Lake. I was walking along the shore and I had an otter trap right at the outlet of East Lake, in water there, and by gosh there was an otter had got into it. But anyway, there was a goldarn wolf there, and I had to duck down, underneath some cedar brush, to get a look at im. He spotted me and didn't so much as say so long kiss my arse and goodbye. He went down the crick to beat sixty. I couldn't get a peck at him at all. But anyway, I went down there - oh, down the crick I'd say about fifty yards, seventy-five yards - and I had tw wolf snares set and there was a wolf in one of them. Used to be wolves in that area by the galore. But the wolf that I scared there, eatin my otter, why he got out of that country in a hurry. Yeah, he follered a hardwood ridge I guess for a mile or more, cause above Fishtail Lake I had some more wolf snares, and I went over in there to look at them that day, and he was still goin. Still pullin for Buck Lake. Gettin out of the country there. Wolves, they're sneaky all right." One thing you can say about wolf snares is that at least the wolf has a good chance of not ever getting caught in one. In the wolf you are up against a very strong and very intelligent customer. If something is not just exactly as it should be about a wolf snare, then the wolf will probably find his way around the snare rather than risk going straight ahead. One day, in at the Marsh Lakes, I watched Len set a couple of wolf snares near the end of a small point which jutted out into a marsh and terminated in a beaver dam which connected it to the far shore. This was apparently a favourite crossing spot for wolves who could cross here without getting their feet wet, and save themselves a long walk around the marsh. There were two wolf trails running out to the end of the point and each of them was choked down by a funnel-shaped barricade of old brush that left open only a rather narrow passageway framed on one side by a small tree. Len first inspected the barricades, adding a dead branch here and there. "Wolves is crafty. They'll notice a fresh-cut branch." He then attached his snares to the small trees and 66

The bounty on wolves in those days was perhaps the main reason for trapping them. You not only got to sell the hides yourself, after they were stamped, but you also got a bounty of forty to forty-five dollars for each wolf, which was a lot of money in those days. "Wolves was worth - considering the way things was in those days - why they were worth picking up, cause most a places, why you'd have wolf snares where you'd have otter traps and mink traps, and stuff like that too, you know, to look at. So you didn't go in there just only to look at wolf snares; you were looking at other traps along with it. No, they was quite a bit of money in wolves." The only thing more dangerous than a snared wolf is a trapped bear. If you've ever seen a bear trap, you'll know why. They are enormous iron traps with vicious snaggle teeth and springs so strong that a man can hardly set them. I imagine that a human leg would snap like a matchstick in such a trap, and I am glad that they too are rarely used anymore. Len still

Wolf set using a snare

spent at least fifteen minutes fiddling with each snare, setting the loop in just the right position for the wolf to get well into it before realizing what was up. Tiny pieces of black wire and small twigs were used to keep the loop open and in the right position. Some trappers go so far as to boil their snares in water with willow, red maple, and hemlock bark to darken them and give them a natural scent. As far as Len is concerned, anything that helps to fool a wolf is worth doing. Getting him to walk into the snare is the trick; once the wolf has his head or head and front paw in the snare, then he can only pull it tighter no matter what he does. The catch is designed to tighten progressively, but not to slip back, and the wire is so tough that even a wolfs powerful teeth rarely succeed in gnawing it through. Once caught in the snare, the wolf would still be there when you came to check it. "Sometimes they'd be froze, sometimes they'd be still alive. Depends how many days, but, if the weather ain't too severe, they'll stay alive in the snare for quite awhile — five or six days; then you gotta use a little rifle, use your .25 Stevens." I asked Len what you would do if you did not have a little rifle with you and he told me, "Well, ya hafta use your little tommyhawk, and then by God you'll have yourself a picnic."

Len holding his .25 Stevens with a wolf and a rabbit at his Cross Lake Camp

67

has three up in the attic of his shed, but he has not used them for quite some time, although I know that he hangs on to them because he figures that he just might need them some day. Just as you have to know what you are doing to get a beaver in a leghold trap, so also you must know what you are doing to get a bear to put his foot into one of these vicious iron legbusters. But if you know the trick, trapping bear is apparently not all that difficult. "It's not too hard to trap a bear," says Len. "They like to ramble around quite a bit in the spring of the year after the ice goes out — after the snow goes off, rather - and you can make a little den in the woods up against a big tree put some poles up - and they like honey very much, and you can bait them with honey, or, you can take a chunk of red flannel and put oil a cummins on it or oil of aniseed, and the bear'll smell that for fifty yards - if the wind is in his favour - and he'll come right to it. Anyway, why ya put your pole across the entrance going into the den, and when a bear steps over the pole, that foot - make sure n have the trap not in the centre of the channel, of the entrance like, but to the left side a little bit; and when he steps over it, make sure that he's going to step right onto that pan." "But how do you know that he isn't going to go in with his right foot first?" I asked. "They don't," replied Len. "No, I've never seen a bear do it. You gotta have a fairly good size stick; you gotta have hardwood too cause they got a habit of chewing on it, see. And you gotta have a good trap." When I asked him about the perils of checking out bear sets, Len responded with the following reminiscence. "Ol Tom Roberts - last time I was talking to him at Buck Lake there, he had, oh he must have had close to at that time two hundred bear that he'd trapped. He tole me one time - we were staying in the Lindsay hunters' camp overnight at Buck Lake; Tom was caretaker - that he'd follered this bear, it was in a trap, and it come to a beech. He must a follered it for half a mile, and it come to a big beech, and it went up this beech tree with the trap on, with the trap on his front foot, yeah - big bear. And anyway, he got up in there an he got wound around one of the limbs with the damn trap, and Tom said he had a hell of a time. All he had was a light axe, and he felled - he said he pecked away at this tree until he fell it. And then he said

when it fell, why the bear was still alive. It didn't kill the bear; the tree didn't fall right on the bear and it was pretty mad. He finished the bear off with his little .22. That's what he shot bear with - a .22, yeah. There's one place in a bear's head that if you can put a bullet in there, it'll kill your bear, an he knew where it was. "Ol Tom was quite a bear trapper. He trapped from Harburn Settlement where he had a farm right through to Buck Lake. Big man, ya know - go well over three hundred pounds and six foot eight or so. Throw a bear over his shoulder and jus walk away with it. An ya know he couldn't hear - couldn't hear his rifle go off even. Lost his hearing crossin a swamp in the spring a the year. It was a long way home around the swamp, so he cut across on a winter draw road over the swamp which was startin to go, an that's how he lost his hearing. Cold water ya know. My oldest boy Jim lost his hearing in one ear the same way. Got soaked and took sick. "Ol Tom, we knew each other fer years. Used to fish together. Tom's brother, Curly Bill, he was a big man too. Looked after all the dams - puttin in the stop logs in the spring a the year to hoi' back the water and puttin the horseshit n straw to em so's the water wouldn't leak through; get in the cracks, ya know, block em up. Couldn't beat horseshit for that. Used t' get it from the farms for that purpose. But ol Tom, he was quite a bear trapper."

Part Two It is tempting to assume that once the fur is safely extracted from the trap, the battle is won and the money is assured. Believe me, this is far from the case. Although it takes a lifetime of savvy just to get the animals into the traps, all can be lost by a poor skinning or fleshing job. In his day, Len has seen plenty of good fur spoiled, and indeed, every time we go to the Hudson's Bay outlet or an auction, Len points out good fur that has been done up poorly and consequently drastically reduced in value. Even when Len takes a beaver out of a trap, he does so very carefully, so as not to damage the long guard hairs, and then he smoothes the water out of the hair by hand, working with the hair. He doesn't like to drag beaver out of the bush, but when on occasion it is unavoidable, he "keeps them on their belly and then it don't hurt their hair." Unfortunately for me, when68

ever I've been along, it has never been considered necessary to drag any beaver. If Len gets more beaver than he can carry out, he skins them right in the bush, often leaving the carcasses for bait at his fox snares, although he prefers to get the carcasses home for food for his dogs. Though it sounds as if it would make things much easier to skin the animals on the spot, it must be remembered that all this was done in the dead of winter. You would have to stop every few minutes, "to thaw out your fingers by the fire", since the wet beaver was at water temperature, and the air, if you were lucky and there was no wind, was probably somewhere around minus ten to twenty Fahrenheit. Nowadays, when Len brings the animals home, he puts them in the basement and either skins them in the evening or the next day if the weather is dirty and he doesn't go out. When skinning, he sits on a small stool, which is really an old wooden chair with the back broken off, and he has the beaver or fisher on a board in front of him. He uses a small sharp jackknife — I mean sharp sharp - and pauses every so often to give it a lick or two on a small whetstone. Every type of animal, it seems, has to be skinned slightly differently, but in all cases utmost care must be exercised around the tail, paws, and head. Generally speaking, all one has to do is separate the hide and fat from the body, but it is not as easy as it looks. Any little slip of the knife can cause a tiny nick or hole which reduces the price of the hide. When skinning, Len appears to work very slowly, but in actual fact he works rather quickly. Gord is a pretty good skinner, but it takes him about twice as long to do a beaver as it does Len, even though Gord seems to be working just as quickly. When he has finished skinning out a hide, Len stands up and flicks the hide several times to rid it of any remaining water and scraps of fat, and then either hangs it up or puts it in a bag in the freezer to await fleshing. Now while this flicking process is normally a rather harmless one, I can remember one time that this was not so. Len was skinning out a beaver that had some kind of obscene underwater fleas or something in its fur. We both marvelled at this and even joked about it being lousy. When he completed the job and rose, I realized, too late, that he intended to give it a dandy flick right in my direction. The only thing that gave him more pleasure than seeing me jump for the ladder up out of the basement was watching me whack

Lunch on the trapline: toasting a sandwich

my head as I tried to climb out through the trapdoor in the hall floor before another shower of vermin was launched in my direction. They were probably harmless and not likely even fleas, but I was taking no chances. "Never seen ol Richard move so fast," Len repeated gleefully at intervals all evening. If Len figures the weather is about to turn spanking cold, he will spend a day catching up on his hide preparations, carefully scraping the fat off the inside of each hide, which is draped over a fleshing horse. Len uses the back side of an old drawknife and once again takes great care, because one false move can seriously damage the hide. The buyers do not like thin spots, nicks, and little cuts. You have to be particularly careful when fleshing an old male beaver that is full of holes from fighting in the mating season, or when working with an old dog fisher that has numerous porcupine quills under its hide, received while dispatching one of its favourite foods. "That big dog fisher I got las winter," says Len, "he was damn well loaded with quills between the hide and the flesh. Son of a bitch had a good charge in him. I pulled quills out of him for almost half an hour down cellar there one day. Oh they like porcupines. Quills don't seem to bother them. They're a quick animal. They kill a porcupine, now they're quick." The hides, having been carefully scraped, are now ready to be mounted on stretching boards and forms. Fisher, otter, coon, marten, mink, and rats are stretched fur side in over long roundnosed boards of differing sizes and nailed into place around the tail to keep them from shrinking as they dry. Beaver are stretched fur side in on special forms or on large square boards and somehow or other end up looking as if they had no head or legs. This job is Ida's, and it 69

trouble was over there — it was all right for a winter or two - but then the fur buyers, they put a set price on beaver, and they didn't seem to want to go above that. See, they were in snucks. The last time I was over there, I had around three hundred dollars worth of fur and they wouldn't pay me my price, so I brought my fur home; and there was a fellow on Highway 28 there buying fur, and he had a bunch of fur there that wasn't very good. So he bought my fur to sell the other fur that he had there, see. Anyway, I made over a hundred bucks for bringing that fur home from Haliburton and taking it to Bancroft. I was well paid for bringing it back home. Damn right. Those fur buyers in Haliburton, I'll tell ya right now, they made money on fur over there." Len remembers that sometimes as few as two buyers would arrive at a local fur auction, having agreed in advance who would buy what. To avoid this racket he was forced to look for good private buyers or take his fur to the Hudson's Bay Company in Bancroft. I once went with Len to sell his fur and was outraged at how little he was given for it. It seemed to me to be peanuts for something that took so much knowledge and hard work to come by. Before the advent of the snowmobile, trapping was a still harder profession than it is now. Instead of driving six or seven miles in the truck up the Burleigh Road to the Bill's Lake logging road, going along the logging road by snowmobile, and then snowshoeing the last two or three miles into his Far Camp, Len would go all the way from Wilberforce on foot! "Some winters there would be nobody up in there and the Burleigh Road wasn't ploughed and I had to snowshoe from the head of Clement Lake right through to my Far Camp; and I took my food for the week and my traps and supplies on a short tobaggan. Towed her all the way up the Burleigh behind a pair of snowshoes and then right into the Far Camp. I've seen me get into the Far Camp quite a while after dark at night. But, as I always said - I learnt this from old Tom Roberts - when you leave camp and you're going home, make sure that you have enough wood - enough good dry wood, hardwood and cedar - in the camp to start a fire in case you come back late at night, see. And then all I had to do was take a flashlight and go down fetch the water. But boys I'll tell you, I seen me good and tired when I got there. Wasn't all sunshine you know."

entails stretching the beaver into an oval shape and then fastening it down with nails all around the outside edge. The bigger the hide, the higher a category it will be placed in, but you have to be careful not to stretch it too much or the hide will be too thin, something the buyers do not like. Once you have a number of furs on the stretching boards, they should be put outside on a very cold night to whiten the hide. Len's fur always has whitish hides when it goes to market and this really pleases the buyers. I've seen fur at the sales with bits of dried meat and sinew still stuck onto yellowish, discoloured hides, and this makes a bad impression even to the inexperienced eye. Len's fur, though, is always in top condition. I remember once how Gord and I took a bag of Len's fur over to Bancroft to ship it to North Bay. The shipper, standing in a big room neck deep in furs, eyed us very suspiciously and asked us where the fur came from. Gord produced his trapping licence and explained who he was, and the shipper was immediately mollified. "I knew those had to be from that old guy Holmes over in Wilberforce," he said. "No one else puts their fur up like that." Given Len's success as a trapper and the job he does preparing his fur for market, you might assume that he must make a tidy sum from his trapping, but as I said before, this is not so. The trapper really sees very little financial reward for his labours. Only fisher and otter really seem to pay well, but there are strict quotas on the former and the latter are hard to get. Even here the middlemen and the furriers make the real money. If the trapper gets top money for a fisher or an otter, say $150, he figures he has done well; but just stop to think what a fulllength otter coat sells for in the store. Moreover, the trapper rarely gets what he hopes to for his fur. There are so many criteria for judgement such as size, colour, or length of guard hairs that even if there are no blemishes on the hide of any kind, it may still end up being marked down for some reason or other unknown to the trapper. In the old days, it was even more difficult to get fair money for your hides. Before there were fur sales in Haliburton, the buyers used to come right to Len's house, but he rarely got the price he wanted from them. Then the auction began in Haliburton, and "sometimes the auctions didn't give you good prices either. The 70

had men at nights to talk to. But trappin, you couldn't take a partner in with you, cause you didn't make enough to pay for his wages, and the point was, maybe you'd get in somebody there - if you did hire somebody - and they wouldn't know beans from a bull's arse; wouldn't know a Number 1 trap from a Number 4. So you'd have to spend days with them to learn them anything. And you might get ahold of somebody that wanted to run home every second day, and that would be no good to ya either. When you're all alone, you're your own boss, lonesome as hell, but what you made was your own. You didn't have to split it or anything like that. If you were in a good section, why you could do all right. You could make a damn good wages - if you knew how to trap." Although Len certainly trapped to support his family, he was trapping for years before he ever got married, which leads me to believe that the money was not really the most important factor. I think the fact that he was his own boss was more important than the money. Len never liked working for anybody else. He is fiercely independent and likes to be on his own. Perhaps the most important reason for his staying with the trapping for sixty-five years, however, was one that he himself did not mention - his love of the woods. I've never met a man that was as much at home in the bush as Len or that enjoyed being out there more. He doesn't last long in front of a television set, but when he's out in the woods, or even at home talking about the woods, he is indefatigable.

I asked Len if any arrangements were made in the event that he should fail to return at a pre-arranged time. Would the people in the village come out looking for him or what? As far as I could ascertain, before he got married there was no pre-arranged time of return, so no one would even have missed him. Len is an intensely private and self-sufficient person and has never liked having to rely on others. After his marriage, there was at least somebody who would know something had happened to him. "Wife, generally, I'd tell her, I'd say, 'Well, I'll be back sometime maybe Saturday evening; I'll try to get here for supper if I can'; and I says, 'If it storms, don't look for me until the next day, cause,' I says, 'I don't like travelling in storms. It's bad.' " So if he hurt himself on Thursday and it stormed hard all day Saturday and Sunday, it would be the beginning of the week before anyone might set out into the bush to look for him. Fat lot of comfort that must have been, to know that at least your bones might be found, although even that was most unlikely. "Oh well," said Len, "the ravens'd have ya's all cleaned up in no time, anyway." You had to have little fear of death to lead that kind of life, and this is certainly the case with Len. At seventy-nine years of age, after a prostate operation and with a heart condition, he still goes off alone for the whole day in the bush on foot or on snowshoes. Believe me, even now it would be tough to find him if anything ever happened to him. Len couldn't care less, however, if he drops dead on the trail or not, except that it would be hard on his wife. He's told me many times that he doesn't see what's so great about dying in your bed or your chair. "Hell, I'd a damn sight rather be out on the trail. That's my life, ya know." I asked Len why he stuck to it for so many years when the hardships were so great, and he told me, "When you had a family - I had two boys and a girl to clothe and feed - you just had to get out and do it, that's all. And I made more money in the fur market than I did working in the lumber camps. That's why I stuck to it. Oh yeah, hell, I've said to different ones, I says, 'If I can't make more than thirty-five dollars a month and my board in the lumber camp, I might as well stay home.' Forty dollars per month and your board was top price in your lumber camp those days. You can't raise a family on that type of money. That's why I stuck to the trappin. It was lonesome. In the lumber camp, you see, you 71

Five

The Far Camp One June evening, as soon as I arrived at Len's house, I knew something was up. Instead of sitting down and chatting as usual, Len remained standing, humming and hawing and hitching up his green workpants even more frequently than he normally does. He clearly had something on his mind, probably some favour to ask, I thought; so I asked him to come straightaway to the point. "Well," he said, "now that I'm gettin up in years, as ya know, Ida don't like me to go off and stay in the bush overnight alone, but I gotta get in and check on my Far Camp — make sure it toughed out the winter, d'ya see. I haven't been in since late winter and I'm kind of afraid the roof might not have held up after all that snow we had in March. I'd ask Gord to go in with me, ceptin Gord's off workin an won't be home for two weeks. Course I know youse is busy as a cat tryin to bury shit on a marble floor... . " I saw immediately which way the land lay and, because Len had done me so many favours, I knew I was in for it, even though I really did have some things to do in my own camp that needed doing rather urgently. Not wishing to miss an opportunity to see Len's beloved Far Camp, my first idea was to see if I could talk him into going in and out in one day, which would mean that I would only lose one full day. Len immediately explained, however, that whereas in the summer and fall a person could drive fairly close to the camp along the old logging roads, in the spring, because of the flooding, you had to walk all the way from the Burleigh Road into where he had his canoe stashed - even that being over a mile from the camp. My next thought was to try at least to postpone things for a day, so that I could at-

tend to the things that really needed immediate attention. "Okay," I said, "you've done me plenty of favours, so I'll be glad to go. How would it be if we went in the day after tomorrow? That will give me all day Thursday to get some things out of the way, so that we can go in overnight Friday." This also was to no avail. I could see that Len had his heart set on going in the next morning - Thursday morning. I put forth several more weak arguments against this, but I could see that I was not about to prevail. I finally asked him point-blank why he did not want to go in on Friday. His answer was vague and evasive. It was at this point that Ida chimed in that I was wasting my breath - something I already knew - and that there was no way that Len would start a job on Friday. "What are you talking about?" I asked. "Ya's don't ever went to start a new job on a Friday," Len explained, "because it won't come to no good. It's bad luck, d'ya see." "You should try to get him to sharpen a knife on Sunday, if you think that's bad," added Ida. Incredulous, I asked, "What's this about sharpening knives on Sunday?" "Ya's shouldn't never sharpen an axe or knife on Sunday," said Len, "or sure as God made little apples you'll cut yourself with it before the week's out. An youse can laugh all ya's wants," he added, responding to the glance I gave Ida and getting worked up, "but I seen it happen lots a times in the lumber camps and I know what the hell I'm talking about." Not wanting to start the Third World War, I quickly said, "Okay, okay, so we're going in 72

plings that shoot up everywhere as soon as you take out the big trees. "I'd hate like hell to have to drag a beaver through here," Len remarked. "The gads is so thick you couldn't whip a jackrabbit through em with a blacksnake whip. Christ, there's places along here ya can't see any farther than the end of your pecker. Not like the old days, Richard, when you could see a deer half a mile away through the open bush." The area we were going through had one of the last good stands of beech in the whole country - recently destroyed by logging, like almost every other decent stand in the country - and there was hardly an old beech that didn't have bear claw marks all over it, scored by the bears while climbing for beechnuts in the fall, scarring the smooth silvery bark that never heals without a trace. According to Len, in the old days a person couldn't have wanted a better place than this to hunt bears. "In the fall of the year," said Len, "specially there's lots a beechnuts, they'd be fat as pigs." There was still lots of sign of bears even when we were there. Not far from our destination, for example, we came into an area heavily forested by tall black cherry trees and, because they were not yet fully in leaf, I noticed that many of them had big bunches of broken limbs near their tops, all pulled together like big nests of some kind, sometimes two or three to a tree. I asked Len for an explanation and he told me that bears break these branches down, not only to eat the cherries, but also to make these woven platforms, which they then stand on to reach the highest and reddest cherries right at the top in the sunlight. "Oh hell," said Len, "they'll go right up the tree a hundred feet high or more - reach out with their paws and bring in the limb, ya know; then sit there on their arse eatin cherries. Do the same with beechnuts. Heighth, it don't bother them lads any." At first I wasn't too sure whether or not to believe this, since it would have been just like Len to pull my leg, and the mental picture of a black bear stretched up on his tiptoes at the very top of a tall black cherry seemed too pleasing to be true, but it turned out this time he was telling me the truth. "God I'd love to see that," I said. "Wouldn't that be funny." "Yeah," said Len, "it'd be a lot funnier to see the son of a bitch diving out of the tree after I took a peck at him with the old .300 Savage."

first thing tomorrow morning and coming out on Friday. I guess that won't kill me. But let's go to bed right now, because if I know you, we'll be getting up pretty early." "Oh, I won't call ya fer breakfast till about five," said Len, immediately back in good humour at the thought of getting a chance to wake me up "with the hens". We went to bed about ten-thirty - unusually late for Len — and next morning we got up even before the darn hens. We were out of the house and on the road by six o'clock, so you can imagine when we got up. We drove for six or seven miles up the Burleigh Road, pulled off onto the logging road at Bill's Lake, drove for about one more mile, and then parked the truck. "From here on, we gotta go on foot," said Len. "Great," I said, unknowingly. "Give me one of those packs and let's get going." In hindsight, all I can say is that I'm glad that pack was not full of steel beaver traps. Even Len admitted that this jaunt was no mere buckjump. We had a walk of about four miles through the usual labyrinth of overgrown logging roads long since in disuse. Even though, as always, I made a special effort to remember every turnoff, I would never have found my way back out without Len. Shades of Sticky Pond! Being certain that Len at one time or another had picked out all these roads for the Company (who else could have found his way around in here?) I made the comment that these roads must have been surveyed by a drunken snake, hoping to get a rise out of the old man. Probably knowing full well what I was doing, but pretending that he did not so as not to spoil my fun, Len rose to the bait: "Yeah, well I'd like to see youse do any better. I suppose you figger ya just run a road through here any old wheres. Well by Christ, I picked out every inch of road in this here bush and I'm telling ya, the Company was well pleased by my work. Damn well pleased." "Oh," I said, "I didn't realize it was you who did the work." "M'yarse," said Len, acting disgruntled, but he secretly enjoyed being kidded. We plodded on for an hour or so, bantering, talking about the history of the area, and having a good time as we invariably do. For the most part, it was really a very pleasant walk, the exception being the sections of the road that were completely choked with gads - small sa73

in a pail in an old hollow log, and fifteen minutes later we were applying hot black pitch to the canoe with the stumps of two brushes, almost every bristle of which had been consumed by deer mice. After toasting our sandwiches on the remains of the little fire that we had used for melting the pitch, the tar had hardened to the point that there was not a single leak when we put the canoe in the water. I asked Len where he got his tar. "Make it myself," he replied. "I cut beeswax up in flakes and melt it in with my tar and then put a little bit of tallow in there with it, and that makes dandy tar for canoes. It won't crack regardless of how cold the weather gets or how hot it is, but, it's hard enough, you go over a log or anything, it won't peel off." We loaded our gear, got into the canoe, and began the paddle up the water system to the Far Camp. On this leg of the trip we had a hot, sunny paddle and what I remember best is the strong tea-brown colour of the water - spruce bog water, probably with a very high tannin content. We had to keep our wits about us because, as is often the case with bog lakes, this one was only three or four feet deep and choked with root tangles that came right to the surface full of muck and were festooned with small sunreddened lily pads, pitcherplants, colonies of sundew, and often even some stunted shrubbery like wild spirea and steeplebush. We had to navigate these shallows by poling, but often our paddle blades would break through the root tangles and shoot down three or four feet, so that we frequently had to stop to extricate our paddles in order not to snap their shafts. Having spent about an hour navigating this shallow swamp, trying hard not to be asphyxiated by the gas released by our paddles, we finally rounded a corner after a narrows and came out into a larger and slightly deeper swamp - or pond, as Len insisted on calling it. On the other side, Len assured me, was the sought-after Far Camp. Why anybody in their right mind would build a camp in the middle of three Godforsaken swamps escaped me at the time, and I only found out later that it was "a dandy spot for otter". We paddled across this larger pond and, although I kept my eyes peeled for anything that looked like a building or even a landing spot, I could see nothing. Len, however, obviously, knew where he was going, and as we approached the shore, aiming about fifty feet to the left of a huge beaver lodge, he deftly steered

Len, as mentioned, has no love for bears. When the subject of bears is mentioned, Len inevitably retells the famous Bill's Lake Chompup and this was no exception. "I had a ten foot birchbark on Bill's Lake up here - a one man canoe, but dandy for trappin. It was quick, oh Christ, it was quick. You had to watch er close when you were trappin, but it was nice an light to carry. I kept it in at Bill's for two or three years; had it up on wires. I thought it was high enough up no bear could reach it. But one summer they found it and ripped the goddamn birchbark and bit holes right through it;. I didn't figure it was worth fixin time they got finished with it. Far as I know, maybe it's still there yet on the shore a Bill's. "I had another canoe Les give me. Kept it on the shore of the big marsh other side a Smith's ol huntin camp in there west a Bill's Lake a couple a mile. It was a cedar canoe. I fixed it up an took it way back in there to use for trappin rats an beaver in the spring of the year. It was up on wires too, but one summer they got at it, bastards. Destroyed the thing, between teethmarks and pawin her all to pieces. Broke a lot of the ribs in it, ya know. It was a nice little canoe for trappin an light t' carry, but the bear fixed that. That was two canoes the bears destroyed on me. I don't like the bastards." After this diatribe against bears, we finally arrived at the bottom end of the marsh system which would take us to the Far Camp. Len then promptly disappeared up in the bush to get his carefully hidden canoe, while I poked around the old logging bridge and the remains of a sluice, which as Len later explained had been part of a system used to drive the softwood over to Haliburton back in Laking's days. "Son of a bitchin bastards," came floating down the hill, and I tore up to find out what had prompted this angry outburst. "What's up?" I asked, as I burst into the small clearing where Len was standing beside a badly battered canoe. "Bears has my canoe all chewed to ratshit," said Len bitterly, pointing to the abundant evidence of "bear work" all along one end of the canoe. Fortunately, as it turned out, there was actually very little structural damage other than one cracked gunwhale, and most of the tooth punctures through the canvas appeared to be above the waterline. Still more fortunately, being the canny fellow that he is, Len was able to produce a block of hard tar which he had stashed 74

you're my age, you'll be in the old folks' home over in Haliburton." "I know, I know. Ida says you do pretty well for your age and all that. Just get out of the canoe." "If you'd cut your yappin and haul the bastard up, I would get out; but I ain't getting out on that log now that you been splashing around. Everything's slipperier than a hen's tit around here, thanks to you." A good five minutes later, when we were finally both out on shore with our packs on, I turned to start off up the trail, but I couldn't see anything that even looked like a trail, let alone the Far Camp itself. I ended up following Len for about one hundred yards up what looked like a rarely used game trail. It was not until the very last second, when I was virtually upon it, that I suddenly saw the Far Camp. I was not disappointed. Before me was a quaint little round-log building about ten feet wide by twelve feet long. It was not more than nine feet high at the ridge and the walls were about six feet high, which meant that the roof, while far from flat, did not have a very steep pitch to it. Having built in the bush with logs myself, I did not have to ask why the walls were only six feet high. A steeper roof pitch would have meant more lumber, something difficult to come by deep in the bush. I asked Len where he did get the boards for his roof and floor, and it turned out that he had salvaged them from the abandoned Laking's Number Seven camp, which was quite close at hand. "Lakings's lumber camp concern had a big, big cookery and it fell down. I jus picked the best of the lumber out of it and carried it on my shoulder down to where my campsite was there." The logs themselves were mainly unpeeled balsam about six inches in diameter, and remarkably, much of the bark was still on them, despite their age. Len and old Mandy Connaghan built the camp one summer in the thirties without horses, and all the logs were cut nearby and dragged to the site by hand - not the least of the reasons for the six-inch diameter logs and the small dimensions of the building. The corners were rather crudely saddle-notched with an axe and obviously done by eye rather than by scribers; not that Len couldn't do excellent work with an axe, but in building such camps, trappers - and that was to be predominantly a trapping camp - do a crude but serviceable job. They do not expect to use them for long and see them strictly as

us around a long, half-submerged pine log and into a little channel, whose mouth was completely obscured by wild spirea and sedge. The channel turned out to be just big enough to hold a fifteen-foot canoe, and as we hit the end, the bow knifed into the quaking shoreline, bringing us to a gentle halt. "Well, hop out," said Len, beaming, "we haven't got all day, ya know." I stood up gingerly and tested the ground with my paddle, which penetrated a good three feet into the muck at the first tentative poke. Guessing immediately what was up - nothing would have delighted Len more than seeing me go in up to my armpits -1 cast about and nimbly jumped to the dry, silver-grey surface of the old pine log. Although the jump itself was nimble (very nimble, if I don't say so myself) my landing left something to be desired. If not actually floating, the log was also not exactly secure. It quickly sunk four inches as my weight hit it, causing some frantic gyrations of my arms and upper body, although I didn't actually fall. "You fixin to fly to shore or something?" said Len, then adding with mock concern, "Don't fall off there, ol timer, or you'll go right up to your arse." "If you're so damn smart, why don't you get out and show me how it's done?" I replied. At this turn of events, Len decided that it really would be best to direct me to dry land where I could pull up the canoe, so that he could get out safely. On Len's advice, I high-stepped along a series of teetering hummocks of grass, which, although shaky, were really quite solid. Leaping from the last one to "shore", I landed and was probably lucky to go only about five inches into the muck; five inches is better than five feet. I was also lucky that I had my boots tied on tight. If your boots are loose when you get into this kind of muck, you leave them there when you get out. I managed to break the suction, releasing wafts of evil-smelling swamp gas, and walk over to a relatively dry spot from which I could catch the painter rope and haul the canoe to shore. "God," said Len ungratefully, "is that you? The stink around here's enough to turn a wolf from the gut wagon." "Listen old-timer, why don't you just get out of the canoe so we can unload the packs and get on with the job." "Well if youse'd hold the goddamn thing steady so's I could get up, I would. Hell, when 75

Them's two things ya don't wanna tangle with. I'd as leave avoid the bastards if I could." Recovering from the odour, I began to have a look around me. Inside the front door to the left was a rusty old rectangular sheet-metal stove, which Len assured me "could throw the heat to beat hell". Along the wall under the window was a small oilcloth-covered pine table with a stack of plates and glasses and an oil lamp replete with tin reflector. Propped on a shelf to the right of the window was an old wall calendar from some garage in Bancroft with a picture of a rather wooden-looking wolf and only the January sheet ripped off. The back left corner was occupied by several large wooden boxes of rusty leghold traps and above them were countless similar traps hanging from nails in the wall. In front of the back wall and flush against the right wall was a very shaky double bunk bed, whose top mesh springs sagged about two feet from the weight of several old mattresses and some blankets. Under the bed were some rolls of tarpaper and asphalt roofing, boxes of nails, buckets of sand, a mixing pail, and several half-full bags of rock-hard cement. Beside the bed and towards me along the right wall was a two-decker white icebox crammed full of perishables, stored there to keep the mice from getting at them. In the front right corner was a washstand with a cracked mirror over it and several old blue denim porcelain-covered metal washbasins hanging on the wall, rusting only in the spots where the porcelain had been chipped away. On the washstand was a drinking glass, half-frosted from old toothpaste, containing one lonely red Dr. West's toothbrush of God-knows-what vintage. Down the centre, hanging from an old maple pole suspended from the ridge, were more dank mattresses and urine-soaked blankets. Having satiated my curiosity, I said to Len, "Okay, we didn't come here to stand around, and seeing as we have to stay overnight, let's start cleaning the place up. I'm not staying in it like this." "Guess we better get at her," agreed Len. I opened the window and propped open the door to let in a little cool breeze and to get rid of the stench. Then we began to work. "First," I said, "we get rid of all these smelly old blankets. They reek of mouse piss and they're eaten full of holes." As I lifted each one off the hanging pole, mouse turds falling on the wooden floor like a hail of dried peas, Len would carefully inspect it, and only with great reluctance

temporary camps for roughing it in the bush. For the same reason, the bottom sill logs, which were cedar, were just lying right on the ground. The one- or two-inch spaces between the wall logs were originally filled with rnoss and later grouting or chinking, held in place by myriad nails hammered in before the mortar was applied. On the side facing west there was one small window about one-and-a-half by three feet, which could be opened inward to let some breeze through the cabin. Beside the front door and about seven feet off the ground., an old rusty stove pipe emerged from a rough-sawn hole in the board gable end just below the roof and shot out and up about five feet on an outrageous angle, its only visible means of support being an old piece of haywire fastening it to the roof. The wide front door was made of three twelve-inchwide pine boards, covered with tarpaper held in place by lath nailed over the vertical cracks. The tarpaper was by this time vestigial, obviously clawed away by the bears. We stood in front of the door trying to ignore the flies while Len fished in his pocket for the enormous collection of keys which he keeps wrapped in an old handkerchief, so that they will not wear holes in his pockets. After producing the keyring, glutted with keys, most of which were meant to open locks long since sunk to the bottoms of lakes on old boat chains or destroyed by age like the doors they once protected, Len began systematically trying all the keys that he thought might possibly open this particular lock. After what seemed an interminable amount of time and an inordinate amount of grumbling, Len finally stumbled upon the correct key and the door at last swung open. We were immediately staggered by the musty smell of damp old mattresses and mouse urine. I had never seen so much mouse crap in my whole life. When I mentioned to Len that there seemed to have been the odd mouse around, he lamented that every time he goes away "the mice gets in, eats the soap, and shits ring-aroundthe-rosy". Even Len admitted that the place smelled pretty rank, and we soon discovered the reason. In the left front corner by the stove was a twelve-inch hole, chewed through the floor by some intrepid rodent who must have wanted in very badly indeed. "Porcupines. I should a knowed," said Len. "Nothing stinks like porcupine piss, ceptin of course it be skunks. I hate porcupines and skunks. 76

tales of death by botulism and beri-beri, which seemed to have merged in my mind as one tincan-related disease. Unmoved and unconvinced by my stories, Len pointed out sceptically "Been eatin em this way all my life." Were my textbooks wrong or was the man naturally immune to botulism? I then resorted to subterfuge and relied on the one thing in life that Len is genuinely afraid of. "Well it might not kill you," I said, "but it would sure as hell give you an awful case of the 'scours.' " "Let's get rid of the bastards," Len agreed, energetically firing a barrage of cans out the front door. The next problem was getting rid of all the stuff not in cans. "What's in that big pail?" I asked. "Corn syrup,"said Len, prying it open and eyeing it suspiciously. "That's gotta go," I said, scarcely able to look at the whitish-green pus-like ointment filling the pail. "I hate like hell to jus throw the whole thing out," complained Len. "Well, why don't you take a mouthful of it and see if it's still all right then?" "You don't give a damn if I poison myself, do ya?" "Well, if you're afraid of poisoning yourself now, with me here, you're sure not going to want to eat the stuff next fall when you come back in here by yourself, so you might just as well get rid of it right now." "Heave er," said Len sadly.

House-cleaning the Far Camp

would he allow me to throw it out the front door into the old garbage pile. In spite of the fact that I have always been disgusted by the mess around trappers' shacks in the bush, the prospect of packing out urine-soaked blankets - to say nothing of the other garbage - was so appalling that I mastered my antipathy and soon was flinging all manner of junk right out the door with nary a twinge of conscience. After disposing of a bunch of disintegrating quilts, two evilsmelling oilcloths, two unsalvageable mattresses (mouse population and all), and all but two or three of the least badly befouled and gnawed blankets, we turned our attention to the icebox and the so-called cellar. I knew the latter was there in spite of the rather cunningly concealed trap door in the floor because Len once told me: "I used to try to get some food into my Far Camp before the ice took in the fall of the year. I had a little cellar in the camp - a little dugout - and a faceboard box in it, and I used to keep tins of stuff in there and potatoes, and I had a big coat I'd put over the top so it wouldn't freeze. Nothing ever froze. It was right in the ground, do you see, and the coat's on top." Frozen or not frozen, I don't know, but many of the tin cans looked like softballs and there is no way I'd have touched the food in them. Nonetheless, I had great trouble getting Len to throw them out because he reasoned that as long as the food was in tins, it was okay. Summoning forth all my knowledge gained in science class at public school years ago, I related terrifying 77

This was the most painful part for Len: getting rid of a wide assortment of food which had been brought in a long distance in a back pack over the preceding ten years. There were a few cans at the very bottom of the cellar that Len admitted might even be as old as twenty years. Mustering all the authority that I could, I boldly pitched all the foodstuffs in the camp into the garbage pile, while a dazed and weakly protesting Len sat and watched, doubtless remembering how each item got there in the first place. Only a few glass jars of sugar and flour survived the carnage. After the food, and while I still had my momentum, out went everything else that was of no use - cracked tubes of driedup toothpaste, mouse-eaten remnants of soap bars, chewed-up washcloths, odds and ends of asphalt roll roofing, cracked glasses and badly chipped china plates and cups, a rusted-out spare tin stove, various rusted stove pipes and elbows, and numerous other odds and sods. This jettisoning caused Len unspeakable anguish. Once we had swept the floor, however, and washed the window, the table top, and the remaining crockery, Len's spirits revived at the sight of his now tidy little camp, and he even allowed that we ought to be thinking about having dinner soon, "being as it was going on four o'clock". It was agreed that I would begin fixing dinner while Len would repair the stove pipe so we could cook our dinner without risk of burning the place to the ground.

we generally camped along where there's a crick somewhere, fer drinking water, ya know. "I mind one time, we were picking jinksen up around the ol farm - it would be north and west of Kennabi Lake. They call it Kennabike I guess, now. A lot of these lakes, the names is changed on them now from those days. But anyway, we were up in that country there - it would be south of Holland's Crick that goes to Drag Lake, and Lakings's had a big drivin camp there, where the men, when they drove Holland's Crick, stayed in; et and slept there at nights. When we pulled in there, it was after dark at night. If I remember rightly, Jim Robertson and another lad pulled in there that night too with a flashlight. They were out lookin for meat, ya know. But there was an old stove in there, and there were tins up there with tea. So Ken went down and got some water and I got the fire going, and we made some tea there, and started eating our lunch and drinking this damn tea, and I said to Ken, I says, 'I don't know, Ken, that damn tea tastes a bit on the bitter side.' Anyway, why we didn't drink too much of it, because we didn't like the flavour of it. So then next morning, got up to get breakfast ready, and I happened to look into the damn tin he got the tea in, and I said, 'Did you take the tea out of this tin?' And he said, 'Yeah,' and 'Well,' I says, 'it's half mice shit. No wonder it was bitter.' So anyway, why there was a teacher - she wasn't married at that time - staying at Ken's mother's place down here in the village. Ken told her what happened, us staying in this lumber camp overnight. 'Acch,' she says, 'ya dirty things.' She damn near brought up at breakfast time there. Course that was a big joke for Ken. Anything like that, he'd get a big kick out of it. She was stuck-up, anyway, so he wanted to get a crack at her. Yeah, it made her sick. Couldn't eat her breakfast. 'Ya dirty things, ya.' Anyway, it didn't poison us; didn't drink too much. But we picked jinksen all south of the Kennaway road down, and we picked jinksen north of the Kennaway road right through to Holland's Crick, south there, down in south of Scribenaw Lake, in around Lost Lake there, through the head water and back, over around Mink Lake and around the other side of Scribenaw... . At that time I was young, goddarn it; my legs could take it. I liked the bush; I wasn't married and I liked the woods. I raised myself out of the woods, you might say." When I heard this story, I was not even aware of the fact that ginseng grew in our neck

One hour later we were sitting at a little wooden table just outside the front door beside the garbage heap, having a hot dinner and admiring the newly rejuvenated camp. It is at times like this, especially while drinking his tea, that Len really lets himself go, reminiscing about his beloved "old days". This evening, long-forgotten memories triggered by objects seen around the camp flooded into his mind and poured forth unchecked. "They tell me jinksen's up in price now," said Len. "My legs wouldn't take it any more now like they used to. I used to pick that stuff every fall, Ken White and I. We'd walk for miles; camp right in the bush. Wasn't too many picked it, cause it meant a lot a walking, you know. You start jinksen pickin in the fall of the year, you didn't know where the hell you were going to come out. You might go right through to Scribenaw, you know. Yeah, Ken White and me, we walked for miles and miles and come dark, why 78

ass. Now you take Beef Iron & Wine — some of the guys used to drink that, and sweet nitre, which was supposed to be for horses. I always put it on oats for my horses. Keeps their kidneys open. Good for their water, but it has alcohol in it too. Don't think it hasn't. Men would buy it up and drink it like vanilla. But shine was better for ya. "Summer I worked for Black Archie there - I was just a young lad, but anytime I wanted moonshine, why I knew where it was. He tole me different times, 'want a drink of moonshine?' Ol Charlie Townsend was the one makin it. He made damn good shine. Made it out a corn, wheat, stuff like that, ya know. Some of them used to colour it, but this was clear. And don't think it didn't have a wallop. You drank too much of it, it'd upset ya. Strong as hell. Lads was there to see if they could catch him, and I don't know where in hell he had it hid, but they never caught him. Oh they searched his place time after time, but they never found nothing. He must a had a good hiding place. He must a kept it back in the bush somewheres. Always had lots of it on hand, but they never found it. "I always had shine in my hunt camp at the head of Barnum Lake. Ol Mandy Connaghan always brought in two, three quarts of the stuff. Mandy used to help me take the hunters out to the watches in the morning. He was no man for doggin, cause the old bastard'd get lost, but he could follow a blazed trail and take the fellas in and out. He was handy that way and he never forgot the shine for him and me. See this gang that come in from Toronto, the head of that party was Fred Witherspoon, and he used to bring in three, four bottles of good rye whisky, but he was no drinker. He'd come in at night and before supper he'd give ya little drink, but it never hurt ya. There wasn't enough to feel it even. Oh God he was tight with it. He made damn sure we didn't get drunk on what liquor he give us. Mandy, he offered his moonshine to this ol Witherspoon different times and old Fred would shake his head. 'No,' he'd say, 'can't kid the foolish. I wouldn't drink that stuff. That's poison.' Oh hell, Mandy and I, we'd sooner drink Charlie Townsend's stuff anyway. Mandy poured ya a drink, by God you felt it. "Ol Stringer Archie Scott, he made shine too, good shine. He got nailed, ya know, for making shine up here at Clement Lake. There's a point that comes out into the lake just south of the boundary between Dudley and Monmouth,

of the woods, so I asked Len to tell me all about it. "Well, the jinksen has the main stem, and up on top there's three main branches and each branch at the end has three big leaves and then two short leaves attached to it. And in the centre, in September - pick it when the leaves is down, frost has got the leaves - late September, the berries'll come on it, and sometimes the patridge'll beat ya to it. See they eat the red berries. But, around where there's limestone in the soil, you'll find more jinksen than you will other places; and it grows in valleys mostly. Yeah, you get in where the basswood is, generally you'll find some. And it may be in a damp place too. Have to get in where it's shaded. Damp and shaded. Anyway, ya pick er in September and bring it home and ya gotta wash it, dry it. Roots is different shapes, similar to cahrrot roots but they'll grow to be a pretty good size some of them. So you dry it on a stove; gradually dry it, ya know. Put some paper underneath it, it won't get dirty. Any fur buyers'll buy it. Glad to get it. Most of it I guess goes to China and then it comes back into Canada here for medicine. They tell me jinksen's way up in price now, too. Around $200 a pound, I heard. I was shocked. Always got a decent price for it even in my day; $18, $22 a pound, something like that. Yeah, it was a big price." "You mentioned Jim Robertson," I said to Len. "Who was he?" "Old Ed Robertson's boy," said Len. "Surveyor - and a damn good one too. Knew this whole bush like the back of his hand. He was surveyor for the Dysart Land Company for years and years - took it over from his dad. Oh Jim knew the country. Don't think that he didn't. There was no place in the County of Haliburton that Jim Robertson didn't know. Clean living man too. Never swore or bothered the liquor." "Not like some people I know," I said, looking meaningfully at Len. "I never took a drink an I never tell a lie neither," replied Len trying to keep a straight face. "In spite of your lily-white past, a little glass of moonshine might be nice right now," I said. "Too bad Charlie Earle and Clarence Godfrey aren't around." "Oh hell, they weren't the only ones aroun here makin shine. Different ones made it. People weren't gonna jus sit aroun drinkin vanilla extract waitin for the government to git off its 79

back and I guess he tole Billy Laval who was constable at Gooderham. By Jesus, Billy come up and found the damn place, but it was clean. Never found a drop of liquor or anything. It went on for a while, but one day Archie was goin up the beech ridge with his horse and sleigh and he had his copper worm and everything hid underneath the horse blankets on the sleigh I kinda think maybe he'd got wind of the fact that this Billy Laval was onto him and he was movin his still to a safer place - and damned if Billy Laval didn't stop him and check his sleigh. By Jesus he found everything and he had ol Archie up in court and the judge give him a pretty stiff fine - that or two, three months in the coop. Ol Archie lost all his material besides, his worm, kettle, all his shine, everything but the property, cause that wasn't his. No one ever put a still on his own property. I guess he was too close to the Burleigh Road. If he'd a went down aroun the head of McGregor's Marsh and got on some spring crick comin in there or on the crick comin down there from North Lake, he'd a been all right. They'd have never noticed the damn smoke. "Oh there were stills all over this country. Lots a moonshinin through the country. Right south of the gate there on the Burleigh, bout a hundred yards, on the west side a Bill's Crick, jus west a the ol draw road down to Bick's Marsh, there's a dandy spring in there and Clarence Godfrey and Eddie Scott - one a ol Stringer's boys - they run off some slug there. Didn't run steady all summer but they made quite a bit a the stuff. Then over in Essonville, Henrys used to run off a gallon or two... . " At the end of this string of reminiscences, I suddenly came to and found myself sitting with an empty tea-cup in a cloud of mosquitoes and ravenous deer flies in front of an old log shack twenty miles from nowhere in the middle of a series of swamps with a white-haired old trapper in his mid-seventies. Talk about coming back to reality! Suddenly aware of the flies himself, Len exclaimed, "Christ, wouldn't the old lady love this! She'd squawk like hell if she was here." "Yeah," I said, "the flies are pretty thick. Course it helps to have built up in the bushes here three hundred feet from shore where no breeze can get to us." As I expected, Len rose to this remark and peevishly explained that if I had any brains, I'd know why he had built there, "so's no one could

Lawrie Smith, Stringer Archie, his son Elmer, and Len gutting a fish (left to right)

Stringer Archie setting a trap

and just around the north side of this point Archie had a little cabin right on the lakeshore log cabin with a pole roof and roofin over top. He had a little stove in there and a worm and he made quite a little bit of shine. Good shine, clear, ya know, and then if he wanted to colour it, why he used brown sugar, d'ya see. I think he burnt the brown sugar some way or other first. He knew how to do it, anyway. Had a nice set-up. Quite a little cabin ol Stringer had there. "But anyway, there was two schoolteachers down here took a walk up the Burleigh Road one Sunday and they noticed smoke across Clement Lake. It was one of those days the smoke was goin straight up above the tree tops. They didn't go over to investigate, but they were boarding down here at Ernie Delarge's and Ernie and ol Stringer didn't pull together, ya know. There was no love lost there. Anyway, they mentioned this smoke to Ernie and he went up when Archie wasn't there and took: a look around; found the damn cabin — everything. He come 80

threw its pale yellow light into all the corners, making this appear a very cozy little cabin indeed. We put one or two more pieces of softwood in the still-smouldering stove, in order to make a quick fire to boil water for tea. Then we sat around drinking, chatting, and thinking until after about half an hour we both had the yawns. We both agreed that in spite of the fact that it was only nine o'clock, we would turn in if we darn well wanted to, and this is exactly what we did. Just before crawling into bed, we went outside "to drain the potatoes", as Len put it, and to my consternation I noticed light shining through a good many cracks and crevices in the walls, all of which had been unnoticeable in the daylight. As we closed the door behind us, we heard a mosquito drone in our ears, and Len said that it was a damn good thing that he had put all new tarpaper on the door - as if this was going to keep the mosquitoes out. Although for a moment this did comfort me somewhat, the image of all those illuminated cracks remained brightly in my mind. After a brief mock argument, during which Len tried to pretend that he seriously expected me to scale that wobbly old bedframe and sleep up on top, I crawled across to the back-wall side of the bottom bunk and pulled a blanket over me, planning to get some sleep. Len lay down on his side and did the same. It turned out that taking the inside was the smartest thing I ever did. Almost as soon as we blew out the lamp, you could hear the first mosquitoes droning like violins tuning up for what turned out to be a prolonged and most unpleasant nocturne. Since it was a warm night to begin with, and since we had had a fire in the stove and then closed the door and the window, it was not just uncomfortably warm in the shack — it was darn hot. This made it very difficult for us to keep our heads and arms protected under our wool blankets without roasting to death and sweating like pigs. Every time you put your head or arms out, the whining escalated and then fell ominously silent. Smack. "Damn mosquitoes," said Len. I was fortunate in that I was wearing pyjama tops while Len was not, so that most of the night the mosquitoes landed on his bare arms before they had ever flown over to me. I lay in silence trying to block out the drone and get off to sleep, but every five minutes, just as I would be drift-

see the place", because if they found it, they would break in and steal all his traps. I was going to tease him further, pointing out that no one in his right mind would ever look for a camp in a place like this, but since the flies were really starting to come on strong, I suggested that we wash up quickly and go out in the canoe for an evening paddle. This turned out to be a good idea, because out on the water there was a beautiful breeze and no flies to speak of at all. Len sat in the bottom of the canoe and I sat on the bow seat facing him, and for two peaceful hours we just poked around, chatting, checking out old beaver houses, and looking for signs of muskrats or mink. There turned out to be plenty of "fur" in the area. Nearly every rock and log had mink or muskrat sign on it, and there were all kinds of yellow pond-lily roots floating on the surface, unearthed by the beaver and not yet spirited off by the muskrats to their secret caches. As we cruised from beaver lodge to beaver lodge, we flushed three or four great blue herons, jumped countless ducks - mostly mallards and blue-winged teal - and found lowbush cranberries in bloom everywhere. Len had once told me that the Far Camp "was an ample place for bog cranberries", and I had never before seen, nor have I seen since, a spot that could rival it. I went back there in the fall when the berries were red, and a person could pick baskets of them in no time at all. We headed back for the camp when the light began to fade after sunset and the hermit thrushes had begun to sing up in the hardwoods on the ridges of the surrounding hills. As we approached the camp, I saw a moving wavy "v" near our landing, and as we drew nearer I could make out the shape of a good-sized beaver making his way to the lodge just down from the landing. We actually got to within twenty feet of him before he submerged with a loud slap of his tail. I was just thinking to myself how nice it was that there were still a few forgotten spots like this left where a beaver could live out a peaceful life and die of old age, when Len said wistfully, "Hope I can pick up that lad this fall." That brought me back to reality again. By the time we arrived back at the camp, it was really dark in the bush, the more so since we had just come in off the lake where the last light had been just enough to see by. Len found his way into the camp with no trouble at all and soon had lit up one of the kerosene lamps, which 81

ing off, I'd hear another Smack and "Goddamn mosquitoes." Finally, I heard a tremendous smack and "Ha. Got ya, ya long-billed son of a whore," and for some reason that struck me as funny and I laughed to myself half the night over it. Getting any decent sleep was out of the question, and I think that between the two of us we got about an hour's sleep all night long. I must have dozed off for a few minutes because I can remember coming to at about four fifteen to the sound of Len rattling the poker in the stove, preparing to get a fire going and make breakfast. Usually, four fifteen is a bit early for me, but not that morning. I was sweltering under that wool blanket and my pyjamas were soaking wet. "Ya's ain't gonna lay in bed all day, are ya's" asked Len. The sun was up by six o'clock when breakfast was over, and we both agreed that it would be a good idea to head out before the sun got too high and the deer flies started to come on again. As we paddled off down the glassy pond away from the camp, I turned to have a last look at the little cabin but had to content myself with the picture in my mind, because not even knowledge of its exact location could help the sharpest eye pick out any sign of it from the water. I returned to that camp many times since and I would be hard put to say whether I liked it better in the winter under snow, in the summer dripping rain after a sudden shower, or in the fall swaddled in a blaze of red viburnum. I came to really like that camp and it was a sad day in my life - to say nothing of Len's - when in August 1980 I went in with him to help him close up the camp permanently. Len had decided not to renew the permit for his trapping zone. Because of its large size, he felt that he could no longer trap it properly at his age and that he would be better off just trapping a small area near the road which could be got at more easily. For Len, this decision meant a kind of personal defeat. After sixty-odd years, he was no longer able to "tough it", and to someone who has been as tough as Len, this was pretty devastating. Perhaps the worst part for Len was that his decision meant severing his lifelong connection with these ponds, creeks, swamps, and lakes, quite a big part of the life of a man who has only on rare occasions been more than twentyfive miles from Wilberforce. He took it hard. On this last trip, we had been able to drive the bush roads right to within easy walking

distance of Len's canoe, because it was August and the roads were fairly dry. This meant that we could bring out all the gear by canoe and truck with very little carrying in between. Fortunately, Len was so worried by the thought of what would happen to the fur on his zone that he did not have time to ponder all the memories attached to the articles that we carried out. He was concerned because he felt the zone would be divided up among a bunch of men from town who would have the ground "skinned" by the end of the first year. Without stretching the truth too much I was able at least partly to set his mind at ease. I pointed out that there was no way that any young town-bred would-be trappers were ever going to find all the ponds and backwaters in the area, let alone all the fisher crossings and good spots for otter. Even Gord, who certainly knows the area better than anyone else alive other than Len, doesn't know all the spots. I asked Len, "If in twenty years two guys out wandering in the bush come across a few broken barn boards and some disintegrated stove pipe, will they know this was once Hughey's huntcamp and one of the best fisher crossings in the area?" "No," said Len, mollified, "I don't spose they will." I had made my point that no one would ever know the area again as he did. But then he added wistfully, "If they was to come across it, they won't know who built the Far Camp neither." "Don't be too sure of that," I said. It was at that very moment I realized that I was going to write a book about Len's life.

82

Six

Fishin: The Buck Lake Days and Stocking the Lakes "Now you take fishin, why I liked to fish all my life, ever since I was big enough to hold a pole. I was always ready to fish. Fish with whoever 'n hell I could pick up. Carnie Houston - he was a pretty good chum of mine; both about the same age, I think. We used to fish together quite a bit. Then, of course, ol Fred Barnes, I done a lot of fishin with him when I was young. You go up to him any time through the week and say, 'Let's go fishin on the weekend,' and ol Fred'd say, 'Well, I guess I can go.' He'd just let his farm work go to hell if he got a chance to go fishin." Len began his career as a fishing guide almost as early as he began taking on hunting parties. He started taking people into Buck Lake around the end of the First World War, when he was still a teenager. He remembers taking Harry Graham and Ross Shaver into Buck Lake

and staying in the old Trough Roof Camp that he used before he built his first log camp there in the twenties. To get in and out you had to get down on your hands and knees and crawl, like a bear. Didn't have no door on it, see; just a hole in the side of it. Some of the lads I brought in fishin there took to callin it Ram's Pasture. Damn door was kind a like a sheep entrance, ya know. The roof over the bunks and everything but the fireplace was a trough roof- holla cedar split in half. The first layer we put on there, the holla would stick up, face up, see. The next layer would break the joint and face down. Like that all along the roof - one layer up and the next one down. By Jesus, she was waterproof too. "In those days, specially in the spring of the year, all the tourists wanted to go speckle trout fishin. We'd go out in the old log canoe old Ike Austin dug it out, must have been sixteen, seventeen feet long - and still-fish off the

Ross Shaver and Harry Graham (coming out the door) at the Trough Roof Camp known as the Ram's Pasture at Buck Lake

The trough roof on The Ram's Pasture 83

Fishin at the mountain

you'd see these speckles come up n break water and get flies right off the surface. One time, one morning, my brother Les and I was fishin there, and we heard a splash right down the shore from us and looked down and there was a dandy big otter with a speckle trout about sixteen inches long through his mouth. Don't tell me otters can't catch speckle trout. They can. "I never bothered takin no steel pole in there like the tourists did. All I'd do is use a cedar pole and that was nice and light to fish with, you know. Then at that time it was all black braided line that I used - couple of sinkers on it to take the bait down and a little double Indiana spinner - silver colour, or gold - each one about half inch long, long shank hook — ordinary hook, no gut on em in those days — and a good gob of dew worms crisscrossed on the damn thing, and you couldn't catch fish with that, you couldn't catch fish with anything. That was sure cure.

side a the mountain there. That's the only thing we ever done in those days. Oh it seems to me once or twice I tried trolling, but it's not so handy trolling out of a log dugout. It was hell to get it started, but once you got it going it was hell to get it stopped, too. If I ever went in there and the old log canoe wasn't there, I knew where to go and get it - up at the Peterson Landing. Ol Tom Roberts would be in there trapping and he'd want a few trout to take back home with him. He'd come down around the lake and pick up the old log canoe and take it back up. We fished together there, ol Tom and I, at the mountain. He knew how to catch speckle trout. We used to fish down deep - thirty-five, forty feet of water. That's where the speckle trout were. We'd either use worms or, if you had a trap and you left it in there close along the shore and give it about twenty minutes, you'd have a trap full of minnies, shiners, and chubs. Then go out to the end of the long log, tie up, and start pullin in trout. Oh Christ, in the evenings before dark,

Speckled trout at the Buck Lake Camp: "Some of the nicest trout that you wanted to ask for."

Len paddling Ike Austins log canoe, Buck Lake 84

of there. Did he grunt and groan! Bugger et one or two trout before I heard him. Guess he figured that was a free meal. "But I only used this camp up on the hill for just a short while, because Ernie Palmateer, which ownded the camp on the point there, he was goin down to the States. Sold his farm at Fishtail and he didn't need this place back at Buck Lake. Thought he might as well get something out of it - his boat and everything bein in there - so he asked me if I wanted it and I bought it. Bought the camp and everything that was in it - boat, blankets, dishes - everything. I was lucky. See my dad and him was pretty

Later, when I used to do some casting, we'd also use these Keyad spinners, you know, with a sinker and a fly at the bottom which you could change. Oh hell, there was several good flies Silver Doctor, Royal Coachman; Cow Dung was good, Yellow Sally. "Sometimes, if we got in there real early in the spring of the year when the ice was startin to go out along the shore, we'd have to fell a tree to get out onto the ice - open water along the shore - but once you were out on the ice, you were fine. And there'd be air holes here and there, you know, where the water'd be running, and there'd be black stuff around these air holes; might be in close to shore or might be offshore a ways - but that was where to fish. You'd almost always get a fish or two there, jiggin, you know. Get a hit before too long. Put a chunk of rabbit on the hook. I learned that from ol Tom Roberts. Rabbit meat is just as good as minnies or worms or any of that. Of course you needed good footwear, case you got skiddin down an air hole. Have to watch your footin, you know - oh sometimes the air holes'd be quite a size. But it was worth the trouble. You happen to run short of meat or you want a change from meat, why fish is nice in the spring of the year." Before acquiring his main camp at Buck Lake, Len built a log camp in the late twenties not far from the Trough Roof Camp. The Palmateer Camp which was to become his main camp was already built then, but Len didn't own it and there was a lock on it. He built this other camp, which I call the Hemlock Camp, because he needed somewhere safe to leave equipment. "You couldn't leave anything in the Trough Roof Camp because it would be stole." He placed this camp up on the hill where it could not easily be seen. "There was nothing up there in the line of decent timber except this goddamn hemlock, so I cut hemlock - I'd say roughly around stove pipe size - and lugged er in there myself. Didn't have no horse - just drug er in myself. It was heavy too. Heavy medicine. Saddle corners. Yeah, I saddled the whole thing. Oh I know damn well it's standing there yet. "I remember Les and I staying in there, sleeping in there one night, and all we had was an old coal oil lantern and a flashlight. We had these speckle trout up on spikes that I had drove into the top wall log outside; goddamn old bear come through the night and he was cleaning up on our speckle trout, the old bastard. Put the flashlight on him and he soon got the hell out

Spring fishing on melting ice

Speckled trout up on spikes 85

Len's son Jim (right) and friend, Barry Bailey, at Len's camp at Buck Lake which he bought from Ernie Palmateer

Len's Palmateer Camp in summer

good friends, used to work together up at Benoir's Lake. When Ernie'd come down to Wilberforce, he'd visit the old man, stop in for dinner. I was only young at that time. "But anyway, this camp that I bought from Ernie Palmateer, I figure he must a built it in the early twenties. When I first went in there, the only camp on Buck Lake was the ol Ram's Pasture. But I know Ernie built before 1925, cause the fellas from Lindsay - Barnsley and Porter, Reid there, the two Frost brothers, Cec and Les - they built their hunt camp in 1925 an it was before that. Ol Ernie there, he built a nice camp - him and his brother Albro. All spruce and balsam. Corners was all dovetailed and for the roof he put rafters up on each side and then he took small poles - oh, roughly two, three inches around - and put them across the topside of the rafters. Then he split cedar and pine about two feet long, similar to a shingle, and tacked them onto these pieces that went crossways and put his tarpaper on top of that again and little cleats to hold the tarpaper down. "Didn't have no floor in that camp, but I had a little box stove in there - that little fella that's out in the shed now. Used to load it up at night with hardwood, and my God it'd burn most a the night. It was a warm camp even in the wintertime. Nobody ever complained. That was a nice camp. You couldn't ask for a better one.

"I had two bark canoes back there and they were nice canoes. Jack Watson, fire ranger up in Bruton, married one of the Kidd girls, he used to make bark canoes and sell them in the summertime. But my two canoes, I think that by the look of them ol Jack Ragan made them. He was related to Mrs Lyman Dillman - I don't know whether he was a brother or what. He used to do some trappin and huntin in the fall. Damn near killed himself once. His pistol fell out a his pocket while he was lookin at some traps, and be damned if it didn't go off and hit im. He had to walk a long way to get help. He went west, and years later he sold his farm an come back. I heard he was worth a lot a money when he died. But him and Jack Watson fire ranged together and that's where he learned how to make bark canoes: it was from old Jack Watson. Not much to do sometimes when you're fire ranging, so they built canoes. Christ, I've heard tell of them going up north of Bruton and getting birchbark out of the township of Clyde. You need good bark and a damn big tree, too. Used to be a huge white birch east of East Lake - four feet at the butt, no limbs right to the top an no cat faces on it; ideal canoe birch... . But they made a lot a canoes; ribs out a cedar, thin cedar slats. That's where my two canoes come from. They were a good run, round about twelve, fourteen feet, and light as a feather. Nice for trappin and fishin, but too good a canoe for to 86

have tourists gettin in and out, cause those bastards, rather than get their feet a little bit wet, they'd pull it up on the rocks and get into it and no water underneath, d'ya see. That used to make me mad. Board canoe will take it for a while, but a bark canoe won't. "Anyway, I used that last camp from the early twenties right through to the beginning of the sixties. My biggest mistake was I didn't buy the land after I bought the cabin from Palmateer. It belonged to the Crown, see, and when they decided to put the Township of Bruton into Algonquin Park, when Les Frost was in power there, why it wasn't long before I was shit out a luck. I kicked my ass different times that I didn't buy that land when the government at Bancroft was selling all the lots off around Kingscote Lake. I could have bought an acre at Buck Lake just as easy as I could do it at Kingscote, and that's where I made my mistake. I'd bought two, three acres along the lakeshore, I could a tole them to stick it where Paddy stuck his drumsticks. They couldn't have done a goddamn thing once I had my title, but I was slow, too goddamn slow. At that time, there was no roads into it -just a bare trail, a snowshoe trail through the bush, and I never thought about it the day'd come that there'd be a truck road right into the lakeshore. It's a bastard how a few years'll make such a big difference. You can't buy up the whole countryside. "After they decided to put the Township of Bruton and Clyde into Algonquin Park, I was tole I couldn't keep a lock on my camp no more. So Gord and I cleaned all the stuff out a the camp an brought it home to Wilberforce. No sense a leavin it all there to get stole. Said they were gonna make it a park, see, keep it wild. And now they have a moose season and a deer season there, it's trapped all winter, and they log hell out of it - roads in there all over the goddamn place. What the hell kind of park is that? Alls I know is that when I had it, there was deer and bear and wonderful speckle trout fishin. Some of the nicest trout in there that you wanted to ask for. Oh God it was wild. And I can't ever remember making a trip back in there at those days that I didn't see deer or bear or moose. I had Ross Shaver back in there one time, there was a bull moose come down from the north. I never heard a moose make a noise like that one did. Big bull, in the summertime. He was in the velvet, and he walked the full length of the sand beach on the east side of the lake. 87

Bawlin! Nnh, nnnh, nnh. He went off down towards Barr's Lake, must have been down in there about a mile, mile and a half, and he turned around and be damned if he didn't come back over the same course and go back up towards Kingscote Lake, bawlin to beat hell. I don't know what was botherin him, but he was a big lad. I wouldn't want to get in the road of him. Never heard a moose make a noise like him. No, I'm tellin ya right now, Richard, I wish to hell I never lost that camp. In my day that was quite a place - but what the hell have they got up there now?" Recently Len's son Gord and I went in to spend a night at the camp and were delighted to find it still standing and in excellent shape. There happened to be a full moon that night, and we watched it come up over the tall pines in the east bay just as it had years ago when one of Len's toi ists had photographed it. All the magic of the place was restored at night as we sat around the campfire talking. You could no longer see the logging scars on the far shore or distinguish the holes in the tree line on the denuded mountain across from the camp. Everything, however briefly, seemed as it always had been. I found it almost impossible to believe that the government had given orders

The East Bay of Buck Lake by moonlight

to burn all the old log cabins in this part of Algonquin Park. Fortunately, the people who were supposed to torch Len's camp couldn't bring themselves to do it. There is just something about the cabin, the point, and Buck Lake that gives it a special charm that anyone can immediately feel. Small wonder Len loved that camp so dearly. Small wonder that he is so bitter about losing it. What surprised me most when listening to Len talk about fishing in the old days was learning that there were no fish at all then in any of the lakes around Wilberforce, not even in the big ones such as Grace, Farquhar, and Otter. "There was lake trout in Clement Lake up here at one time," Len told me. "I remember when I was a kid my dad used to buy lake trout from Billy Drumm lived up by the haunted house there. But I think they fished them all out through the ice, cause there wasn't nothing there after that." To fish for trout, you had to go all the way back into Buck Lake - "all the York Branch waters was full of lake trout and speckle trout" - or further. "One time," Len recalls, "ol Tom Roberts and I went up to East Lake in the northeast corner of Harburn Township. He met me at the south end of Drag Lake with a canoe an we stopped that night at a little camp of Tom's on a small point at the northeast end of Drag Lake. Then we went up through Haliburton Lake, across North Lake, and east through the two Burham's Ponds into East Lake. The two MacDonald boys was buildin a log camp on the island and we stayed there. We fished over on the south side of the lake at one end a the mountain where old Bill Gregory had his trappin camp. Speckle trout! You couldn't hardly keep the bas-

Len with two catches of bass at Cross Lake

tards off the hook. They hit your hook jus like sunfish. That was a good many years ago; must a been twenty - wait a minute - been thirtyfive years married, and it was before that; quite a bit before that. Oh I'd say it was roughly forty, fifty years ago, maybe more." To fish for bass, one had to go just as far afield. I was amazed at this because I had always assumed that the fishing in the old days was superb everywhere, the kind of thing you only read about now in glossy magazines. But it's a fact that most of the young glacier-formed lakes in the area were barren of gamefish until stocking programmes were initiated in this century. The little book, Monmouth Township 18811981, states that "fish were not found in the lakes at an early date. Enterprising residents at a later time introduced lake trout and bass." Although few people know it, Len stocked nearly every lake in the Wilberforce area that has fish in it today. The government stocked Farquhar Lake with lake trout, and Fred Barnes and "ol man Webber" put the bass into Cedar and Otter Lakes, but apart from that nearly every other lake was stocked by Len, with either his brother Les, Fred Barnes, or Ken White.

"Speckle" trout

88

somebody's fence rails. As soon as the damn thing broke off, one of the women - barefoot would shove er in another four feet, five feet burn er off again. They didn't believe in sawing the goddamn wood. I often laughed about that. "But anyway, Fred'd get his oars and we'd go fishin. That's the time we used to have damn good bass fishin - early, right in the morning, an the fog goin off the water. Fred'd get his girls to catch a bunch of grassuppers right out a the back fields, and that was our bait. Good bait. We used to oh catch bass right and left there all day. Bags of the buggers. Wonderful fishin. Couldn't ask for nicer bass. And over across from where we were fishin, there was a mountain, a damn big rocky mountain, and all over through there must a been burnt over years ago, cause there was pails and pails of blueberries come up that rocky hill. Real good run of bass, though. Nice bass. Fish an come back. Come back enough bass to do us all the next week and then some. Two families. There was good trout fishin there those days, too. For years there, they caught old smashers of lake trout. Great big ones. But Fred and I, we liked the bass — specially for stockin purposes. "A'Delbert Miller went down with us one time, one Saturday night there, to fish, and we had a lunch t' eat goin down. Different nights we used t' eat goin down in the Democrat; cut off a slice of bread and put some butter on it and a chunk of cheese. And ol Fred says to this Del lad - he's dead now too - says to him, 'Well, how do you like the cheese, Del?' And Del says, 'Oh, tastes good. It's old, ain't it?' 'Yeah,' Fred says, 'yeah, it's a bit old. But it's tasty. There's the odd skipper in it — ' 'BLAAH.' Fred and I, we damn near come out of the seat laughin. I was sittin in the middle and I could feel ol Fred shakin on one side of me and Del on the other

The bass in all of the neighbourhood lakes - Wolf, Cross, Barnum, Big and Little Straggle, Rock, Bill's, Watt's, North, Kennabi, Yankton, Clement, Grace, Otter, Cockle, and Cedar — originally came from Paudash Lake. Len is always talking about stocking lakes with bass out of Grace Lake, so I asked him how the bass got from Paudash to Grace to begin with. "Well," said Len, "as far as I know, Fred Barnes and I was the ones. We brought up bass here for two, three summers and dumped them into Grace Lake. Ol Fred and I, we'd go down every Saturday night to the north bay of Paudash and fish. Fred would take some cream cans down with him, so's we could bring some bass home live, see. We had a little box like a trap that you could put them in while you was catching them, and then we'd fill the cream cans full of water and dump the bass in them. On the trip home, every time we'd pass a spring crick by the side of the road, we'd change the water in the cans. Keep em healthy, see. Then when we got home, we'd crack em into some lake or another round here. Oh we put some in North Lake up here, some in Clement, and Grace, some in Farquhar... . Yeah, Paudash Lake is where all the bass got started from. "We'd leave here bout eleven o'clock with the team n Democrat, go down through South Wilberforce there, up over Dillman Hill and down to where the 121 is nowadays. There was a good road from there right to the sand beach at Paudash. We'd drive all night. Bout a four hours trip, I guess. Maybe get there an hour before daylight in the morning. We used to sleep down there for about an hour after we got the horses put away. There was a log shack with a trough roof - I guess it was a stable at one time - and we'd sleep in behind the horses there on some hay that we took down with us in the back of the Democrat. Take the back seat out, see. Come daylight we'd be ready to go. "There was a family had a shanty - it had a trough roof- at the north bay of Paudash, and through the week they'd use ol Fred's boat and they'd have the oars. Fred'd have to go in and get the oars from them when we wanted to use the boat. And this shack they were livin in, soon as you opened the door, Christ! You could see right through it! Right through the other end of her. You could see daylight any place along the logs. I often wondered how in the Christ do they live here in the wintertime. They had a big round box stove and they were burning

Couldn't ask for nicer bass

89

side heavin over the edge of the Democrat. By Jesus, he brought up everything but his boots. Christ, they didn't bother Fred any, cause, I mean once they're et, they're dead anyway. Chew them up. They get in old cheese, you know, in the summertime. Fred liked his cheese, but he liked it old. Ol devil, he says, 'Might be the odd skipper in it, Del.' " The bass that Fred and Len brought from Paudash Lake in cream cans and dumped into Grace Lake "walked right ahead". There was wonderful bass fishing there for years. So Grace Lake served as a kind of halfway house for all the bass in the neighbouring lakes whose ancestors were hardy Paudash Lake stock. Whenever he wanted to stock a lake, Len would go over to Grace Lake and start catching bass which he would keep in a submerged fish box about three feet long made of screen mesh with a little trap door on the top. When he had collected enough fish, he would take them out of this holding cage with a little "wire basin" or scoop and dump them into a copper wash boiler. He would have two long poles lengthwise along the sides of the boiler and wired to the handles at each end; then he and his helper would carry the boiler with a pole in each hand. Although Len claims that the water in the copper boilers didn't splash all that much, he did prefer a different method of stocking. "I have a can that fits right inside of my pack sack, just perfectly snug. It was made for the purpose. Charlie Hayes got it made for me in the city out there. You can put twenty-five, thirty bass in there. Be fairly heavy, but it wouldn't splash. Up at the top, there's a hole about five, six inches across and the water don't come up through there. The fish'd get a rough ride on your back - oh, every step you're takin, you'd hear the splash

comin up - but that's the best thing for your fish. Keep the oxygen in the water, you know. But don't put too many in a can. If the bass is big, why twenty would be plenty. But if the bass is six, seven inches long, why twenty-five, thirty would be fine. I used to like to put them in ten, twelve inches if I could, but I'd use whatever the hell I caught - long as they weren't damaged. The number of fish you can carry also depends on the length of your portage, cause you don't want to be puttin a bunch of dead fish in. The more fish you have in the can, especially adult bass, the quicker you gotta go or they'll go in belly up when you get there, d'ya see." One time when Len and I were talking about stocking, he told me about the summer that he worked for the Department of Lands and Forests netting bass out of Clement Lake, both for stocking purposes and to reduce the numbers of bass in the lake to help the trout get started again. Len liked the job because it was steady work and fairly good pay. While he was telling me about it, a nagging thought kept running through my head. Finally I asked him: "Len, how did the bass originally get into Clement Lake? Didn't you... ? " Len suddenly became coy and had a rare failure of memory and he "couldn't rightly say. Might a been ol Fred or old man Webber or somebody." "Listen," I said, "when they were paying you that summer to take bass out of Clement, did they know who had put them in there in the first place?" "No," said Len roguishly. "I don't spose they did." "Yeah, and you didn't inform them, did you?" I said. "Did you at least succeed in reducing the number of bass?" "Oh Christ no, we didn't even make a dent in er. You talk about bass! That lake was full of them... ." Then he added wistfully, "But it was good pay." Len was just as active a stocker of trout as he was of bass but he got most of his trout from the government. "Ken White and I, we put thousands of the buggers in lakes around here. Government fish. I forget now where the hell I got the forms. Used to fill out a lot of forms. Come in by train. Come in cream cans -just like cream cans but they had little round basins in the top that had ice in. Never come without ice. They wouldn't live. As the ice melted, the cold water went down into the water where the fish was in. Kept the water cold all the time. Ken and I,

Len preparing pole for the copper wash boiler full of bass

90

we'd meet the train with my team and wagon and get those cream cans and go like hell. Sometimes we'd take em down a big lake by boat, but I didn't like that. Too smooth of a ride, d'ya see. Better to have em in the wagon - shake hell out of the water that way, see. I mind when Ken and I stocked Pine Lake - spring of 1935, in May, was the first fish ever went into Pine Lake. There was nothing in there but only chubs chub minnies and shiners. I forget now just how many thousand we put in, but we carried them up in wash boilers, me n Ken. Cream cans is a prick of a thing to carry through the bush, you know, so we dumped them into copper boilers and carried two of them up there full of these damn little wee lake trout about an inch long, hatched the fall before like, d'ya see. Oh they were heavy, god damn, and uphill at that. "And it's surprising the amount of people, if you want a hand to cadge some stock over to a lake, they're busy as hell. But soon as the fish gets old enough to catch, they're the first buggers there. Fish the damn lake out, but they're never thinkin about the day that the lake should be restocked again. Makes you sore lots of times that you break your damn neck trying to keep a lake in good shape and some other buggers goes in and fishes it out. "Ken White, he was good. Good at anything. Always give me a hand. He helped me to trap and hunted with me in the fall of the year. We fished together and you could count on him to help ya stock a lake if it needed it. He was a damn good friend and quite a bushman. Ken and I used to have some funny times together, but then he died. Got pneumonia here at North Lake taking out some timber for Bill Shay and Bill Mumford. Come home, went to bed, and he never got up. I was up at my Cross Lake Camp trappin, and I come in one night from lookin at some traps - back in the snowshoes days that was - and note on the door, on the cookery door, Ken White had died. Ken's mother sent up ol Frank Schofield on skis with the note. I was shocked. I come down the next morning. He was workin there in the swamp below North Lake cuttin posts and ties, takin cedar. And the camp was built into a side hill and the roof was slanted towards this side hill so that the water, as it melted on the roof at nights, run down over the eave onto the frozen ground and in along the loft between the logs and laid on their beddin. The blankets was wet half the time. Ol Ken, I guess he needed the money, so he toughed er

Len at Cross Lake with two catches of trout from Pine Lake; note that the five lake trout have had their tails trimmed to look like speckled trout!

Ken White and Len (with pipe) at the Cross Lake Camp; "Ken was a damn good friend and quite a bushman."

91

Len in doorway of Ken White's camp on Kennabi

out. Hard scratchin in those days. He got pneumonia over it and never got up. He never even saw thirty. "Now Cross Lake and East Lake, Les and I, we stocked them with speckle trout a couple of different times after Elmer Aldredge had his loggin road in there up past Rock Lake. At that time they used to bring them in to Wilberforce by truck in great big square tins. Government stock, yearlings. By Jesus, they were nice fish too. That's why they went ahead. We stocked Cross Lake, well, we'd go right in to Elmer's lumber camp on the knoll at the far end of Cross Lake and - oh, it'd only be about fifty yards down to the water's edge. That was easy stockin. When the Development bought it, they caught speckle trout out of there that Les and I put in around eight pounds some ounces, and that's big speckle trout, mind you. And the Cross Lake gang used to get them six and seven pounds right there out from my old camp. Lovely trout. And fat! Bellies on em like poisoned pups. Oh yeah, all the good speckle and lake trout fishin in those lakes them days was from our stockin. There was no fish there at all before that." The motivation behind Len's stocking programme was anything but frivolous. Fishing was an important source of revenue for him. "Jus like the old lady pissin in the washtub, d'ya see. Every little bit counts." Fishing parties didn't pay as much as hunting ones, because he would only take in two to four men, but the expenses were less and it was not limited to a few weeks in the fall. There was fishing all spring and summer, not to mention ice fishing in the winter. Every additional lake with fish in it was another string to Len's bow as a guide. If one lake was slow, there would always be another one to try the next day. To Len, stocking lakes was like putting money in the bank, and he's

Len with his son Gord; "Len has not grown tired of fishing"

often told me that putting fish in a lake is like putting manure in your field. You get a better return the following year. It's surprising that after all his years of hard work guiding fishermen and stocking lakes, Len has not grown tired of fishing. Quite the opposite. He now seems keener than ever and goes fishing whenever he can. He's not quite as bad as old Fred Barnes was. He won't "let his work go all to hell to go fishing", but he still gets out quite a bit, summer and winter. As a rule, even in lakes where other people have long since stopped getting good fish, Len will do well. He knows where to fish. Many times I've heard him say about some lakes that there are only one or two spots in the whole lake where you can be fairly sure of catching fish. Anyone who has not spent a lifetime rowing tourists around these lakes is not likely to know just where these spots are. In the rare instances when he does not do well, Len always has a ready-made, time-honoured excuse at hand: the wind is from the north; thunder weather - trout don't bite worth a damn; nights too cool - the bass has moved into deeper water and stopped hittin; should by rights be fishing in the early morning or the evening (or whatever part of the day you are not fishing); and so on. One time when he brought back several tourists from an unsuccessful day of bass fishing, I decided to tweak the old man, thinking that I'd heard all of his excuses. 92

"Yeah, ol Mandy, he was quite a lad. Lived over there near the Terrace Inn in an old shack. Never had any toilet paper in the outdoor toilet. Used the Eaton's catalogue. By God there's one thing I'll say about him: you ever wanted to pull a boat out of the water in the fall of the year, and you were alone, you walked up there and asked ol Mandy, he'd go and give you a hand and never ask for a red cent. Oh he was good — good neighbour. I never begrudged the man a meal any time that he come around here. Why goddamn, he done me a lot of good turns and I used to like to see him stay. But he was like me - he loved to fish. "Yeah, ever since I was big enough to hold a pole, I wanted to go fishin. Fishin ... I always liked it."

"Len," I said, "how come the bass weren't biting today when it's been nice and hot, the wind is from the west, the water's not too low, it's been slightly overcast but not at all stormy, and you had the bigger size frogs that you like so much?" "Water's too clear," Len said without batting an eye. "See down ten foot today. Bass never hits worth a damn when the water's like that." I had to laugh as the two tourists nodded their heads in worshipful agreement. When I told Lionel about it later on, he laughed bitterly and said, "Why doesn't he ever tell you that before you go out? You probably couldn't see two inches under the surface anyway." Lionel's failure rate with the neighbourhood bass is so high that the man has a right to be bitter. He's what Len calls "a real joner" - someone who has almost legendary bad luck. "Your Lionel, there, he's the opposite of ol Mandy Connaghan," said Len. "Mandy always caught the biggest fish and shot the biggest buck. Course he was an awful liar. Nobody could beat ol Mandy when it come to telling stories. They got him drunk one night when he was helpin me out in deer season. He was eatin supper there and one fella asks him, 'Mandy, what was the biggest buck you ever shot?' Three hundred and forty pounds,' he says, 'with the guts out. That's the biggest deer, by Jesus, I ever knocked down. It took half an hour to rip the guts out a him.' Oh he lied to beat hell. "And then fishin, him and Lawrie Smith used to get talkin and Lawrie liked to tell stories too. It didn't matter how big a story Lawrie told, Mandy'd have one made up that would beat Lawrie's — a little bit heavier fish. One time Mandy was out fishin on this lake with somebody and — oh the fish was hittin good — and anyway, why he caught his count of bass and he was going to dump the rest of the minnies - or frogs they were, rather - on the water, and watch them and see how fast they could get to shore before the bass would grab em. And anyway, why he dumped the bucket of frogs into the lake, and these damn frogs all made for the shoreline, see, jumping through the water, and anyway, he says, 'Up come these goddamn bass, grabbed these frogs, and brought them right back to the boat, and,' he says to ol Lawrie, 1 done that for almost half an hour, taking these frogs out of the bass's mouths. They couldn't reach shore. Damn bass kept bringing them back to me.' And ol Lawrie says, 'I can't beat that Mandy.'

Len doing what he does best

93

Seven

Life in the Logging Camps Most of my information about logging is based on Len's experience in Willows' camps in the early to mid-twenties, but some of it comes from his knowledge of William Laking's operation in Dudley Township, just west of the limits reserved by Alf Willows. Laking, who lived in Haliburton, had a very big logging concern, much bigger than Willows'. His limits stretched for miles and miles, and some of his camps, like Number Seven, employed about one hundred men and had twenty teams of horses. This was the camp Len took the lumber from to build his Far Camp. Although Len never worked for Laking, he knew many of the men who did and saw Laking's camps first-hand. Willows' and Laking's operations go back to the end of the old logging days - the time before the chainsaw. Techniques and life in the camps changed very little from the beginning of the logging era until the 1940s and 1950s, when the chainsaw suddenly made it possible to operate on a previously undreamed-of scale. Crosscut saws, sleighs, horses, and oats were rather suddenly displaced by chainsaws, trucks, skidders, and gasoline. Since the forties logging has come to use progressively more sophisticated heavy equipment. While there are plenty of men still around who remember the first primitive chainsaws and logging trucks, there are fewer and fewer who remember the days of crosscut saw and horse. The men who worked for Willows and Laking never dreamed of chainsaws. When Willows and Laking were operating in the early twenties, nothing but the softwood - and that mainly white pine - had been touched in the Haliburton area. "Oh hell," says Len, "I can remember when they wouldn't buy hardwood. See softwood floats,

where hardwood, if it's in the water for a while, it gradually keeps sinking down, sinking down, down, till you've lost her. Couldn't get er out by water. They started takin hardwood around the twenties for railroad ties and creosoting them to make them last in the ground. Before that, it was all softwood." Len remembers not only what they cut and how they worked in the camps of the pre-machine era, but also - perhaps more importantly — he remembers the personal and social life of the camps. This, then, is Len's remembrance of how things were in the logging camps in eastern Haliburton in the early 1920s. "I worked five, six years there for old Alf Willows after the First World's War. Alf and his father, they were in together on timber, mostly softwood, but some hardwood too for ties. First camp he had that I worked in was about three mile west of the head of Otter Lake. Tuck Matton was boss at that camp and I worked in there for him several winters. That timber was taken down Otter Lake and Otter Crick to what they call Graham's Siding or Ward's Siding where Willows had a mill and manufactured it up into lumber and ties and shipped it out by train. When that timber was cut off, he moved over to the Burleigh Corners. I think he had two concessions up in there in Dudley, from the Marsh Lakes over to the boundary at Cross Lake something like ten lots, round a thousand acres. He had a bunkhouse there hold about thirty men and a big cookery and afterwards he built another camp up on the knoll, long enough so the cookery was at one end and the bunkhouse was at the other. And there was a big horse stable there and a big blacksmith shop. Old Ed Tallman was boss there and he built that camp. Everything was logs, good size logs and chinked 94

got your board along with it - alls you could eat. Forty dollars was about tops. You were gittin forty dollars, why you were pretty good with a cant-hook or you were puttin up your full count of logs. No one ever got rich workin in a lumber camp. "When the married men went out on Saturday nights, they'd wear their dirty clothes home and get a change over into fresh stuff at home - maybe have a bath or something there too. There was no real place back in the camp to have a bath or do your laundry - no bathtub or anything like that. But anybody that stayed in there Saturday night could put a big galvanized washtub on top of the old box stove and heat some water up and wash himself, if he wanted to. There was nothin against it. They had camp towels you could use or you could take a pair of towels in with ya. And on Sundays, you could maybe do a bit of washin, see. Had a scrub board there if ya wanted it. "Now for your hair, well, most a the men would get their hair cut when they went home - either that or leave er long. You had your choice. But there was no barbers in camp and there was no doctors or nurses there in case you got sick. If somebody got hurt, they had to bring him out. I never worked in a camp where anybody got killed, but one lad there, Bill Jeffrey was his name, he got hurt bad one winter over near Otter Lake workin for Tuck Matton. The tree barbered on him - come back over the stump and hit him. It was leaning pretty bad and there was only a young fella workin with him and I don't think he understood the woods too good. Anyway, this tree barbered; instead a going sideways, it come back over the top of the stump maybe six, seven feet. I guess he didn't corner it good enough. When they backfire like that, they'll split right up the middle and sit up on top of the slab - but not always. Sometimes they go straight back or sideways and pin ya. If there's no snow, nine times out a ten you can get the hell out a the road, but when there's snow to get through, you can't always get out a the road of a damn barber tree. This Jeffrey, what he should a done, which you don't always do, is tramp a path so's he could get away, but he didn't and the snow bein deep, why Jeffrey didn't get away fast enough and he got pinned. He lived though. It never killed him - didn't hit im in the body - but it smashed his leg and he had to be taken out by a team of horses and shipped to a hospital. He didn't do anymore work for

with moss and plaster from the inside out. The corners was all saddled. I stayed there three, four winters. "We'd go in in the fall of the year, sometimes in October. Generally I went in whenever the deer hunt was over. Go in and work there all winter, you know. Sleep there and get your board there. Stay in till breakup. When the ice started to break up in March, they'd let you go. Soon as they had to stop drawin logs, they didn't need you anymore. But, you'd be startin to get tired of it by then anyway. During the winter you could come out Saturday night, if you wanted to - long as you were back Sunday afternoon, so's you'd be ready to work Monday morning. I did all my work in the camps before I was married and I'd stay in two, three weeks at a time or more, specially after my mother died. It was hard on the married men. It'd be lonesome for them, no doubt. Most of them would try to get home - try their damnedest to get out Saturday nights. Not too many of them stayed in there on Sunday, unless they were from way out there somewhere and couldn't get home. At that time, see, there was no trucks or cars. Sometimes you could get a ride with the cutter - generally had a drivin horse in there and a cutter - or a fella with a team of horses might give you a ride. But if you didn't hitch a ride, you had to take Shank's pony - walk er. And that was a long walk, especially from the head of Grace to the lower end on a cold night. "As a rule, everybody'd go out overnight at the end of the month cause that's when you were paid. Mostly you'd get a cheque on some bank or other which the storekeepers would cash for you, but sometimes they'd give ya cash. There was no money there to speak of. At those days, if you were drawin around thirty-five dollars a month, why you were doin all right. Course you

Alf Willow's Logging Camp - bunkhouse and cookery

95

quite a while after that. Left him limpin for a long time. He was lucky he wasn't killed. But you didn't see very many accidents in there. As a rule, you go into the lumber camps, you know how to pull a crosscut saw and handle an axe. And if ya don't, you shouldn't be there. "In my day life in the camps wasn't so bad. Years ago, when they first started to log, it was a poor bed to sleep on and sowbelly or white beans to eat. They'd stay with you but you never got too much of a change. When I worked in the camps, things was better. Lots a good food they fed ya. You could eat as much as you liked. There was no limit on it. Eat till you filled up three times a day. Hell, if your appetite was poor, they'd give ya Beef, Iron n Wine make it better. Said that right on the label of the bottle: Beef, Iron and Wine. I don't know what in hell else they put in it, but it was mostly wine. Buy er right in the store. Anybody was feelin tough, they'd get aholt of that and they'd get straightened up with it. Get ya eatin again. Get your strength up, see. "In the mornings you'd have porridge, fried potatoes, and you'd have your bacon and eggs, bread, and couple a kinds a jam. To drink you had your tea mostly and they had milk. You wanted coffee, generally had some coffee too. But most of the lumberjacks, they took tea. Then at suppertime you'd have dumplings and maybe roast meat or baked beans - something like that. And don't think some of those old cooks couldn't cook beans. Oh, fart like a shotgun all night long in the bunkhouse. Then there'd be cakes and pies of all kinds. I've seen ol Geordie Bowen — used to live in Highland Grove — it was nothing for him to have thirty-five arid forty pies up on the shelves all at once. Different kinds a pies too: raisin, apple, and there was what the lumberjacks used to call shoepack pie. It was made out a molasses. Very dark pie. A lot of people never heard tell of it, but it was all right. Not a goddamn thing wrong with it. Old Geordie, he knew how to make it. He was a wonderful cook. Made everything right in the camp. "He'd have all his provisions right there on hand - flour, sugar, potatoes and beans by the hundredweight, big wooden tubs of lard, thirtypound pails of jam — everything was brought in in big quantities. Be no use a sendin a quart and a half pail of honey or a quart pail of jam into a lumber camp where there was thirty, forty men. It'd be cleaned up in no time flat. They'd need a team of horses running to town getting

provisions every day, stead a once a week. He'd have sides of beef and pork, great big frozen lake trout, boxes of prunes, raisins .... He'd never run out of provisions. Foreman seen to that. Foreman'd tell the cadge man what he needed and the cadge man'd draw it all in. In the fall, he'd use a wagon but when winter come, why he'd bring in the chuck on a bobsled. They generally had a light set of sleighs for that job. 01 Sid White - that's Ken's father - he done the cadgin there at Willows's for a while. "Oh there was lots of good cooks in those days. At Black Archie's camp there was old Bob Bowers and his wife. Then over at Otter Lake, there was old Bob Huff - cooked for Tuck Matton. He was a good cook too. This old Geordie Bowen, he cooked in lumber camps most of his lifetime. He was a cook at Burleigh Corners the first two years I was in there and the third year it was Art Cookie. He lived on a farm over above the head of Otter Lake - just died here round about a year ago. He was an exceptionable good cook, but he quit and then Bill Fleming come in. One of the men - ol Ez Ames, he was just a small man, small size, you know — was complainin about the food to the foreman, Ed Tallman. And somehow, I don't know just how, but Art Cookie got wind of it. One morning Ed Tallman come up to Art and asks him to fry up some potatoes. Says, The men can't eat boiled potatoes all the time. There've been complaints.' Ol Art told him right then and there he was quittin, and he says, 'As for old Ez Ames, a plateful of beans and a cold fuck'd kill the old bugger. And you tell the old bastard that.' Christ he was mad that morning. Wouldn't even make breakfast. We were sorry to see him go. He was an awful good cook and as far as I know, no one else was complainin. You can think what you like, but you can't always say it. As the ol sayin goes, a close mouth makes a sound mind. But people thought maybe it was all set up that way to get Bill Fleming in. See he was related to the boss. Ed Tallman married Bill Fleming's sister, Jennie. And Ez Ames, he was Alf Willows's father-in-law. "If the gang was anyways big, the cook'd have a choreboy as a helper - some young chap just startin into camp life-, see. He waited on the table, washed up the dishes, dried them, put em away, set the table for the next meal, split the wood, carried it in, carried the water in for the cook - whatever the cook told him to do, he'd have to do it, cause if he didn't, he wouldn't be 96

had one row of beds from one end of her right through to the other - top and bottom bunks and the same on the other side, exceptin there was about eight feet at one end by the door for a barrl of water and a sink made out a lumber with an outlet under it out between the logs and onto the ground. You could have a wash there in the morning, see. Your washstand was long enough you could put three wash dishes in it, so three men could wash at the same time. There was a towel rack there, a wooden towel rack, and company towels and all the Lifebuoy soap you wanted to use. Lots n lots of times you'd have to shove the ice back in the barrl to get the water. That was refreshing. You're damn right. Them chunks of ice'd wake you up quicker n anything else. "You had to go to the toilet, there was a toilet outside, a frame building right close to the crick there. But it was close to the bunkhouse too. Wouldn't be any more n thirty feet. Never had a crap can inside. We weren't that lucky. But that outside toilet would sit four men, five in a pinch. From the floor up, oh, about two feet, there was one-inch lumber but there was no boards crossways to sit on - no toilet seat or anything. Just a round pole with the knots cut off it that your lumber was nailed to, see. You'd sit on that. They called it the snortin pole. Had to be careful not to fall over. "At the far end of the bunkhouse, there was a little table with benches on either side for sittin at or playing cards. And at the front end not too far from the door was a big round box stove, a big Adam Hall heater. You walked into the bunkhouse - there was only one door in that bunkhouse - and your box stove was right there in front of you. It'd take a cordwood stick with no trouble at all. Some of them used to take a five-foot stick. They were buggers to throw heat. Put the dry maple to it and by Jesus, put you right out of the bunkhouse if you ever loaded it. Lots a times at night we'd have to open the ventilator in the roof and let the heat out. Then when it started to chill off, you could close it down again. Never left it open all night, cause it would get too damn chilly then. But Willows's bunkhouses, they were dry and warm, not like that goddamn ol shack in at North Lake where Ken White took pneumonia. In our bunkhouses, we was never cold. "Course we always slept two to a bunk, you know. There was no single bunks. If you could at all, you liked to bunk with someone you knew,

there long. Then he'd have to go to the bunkhouse and carry water there and bring in enough wood for the night and keep the stove goin in the bunkhouse all day, check that every little while. In some camps, the choreboy'd have to clean the horse stable too but at Willows's, the teamsters cleaned their own m'nure out from their own team like and looked after their own horses. Choreboy had to get up early with the cook. It wasn't easy work and the hours was long. I never had to do no chorin myself, but I always felt sorry for the choreboy. Not much of a life for a young gaffer. "Willows's main cookery was a fair size sit twenty-five, thirty men at a time, and when the sleigh haul started, there'd be even more men at the table. Both the boss and the cook slept there. They kept the van there which the boss looked after. It was a big wooden box where they kept matches and pipe tobacco, papers, stuff like that and you could go in and buy whatever you needed. There was a big long table and benches to sit down on and the food would be all put out right in front of ya. The table was wide enough that right down the centre from one end to the other they had a kind of raised bench a foot or so high and a shelf between it and the table. The food would all be put there instead of on the table. Oh they'd put pies there and cookies or cake, bowls of sugar n butter, big dishes - white or old grey granite dishes full of stew meat, potatoes, and vegetables, and they were to hell out of your road. It was a lot handier than putting everything right on the table. There was nothing left on the table but the plates, cups, knives and forks, and things like that. And everybody helped themselves. Start passin the dishes down, help yourself, and pass it to the other fella. "In Willows's camps, we were always allowed to talk at the table. Both Tuck Matton and Ed Tallman let ya talk. But old Ed Robertson, in the camp he run for Lakings you weren't allowed to talk at the table, cause there'd be about a hundred men in that camp, and if any of the dishes went empty and they hollered at the cook with everybody talking at the same time, why the cook wouldn't hear them. So that was one of the rules. Whiles you were eatin, you had to keep your mouth shut. When you went to the bunkhouse, you could do as much talkin as you liked. "There was lots of places to sit down and talk in the bunkhouse - benches, you know. We 97

The bunkhouse

but you wasn't always that lucky. Myself, I prefer sleepin with somebody I know fairly well, that's not lousy as a pet coon. Ya never had to worry about sleepin with a man - pretty lucky that way. Them kind a guys never come into the camps. Most of the lads were married. But some of them was pretty rough lookin. You didn't associate with them too much until you found out what the hell they were like, see. At the Burleigh Corners I always slept with an old chap by the name of Wheeler Patterson. I knew him and his brother Lawrence before I went into the camp. There was three winters old Wheeler and I pulled together there and there was never no problems with him. He worked on the road kept the road in shape. I used to sharpen his axe for him, cause he was up in years and couldn't see too good and at that time I had damn good eyesight. He'd turn the grindstone and I'd sharpen his axe, and my axe needed touching up, why he'd turn the damn grindstone for me, too. Smoked a pipe all the time and he used to take the nightmare at night. Lots a times I used to shake the old bastard. Then he'd wake up and I could get some sleep. Oh Christ, yell right out in his sleep like you'd think he was killin somebody. One night there, I don't know what in hell he was dreamin about, but anyway he says, 'You sons of bitches,' he says, 'come out of the cellar and I'll get ya.' And his goddamn hands started to go up there - hit me right over the

head. I woke him up in a hurry fore he took a second crack at me. "Ol Wheeler, he didn't like the goddamn lice. When these bastards'd come in off the Monck Road, we always figured there was another slash of lice comin. Some of them were filthy looking buggers, you know. The lice'd get in and start to move around the whole camp bunk to bunk, and pretty soon the whole camp would get loused up. But ol Wheeler, he used to take coal oil out of the drum that they kept for the lamps and he put it all around the edge of the bed - top, bottom, and sides. He didn't spare too much, either. And that helped keep the damn lice away. They didn't like the smell of coal oil and we was hardly ever bothered. Oh, once in a while you'd get a little wood tick onto your skin. They'd bore into your flesh, see. They'd make you a little bit itchy, but they never poisoned me. The way to get them out was not to pull on them, cause the stem was liable to break off - shove in a little bit on them and they'll back out and there won't be no poison left there, see. I don't know where the hell they come from, but we used to figure them bastards brought them in on their clothes, and then they'd get to crawlin, see, from bunk to bunk like the lice. You get some bird comin in there, stranger, that lived back in the bush and wasn't too clean about himself, you wouldn't know if he was lousy or not, but you hated to take a chance on it. So I was damn glad to share

98

The end of the day

a bunk with ol Wheeler. He was clean,very clean about himself and he didn't drink. "Course you weren't supposed to drink anyway. Wasn't allowed. No beer or liquor in the bunkhouse. The head fellas didn't think much of drink, cause then the men'd get to quarrellin, see, and fightin wasn't allowed either. As a rule, there was never too many fights in any camp I ever seen. Generally there was no women in the camps. It was all men cooks even, ceptin in Black Archie's camp where Bob Bowers had his wife there to help him. With no liquor and no women, the men wouldn't scrap too much and if they did, they wouldn't fight long. Not if the foreman heard about it. If the foreman figured it was your fault, your time would be short. You'd be on your way out next morning. At that time, there was no problem gettin men. A good boss will look after a hundred men, like old Ed Robertson over at Lakings's Number Seven there; but I've heard it said that you put a woman lookin after a hundred women and there'll be a lot of hair pullin done before the end of the month is over. There was very little quarrellin in the camps I was in, but you saw some tough nuts in them camps and that was one place to keep your mouth shut.

"In the evenings, you were allowed to play cards until nine o'clock and that was that. Come nine o'clock, you had to be in bed. Lights out. That was one of the rulings, cause you had to be up early in the morning - have your breakfast before daylight. We'd play euchre and pedro. There was only a little bit of poker playin. They'd play with matches, but for money too. The foreman didn't like that and there wasn't too much of it done. The married men — which was the majority - they needed their money at home. Now over at Lakings's camp, there was no gamblin allowed at all. If old Ed Robertson caught anybody playin poker, it didn't matter if it was one table, two tables, that was that. They'd all be packin their turkey in the morning. He'd tell you once at the start, and if you didn't go by it, you wouldn't be there very long. He meant what he said. Which was a sensible thing. At that time wages was low and if a man pissed away 99

Logging tools

all his money in poker, when he'd go home, he wouldn't have no money for the old lady and the kids. In Willows's camps, I've seen young lads goin out and they'd owe the goldarn van, owe the company like - too much gamblin. That's why they were against it, d'ya see. "Most of the men were damn good and tired in the evening. You didn't feel much like playin cards and were glad to have lights out at nine. After supper you'd just sit around an smoke an talk, fillin in the time. You could sing songs, long as they weren't dirty songs. The bosses, specially old Ed Robertson over at Lakings's, they didn't like that. Generally, they wanted you to live a clean life, but in any camps I was ever in, they never bothered to bring preachers around or anything like that. Not in my history, no. And there was no Bible readin, none of that. You got that when you got home. "The foreman kept pretty close track of things. He was head boss. Old Alf Willows what ownded the camp, he'd come up to the camp maybe once a week, but most of the time he'd be at his sawmill back in town. He depended on Ed Tallman to look after everything for him.

The boss had the provisions to order for the cook and the horse feed to look after - baled hay and grain, oats you know, salt. The horses had to have their oats if you expected them to work. Without oats, your horses'd get crane poor — poor as a goddamn crane. Then the boss'd go out in the woods and take a look around. The majority of bosses is out in the woods all day someplace. You never knew when they were gonna come along. Start blacksnakin, though, and the boss'd soon be around. Generally you'd see him once in the forenoon and once in the afternoon. He'd come through where you were makin logs or skiddin logs out with a team jus lookin things over to see if everybody was doin their day's work. If you didn't put the logs up that he thought you should, he'd let you know. But if ya did, he'd never bother ya. The bosses I worked for was all good bosses - Black Archie, Tuck Matton, Ed Tallman. You could always get along with them if you gave em an honest day's work. They didn't want you to kill yourself, but they did expect that honest day's work. No goddamn arsin around. 100

"They'd get you out early in the morning and they wanted you in bed early at night. Hard work. Six days a week startin at daybreak and often long before it. Generally, there was no work on Sunday, cept it was maybe jus certain guys that had a sand hill to shovel off or somethin like that to do - get the road ready for Monday morning, d'ya see. I've done that myself for Ed Tallman over at Cross Lake there. Be out most of the Sunday cleanin off the long sand hill goin on to Cross Lake there. Might finish at three o'clock, but bein as you worked Sunday, you were allowed a full day on your time sheet, see. And that was nice. Rest a the time, you could go look at traps. But come Monday morning, you'd be back at work. "And they put the work right to ya makin logs. Leave the camp before daylight and walk out to work. Sometimes, especially when the sleigh haul started, you could get a ride out with a teamster, but usually you walked. It'd jus nicely be gettin daylight time you come to your work where you left your saws n axes the night before. We'd leave em right in the bush, except they were gettin dull and you had to carry em into camp for sharpening. We used to cut in three-man gangs — chopper and two sawyers. The chopper put the notches in the trees. Most a them used a single axe with a flat back for pounding in wedges, but some of them used Methodist axes. Call em that cause they're twofaced. Then the two sawyers come along with their crosscut and upset the tree. Sometimes, if you got into a tree a ways and you could just see 'Oh-oh, that's gonna sit back and pinch,' why we'd use wedges. Always carried wedges in our pockets. They had a little eye on em which you could put a red string through, case you dropped it in the deep snow. Even when there'd be lots of snow, we never used to wear snowshoes -just wade around through the snow. If the snow got a bit on the deep side, it always paid to tramp a path away from the tree that you could get away from it in a hurry, see. Soon as the tree'd hit the ground, the chopper would be there and he'd measure the damn log up, and maybe if it was only small limbs, he'd limb it for the skiddin gang -jus more or less to keep warm. He didn't have to do it. That was part of their job. Alls the sawyers had to do was jus nip the tree in two wherever the chopper marked it, different lengths: ten, twelve, sixteen feet, but not over sixteen feet - two ties in that. It was a small tree, there might only be two ties in it. Except

you were takin out hydro poles or boom timber, you wouldn't take nothing over sixteen feet. "The guy that had the axe work, why that wasn't light work chopping into frozen timber, specially if it was hardwood - maple, beech, or red birch. I done that myself. But the lads that pulled the saws, why it's hard work pullin one of them all day, specially if it gets out a kelter, starts to pinch a little bit, set starts to go out a her. That's no fun. I know, cause I done that too. "Most of the times in the lumber camps we used Simmonds saws — that was the name of the breed, Simmonds. We liked them best, cause they had good hard steel in em, see. I think maybe they came from Sweden. You could get saws with two cuttin teeth to a drag or raker or four and a drag. The two n a drag was the best for hardwood, but if you were into softwood, a lot of them preferred four n a drag. They had a man to file the saws and that was a job by itself too. That'd be his job all day. He'd go out to where the cuttin gangs were workin and he'd have a spare saw sharpened up. He'd han' that to ya and he'd take yours. He'd have a stump there, about four foot high so's he wouldn't hafta bend his back, and it'd have a slit sawed into the top of it to hold the saw while he'd sharpen er up with a hand file and a raker gauge. See if your rakers are too high, your teeth won't cut. But you don't wanna have your rakers too low, either. You want em just a little shade below your cuttin teeth so they'll bring the shavings out. Sometimes he'd hit it okay, but other times he'd make a fluke and the set'd go out of the damn saw, and then you'd have a picnic in the bush all day. Specially if they were lookin for count. "See if you were cutting softwood, makin logs in the swamps, the foreman expected around seventy-five or eighty logs a day for each gang. Hardwood most of the times was around thirtyfive or forty. Course it depended on the size, too. If you got into a patch of pretty heavy timber, well it takes a hell of a lot longer to go through a three-foot log than it does a foot log. But your foreman knew that. He'd be gettin more footage. You had to keep track of all the logs you cut in the day. On a three-man gang, that was the chopper's job. See when you go in at night after supper, your boss might come into the bunkhouse and ask for your count. Ask ya, 'How many logs did ya's get today?' And you'd hafta tell him the number. Chopper couldn't lie none, cause

101

know. You had to go back to work again around one o'clock and go till it got dark. Lots a times you'd be comin in after dark too, and when they served supper, you were ready for her. "After you were through cuttin one place, well you moved on, and that's when the skiddin crew moved in. The teamster was boss of that crew and he'd have two cant-hook men and a trail cutter with him. When the teamster went in after a log, he'd have his trail cutter cuttin brush and small trees out a the road. He'd limb the logs too, when he got to them. Trail cutter was the lowest paid job. You didn't need any brains to do that. Just cut brush. He'd jus use an axe for that, cause if he didn't, why he'd hafta have another man to help him on the crosscut saw. If he come to a tree that didn't make logs, if it was too burly or something, he'd cut a trail around it. But small saplins and stuff like that he'd cut the hell out a the road, so's the team could get through. "See you always had a team of horses. Oh you could use a single horse, but your logs'd hafta be of a small run then. One horse won't do much to a big hardwood log. Usually you had a team of horses, heavy-set work horses. The majority of horses were Clydes or Perchons. A small horse in a lumber camp generally'd be no

Sharpening the saws

if the boss went and checked up on him, it'd be too bad for that chopper. If he put in for a big count and the logs wasn't laying there on the ground, you'd all be goin out the next morning. "When you were on cuttin, ya started around daylight and ya went till about eleven-thirty or noon, which was lunch time. You'd either go back to the camp to eat, or if you were too far away, why you took a box lunch and a tea pail and made your tea right out there in the bush. When we were lumbering over on the hill north of Cross Lake, I have seen them come out there with a little one-horse and a box, like a stone boat, with hot tea, pot of hot beans, bread n butter, sugar, canned milk, and stuff like that. We'd make a fire and eat around the fire, gang of us. The man that brought it out, he'd feed his horses there and as a rule he'd eat with us. Then he'd take all the tin dishes and stuff back with him after lunch. Choreboy, you know. Then we had to work again all afternoon. Goddamn right. They wouldn't let you go in as a holiday, you 102

the ground was a little bit sidlin, which you had no trouble in this country to find. They'd take two big skids, maple logs anywhere up to thirty feet long, and place em at right angles to the draw road on the uphill side. The back end of these skids, which is the end you're gonna put your logs on from, would be right on the ground but uphill slightly on the side grade, so's you wouldn't hafta roll your logs uphill. That'd be in your favour, see. The logs'd roll themselves cause it'd be downhill. Them big hardwood pills, they're hard to wrastle, you know. You wouldn't wanna be rollin them uphill. Now underneath the front ends of your skids, closest to your sleigh road, you'd put another maple log lengthways along your road to raise em up a bit, so's they wouldn't be too much downhill, and to make it easier for loading the sleighs later. That was your headblock. If you had real long skids, you'd put one in the centre too. Keep em from saggin when you had your pile on. At the front end of each of your long skids on the top side, roughly over your headblock, you'd cut a notch, and across these notches you'd put a maple pole, say about three inches thick and six, seven feet long and that was your buntin block. It was a kind of stoppin block to stop your logs from rollin right on off the end of your rollway as you were puttin them on the skids. The two cant-hook men'd jus stay there at the upper end of the rollway waitin for the logs to come and then pile em up. "The first logs, which would be your bottom logs, well the cant-hook men'd just roll em onto the skids and right down tight up against the

The railway ready to be broken down

good. Not made for the hardship, you know. But your teamster would get up to his log, fasten the skiddin chain on it, and start skiddin it out to the rollway. For fastening, you could use a grab hook, but if your timber was a good size, it'd be too heavy to lift up to get your chain around the end, so generally we used tongs sink em right into the log. Then put the other end of your chain into the grab hook which is screwed into the D on your doubletree behind your team and haul er away. Early in the fall, they'd do their skiddin right on bare ground, but later in the year they'd hafta drag through the snow. "The teamster and his gang would make these rollways or skidways for to put the logs on and keep em in one spot out of the way until the sleigh haul began. That not only saves room, but it saves a lot of snow shovellin in the winter months. Most of these rollways was put in where 103

buntin block. You'd put on five, six logs there and then start deckin. Your cant-hook men would have short deckin skids, six, seven feet long and at one end of each of them there would be like a dog with three little teeth that you drove into the closest bottom log with the back of your axe, and the other end, which had a D on it for fastening to your sleigh when you were loadin later on, it would just lie on the ground. The team of horses skids the next log along your horse trail to the upper end of your rollway, but goin back, why that same team'd deck the log, d'ya see get it out a the road for the next team, so's they could get the next log right beside the rollway again. So the teamster had work to do both ways. When he come in with a log, one of your canthook men would grab the pup at the end of your deckin line and drive the gibby tongue into the log as close to the centre as possible with the side of his cant-hook stock. See your pup had a bit of a half-moon shape, similar to a cant-hook bill, but smaller, which the correct name is a gibby tongue. And the teamster, as he came in with his log, he'd have to grab the other end of the deckin line and put it into the grab hook on his doubletree. Then as he was leavin, he could pull the log up onto the rollway. See your deckin line, which was a steel chain maybe forty, fifty feet long, ran through your deckin-line block which was chained to a tree somewhere behind your rollway, high up as you could reach. You could use a single block or a double block, depending on the size of your logs. Double block'd give you more power if you were deckin big logs. As your team started back along the horse trail, the log'd raise up along your deckin skids and then bump right over the other logs on the rollway, till the two cant-hook men had it right where they wanted it. Then the log'd drop down and the gibby tongue would drop out. You had to watch out, cause sometimes the pup would fly when the log dropped. Then one of the canthook men would go and get the damn pup and pull it back to the end of the rollway ready for drivin into the next log that would be drew to your skidway. Your teamster would unhook his end of it and go back into the bush after another log. "Now scalin - measuring the footage in your logs - that's another job has to be done after ya have a number of rollways stacked up. If it was the Company's own logs, lots a times they wouldn't bother scalin em in the bush or at the dump, but if they had jobbers in there cuttin for

them by the thousand, those logs'd be scaled right in the damn bush on the rollways before there was ever a log drew. See the jobber'd be hired by the Company to cut logs and skid them so much a thousand. He'd have his own teams and his own men and he had his own board to look after. Company's got nothing to do with it. There's generally two men does the scalin. One man'll be with the book at this end, measurin the size of the log and markin it down, and the man at the other end, he'll be checkin things over at that end and then stampin the log with his stampin hammer. AW was stamped on to every log that belonged to Alf Willows. Your scalin was always done from the top end of your log. They'd measure the top end and the length. That's why they'd have two men. See the top end could be at either side of the skidway. Saved walkin around them big rollways all the time and losing track of what you were doing. Two men'll do it faster n one. It don't take two men very long to scale a skidway of logs. "After the heavy snow come and the sleigh haul began, then you had to start breakin down your rollways and deckin the logs onto your sleigh bunks. The sleighs'd be all loaded and the teamsters on their way before daybreak. You'd hear those old sleigh runners squeakin on frosty mornings for a couple of miles. If you were a cant-hook man or a top loader on the sleighs or a teamster, well then you had to get up goddamn early. You were shoved out a lot earlier than if you were makin logs. I know, cause I done that enough times myself. You'd have your breakfast and light yourself a long-handled coal oil torch, which was similar to a lantern, except that it held more oil and it was just open, no glass around it. Sometimes a blast of wind'd knock the flame to one side, but they never blew out. Soon as the wind quit, they'd come right back again. They had about a one-inch round wick stuck out a them and they'd throw quite a light, ya know. Stink like the devil, black smoke, but it was the only light you had out there at four o'clock in the morning, cept for the old stars which would be shinin just as bright as they would be at night. "The teamsters'd be hitchin up to go get the first load of logs - you'd hear the horses snortin and see the steam comin out their nostrils - and the cant-hook men and loaders could get a ride out with them. You'd be out at the rollway at four-thirty with the trees snappin and a torch stuck at each side of the skidway 104

and one across from where your sleigh stood, so's you could see what 'n hell you were doin. Many a time I've warmed my hand from those ol torches. Course, before you got there, the snow shovellers would have been there and your skidway of logs'd be all cleaned off. "Soon as the haulin gang got there, the cant-hook men'd start breakin down the skidways. The teamster would bring his front sleigh bunk - generally double bunks, ya know - right up alongside the downhill end of your rollway - sleighs'd only be about two foot high - and the cant-hook men would put the two short deckin skids in place, same skids as you used for makin your rollways earlier. One end of each skid had a little D hasp on it that would fasten into a little dog on the side of your sleigh bunk and the other end of the skid with the three metal spurs was stuck into the head piece at the front of your long skids. Then the two deckin skids couldn't move on ya, see. If you didn't have that, one of your skids might kick back and the end of your log'd come down and hit the ground, cause when you start breakin your rollway, those first top logs'll come down flyin. Deckin logs in the wintertime is an experienced man's job. It's no greenhorn's job, cause when them logs come crashin down, you could easy get hurt if you didn't know what to expect. When I was workin for Willows up at Bill's Lake, on frosty mornings I could hear them buggers over at Lakings's breakin down skidways. On a cam morning when it's cold, you can hear sound for quite a ways. They'd have their rollways decked way up in the air and you could hear the racket miles away when them logs hit the skids. We always knew what they were doin. "Your first logs, you just roll right onto the sleigh bunk. Some sleighs had spurs couple a inches high to keep the outside logs from rollin off and other sleighs, you chained them in place. Once your first layer was on your bunk, then you had to start deckin. Get the pup that's on the end of your deckin line and hammer it into the log and the teamster'd hook up the other end and up she'd go. Load both bunks six, seven logs high. Your load was peaked so's the top logs wouldn't fall off, and then you put a couple a long chains around the load and tightened it up whistlin tight with a bear trap what was used specially for that purpose. If you didn't have a bear trap, well then you had to use binders. You'd put your front chain on first and leave a little slack in the chain. Then you'd cut your105

self a saplin, say three, four inches, and put the butt end of the saplin in through your chain and then twist the saplin around in a circle and that would make your front chain tighter 'n billy be damned. Then take your back chain and fasten it to the free end of your binder with a cat's paw, which is a kind of knot that when you fasten her down, she won't slip at all, won't work loose. Now tighten your back chain just as tight as you can get er by hand and fasten it to your sleigh bunk. Your saplin then will have quite a bend in it, d'ya see. Keep the chain tight, so's it can't work loose. "Soon as your load was chained, your teamsters would get the hell goin and haul the logs down to the dump at the head of Grace Lake or, if it was hardwood logs, they'd haul em right down to the yard in town. You started early in

the brush out of the road with axes and crosscut saws. On rough ground, sometimes you'd hafta use your grub hoe and sometimes you'd hafta put in long stringers and then put short skids across about three feet apart - fairly heavy skids that the sleigh runners wouldn't break. Then in the winter, that would all be packed in with snow. "The head boss on the road was called the beaver, buck beaver. He had to pick out all the roads in the fall and blaze them. Then come back and start cuttin them out. The boss of the camp'd give him as many men as he needed to get all the roads done in time. My brother Les, he was buck beaver for Alf Willows. Ed Tallman give him a job cuttin roads and it wasn't too long before he got himself worked into buck beaver. He was awful good man in the woods and a bugger to work. He was the best man on the job and hell, he was only a kid - I'd say sixteen, seventeen, not older anyway. Ed Tallman give him eight, nine men and he seen that they all worked too. If some bastard didn't work, he had the power to send him back to camp. I think the last winter that I worked in there, Les was get-

Fastening the load on the sleigh bunk

the morning but often you'd be done by ten o'clock at the outside and be back in camp by ten-thirty - get to sit around until lunch, except Ed Tallman would come in and ask me to go out and give him a hand to fix a sleigh bunk or something like that. I'd go. The work didn't kill me. Short days, you know. You'd be finished for the day maybe around three-thirty. See hauling logs was a hurry up job, not like makin logs. The teamsters had to get their two trips in. "The key to any sleigh haul, though, is your roads. In the fall of the year there's no sleigh haul goin on, because you can't start haulin sleighs until you get a couple a feet of snow on the ground to fill up all the holes and cover the damn stones so your sleigh runners don't hit em. And that's when you make your draw roads, see. Startin early in the fall you'd have a gang of men makin the roads for the sleighs - cuttin the trees down close to the ground and cuttin 106

each side, right over top of the sleigh runner, there'd be a plug right at the bottom. When you pulled these damn plugs, then the water would just fly back of the sleighs - spray a couple of feet wide all over the runner tracks. Then it would freeze up and you'd have a dandy road. "Course if you flood your roads, you're gonna need men to take care of the hills. Hafta check your sleighs so's they don't break away on ya and kill your horses. That work was done by your chickadees and your sandpipers. Hay in the grades - that was chickadee work. See the hay hills would be what you'd call jus grades. They wouldn't put hay on a real bad hill in case it would clog up in front of the runners and let your sleigh get goin too fast. But if your hill's not a bad one, the quickest and easiest thing is to keep it clean with a shovel, keep the snow right down to the ground, and then put marsh hay on it. Put the hay on first thing in the morning when it's still dark, before the teams get out, and take it off at night in case it snowed. Snow on top of your hay wouldn't be no good, d'ya see. You'd hafta take all the hay off and shake all the snow out a it, then clean the snow off the hill and put the hay on all over again. "I used to cut the marsh hay for Willows in the summertime. Used to cut Bick's Marsh and Colbourne's Marsh and stack it. Then when we needed hay in the wintertime, we'd take a team of horses and a set of sleighs, go down the frozen marsh, and get it. We'd put so much off for the chickadee at each hill all along the draw roads, right from where the logs was in the bush down to ol Wheeler's Hill before the head of Grace Lake. "Now if your hills was bad, well you wouldn't take a chance with hay. The bad hills had to be sanded. Dig out a big sandhole on the side of your bank somewhere. Dig it down deep and start a big hardwood fire in your sandhole at night. Crisscross your wood and let the smoke come up through and then after your fire gets nicely goin, take your sand and put it all over the top of your fire, d'ya see. But the top row of sticks, make sure that they're tight together, that the ,sand don't drop down through, put out your fire. The next morning the sandpiper'd go back and he'd have nice red coals all in amongst his hot sand, see, and he'd crack them onto the frozen runner tracks. They might melt through a bit the first few times, but after you get a few trips over your hill with the sand on it, why your dirt freezes in the tracks and soon they're

ting forty-two dollars a month. That was top Pay"Come the snow, there'd be a different gang there steady on the roads. You had a lake to cross, they'd hafta drag it with rollers. Put a tongue onto a roller and hook it up to a team of horses, and if the lake was slushy, that'd put the snow right down in the damn slush. Soon as the weather turned cold, then you'd get maybe a foot or a foot and a half more ice on top of what was already there. Then you had a good ice road. And if the lake did slush up again, nine times out a ten the water wouldn't come up to your ice road, see. And if your lake ice wasn't quite thick enough for heavy loads, that'd make it so much stronger. Give you two, three weeks longer on the sleigh haul in March. Of course years ago, why the lakes made ice faster than they do now. The lakes these past few winters - I wouldn't recommend them to haul logs with horses in case you drownded them. We don't get near the snow or the ice that we did when Alf Willows was up here. I've seen me go up Grace Lake and into the camp right after Christmas with a load of cadge - be the first one across the ice, but I never drownded a horse yet. 'They drownded a team one winter in Bill's Lake. That was the Wilberforce Lumber Company. Old Dave English was runnin the camp. Hit a faulty place and the sleigh went down, logs and all. Horses too. Went right down. Bubbles comin up and the water churnin. They didn't last long in that cold water. They got one horse up but they never did get the other one out. I believe they got the harness but I forget whether they got the sleighs or not. I know there was one horse left that sunk. That horse was floating around next summer in the lake. Stunk like a polecat, that old carcass. "If it was cold nights, the draw roads all had to be tanked too, flooded, you know. Oh yes, there was work goin on at night, too. It wasn't all sunshine. You couldn't do that job in the daytime, because it'd be holdin up the teams, see. Not only that, but the weather was colder at night - freeze up better. There's tricks in all trades, see. You'd have a great big tank eight feet acrost and about five feet high, maybe sixteen feet long - all made out a two-inch plank and it was bolted lengthways onto your sleigh. Each corner would have a rod that'd go right down through it - keep the tank whistlin tight. The water couldn't get out of it. At the back, on 107

Tanking the roads

built up hard, just like stone. Then you keep addin hot sand coals every morning if it needs it and my God, you don't need no loggin chains or anything like that. The hot coals n sand'll check your sleighs. Goddamn right they will. Your teamsters'll have to stop and let their shoein cool off right on the hill if she's sanded heavy.

They get halfways down the sand hill and their runners'll be red hot and the sleighs'll just jump, jump, jump, jump - just like that. You could only go about ten or twelve feet and you'd have to stop again, give your runners maybe ten, fifteen minutes to cool down. And make damn sure you stop every time you feel your sleigh start to quiver and jump. You don't, you're askin for trouble. If you were a greenhorn wasn't used to haulin logs down sand hills, you tried to go on, well your logs would work ahead from all the jarrin up onto the tongue of your sleigh, and first thing ya know, damn logs'll be right in amongst the horses - hurt em, see. Soon as your sleigh starts jumpin, stop and sit. That's the proper thing to do. "There was a team of horses killed over on the Bull's Run before my time. I remember my dad talkin about it. It snowed the night before and they didn't have enough hot sand and coals on the hill. The teamster started up on the top there and the load broke and the team couldn't hold it back. The teamster tried t' steer them

Walter Clark's team beginning the descent of the sandhill; note the fire hole behind the sandpiper

108

into the bank but they were goin too fast. Sleigh run right over both horses and drug em all the way down the damn hill. Piled up at the bottom, there. There was nothin left of the horses but a bit of hamburger and some red snow. "But you had to keep the whole road in good shape, not just the hills. Usually had two, three old fellas workin on it, patchin it up - chickadeein, you know. They'd walk along the draw road and if they'd notice a place where the sleigh runners were startin to cut off — on a corner or on a bit of a side grade - well they'd put skids in there so the sleighs wouldn't cut off no more. They'd build er up with hardwood skids - the old fellas, they never used poplar even when it was close by. They claimed that was what your Saviour was nailed on - a poplar cross. Whether there was anything to it or not, I don't know; but a lot a old chaps, that was their belief and they'd walk half a mile to get a birch or a maple. Wouldn't cut a poplar down. Bad luck. I know Tuck Matton in west of Otter Lake there - boys, you cut a poplar and put it on for a skid, he didn't like it. He'd tell ya once about it, but he wouldn't tell ya twice. Didn't want no damn poplar on his skid roads. Myself, if I had to build a log cabin tomorrow, there wouldn't be a stick of poplar go into it. I wouldn't take a chance. Damn thing might burn down. "Anyways, oncst your sleigh haul was over and your timber was all dumped on the ice at the head of Grace Lake, why, your work wasn't over. Oh no. You still had to get it to town and that meant drivin it down the lake. At Willows's, we never drove rivers too much, cept the Grace River, but we drove Grace Lake every spring. They always kept a few of us up at the camp in the spring of the year. Last thing we'd do in the later part of March every year was boom the timber out on the ice. Use spruce mostly for your boom timber, cause it's tough and balsam don't float too good. Some balsam gets mighty, mighty, heavy. Boom timbers'd be about thirty, thirty-two feet long; had to lug em around with horses. You probably seen old boom timbers with holes in the ends for the chains floatin in around the shores and outlets a different lakes. You'd chain em all together, so's your logs couldn't go all over the lake and you'd tie the boom to a tree or a big pine stump, so's it couldn't get away on ya till you were ready for it, see. "When the ice went out, we'd drive the boom from the head of Grace Lake down to Wilberforce. We had nothing to pull it with, so you had

to rely on the wind. When the wind is in your favour - fine and dandy. You'd work like hell. But when the wind wasn't in your advantage, you had to snub your boom to the shore somewhere, and then you got a rest. We always kept in fairly close to the shore, ya know. We had a boat there - oars, not a tugboat; that come later. It was made out a two-inch spruce and pine and we could jump in and out amongst the logs and it wouldn't cripple the boat any. We just tried to keep the boom logs out in the lake and floatin towards the river. And when we come to the river, we'd cut the boom there and start feedin logs into the river. "All in all, most a the work in the camps was done in the fall of the year, the winter, and the early spring. After that, generally, you'd do something else for the spring and summer farmin or guidin or something. But sometimes they'd keep the camp goin in the summer cuttin pulp wood by the cord. One summer, I run the camp for Alf Willows and I had a gang of Czechoslovakis in there from the first of July right until freeze-up. They'd come over to this country lookin for work, I guess, and they found it. We were cuttin pulpwood. Some of it would be pretty good size - maybe half the size of a sap kettle - but the majority of it would be stovepipe size or a little bigger. Anything that was great big spruce and handy to the road, they'd leave it there standin, cause you could get that in the wintertime with your team. We'd get one swamp cleaned up and then move over into another one. I had to sharpen all their crosscut saws for them, but God they piled their wood neat! You could stand at one end of a three-cord pile and you'd swear that they wjre goin by a chalk line. Oh God yeah, every damn stick in line. They knew how to pile pulpwood too. Put all the big sticks at the bottom and your small ones at the top. Don't put any small ones in the holes between your big ones. Get more cords that way, see. Paid by the cord. Another summer there was a bunch from Wilberforce there haulin hemlock on the west side of Flour Barrl Lake. They'd fell the trees and put them into logs, and then they'd rim the tan bark in four-foot lengths, take it off the hemlock logs, and pile it up in cord lengths, which would then be drew down to Wilberforce and loaded in boxcars. They used it for tanning hides and smoking meat, hams. Quite a price I heard they were getting for that ol hemlock bark, and 109

then the wood went into lumber and square timbers. "So you see there was quite a few different jobs goin on at different times of the year in your lumber camps. You didn't just go upset a tree and wait for the money to roll in. Oh Christ no. You had to have plenty a men and men that knew what the hell they were doin. You needed men to cut your roads, men to cut the trees down and make logs, men to skid em and deck em, trail cutters, snow shovellers, teamsters, men to plough the roads and tank them, chickadees and sandpipers, and then ya had to have a cook and a choreboy, someone to haul your cadge, a blacksmith, a saw filer... . There was a lot a hard work attached to it in those days. Damn hard work. You didn't wanna work, then the camps was no place for you. They don't know what work is nowadays. And you think I'm an old man bullshittin ya, you go out with one a your friends and pull an ol crosscut saw for nine hours for about six days in a row and then come on back. We'll talk about it then. Oh hell, once them chainsaws came in, why a man could do ten times the work he could pullin the old crosscut saw. And in less than half the time. Them saws came too late for us fellas. There were no chainsaws in my day. Back in those days, it was all horse work, sleighs n horses. It's just these last few years the damn trucks has been used to draw your logs. In my day, it was hardship on horses and men. Nothing but lots a hard work. I'm not sayin that was good or bad, but that's the way it was."

110

Eight

Life on the Farm and Other Jobs The village of Wilberforce as we know it today is almost entirely situated on land that made up Len's father's farm. When one drives through the village past the planing mill, the gas station, the Memorial Centre, the firehall, the houses and stores, the library, the old Red Cross Outpost, the site of the old Orange Hall, the school, and over to the new shopping complex, it is hard to believe that most of the area was under grain in this century and that Len ploughed it all for many years with a singlefurrow walking plough. Over several decades John Holmes sold off small parcels of land as the town began to grow up around Shea's store and the sawmill. Nevertheless, John Holmes kept the majority of his acreage for farming, a pursuit that he followed right up until the last few years before his death at the age of seventynine. Len's father farmed mainly to keep his family in food, and his family was not small. When he moved to Wilberforce in 1904, he had three children - Mildred, Ruby, and Len - and over the next ten years four more arrived: Minie, John Daisy, and Les. "Seven of a family," says Len, "and my mother and dad is nine. That's a full table. No wonder the old man was poor." Poor is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is no question that John Holmes had to work hard all his life. He had a large garden and grew enough vegetables to feed the family and to sell some in the summer months. Len remembers that his father used to sell hundred-pound bags of potatoes during the First World War for five dollars a bag. John also grew all his own grain. "He'd grain a field for a few years and then put it into pasture. See if you have a pasture some place that you don't work, your land's getting Ill

built up all the time. A lot of farmers around here, they've had to pasture places that was too rough to plough, too hilly and stony, but they're losing all that fertilizer that makes the grain grow. My father grew wheat for bread and porridge, oats and barley for the horses and pigs, and buckwheat for the hens. Buckwheat makes good hen food, strong." Besides growing his own vegetables and grain, John Holmes raised cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens, and kept bees. "Had quite a long sheep pen behind the horse stable," says Len. "We used to cut all the wool with hand clippers and wash it and pull it all apart and then my mother would card it and we'd sell it by the bag to the cattle buyers that come through on the train." Being an inveterate honey eater, Len remembers the bees well. "We made our own hives out of boards and always had honey in the comb. My parents used to have a lot of sap buckets and we'd fill up all these buckets with honey in the comb and eat it all winter. I still have some wax out in my shed yet." Unfortunately, to feed nine mouths, John Holmes had to do more than just farm. For a few years he had a full-time winter job as a millwright for the Harper Lumber Company up at Benoir's Lake. After the harvest he would leave Len to do the ploughing and go up and stay at the mill six days a week, coming home to his family only Saturday night and Sunday. Len used to go up and get him after work on Saturday, and it was during one of these trips that the wolves had so terrified him and his horse going across the Long Crossway. Most of John's other supplementary jobs allowed him to remain at home with his family. He was the agent for CIL explosives in the area.

John and Minah Holmes and family; that's Len wearing the boater

"First were the tread-powers. Your dog walks on this tread or track made of three-inch cleats or slats separated by small gaps which ran like a belt around small steel wheels. On one side was a big wheel that you put your belt on and then attached to the small wheel of your cylinder, and on the other side was a wooden lever or brake which you could gauge for power. If you wanted more speed, you could raise the brake up a little bit away from the wheel and your dog would have to go faster on the tread - give you more speed on your washing machine or butter churn. Oh hell, you could run anything that had a wheel on it, grind axes - anything like that. The dog was tied to the front of it and you had your gate closed there, so he had to walk. But they never seemed to mind it too much. It gave your hounds a lot of good exercise. I remember one time this fellow from Haliburton come over to see my dad and the old man was doing his washing that day. This fellow couldn't get over seeing a dog walking on this damn tread-power. He figured that was the best thing

The dynamite and other explosives were shipped by rail only as far as Kinmount, because the I.E. & o. line between Kinmount and Wilberforce was deemed too rough to risk shipping explosives on it. This meant that John had to go down to Kinmount with his team and Democrat, pick up the explosives, and bring them home. It's a wonder he ever made it. I asked Len what the road was like and he replied: "At that time the road wasn't like it is today. Hell no, she was rougher than a boar's arse." John was also the agent for the Matthew Moodie Company that made such things as threshing machines, sawing machines, separators, dog-powers, and horse-powers - a somewhat less dangerous position than being the agent for an explosives firm. Len remembers his father using the dog-powers and horse-powers for years. 112

But the man in the centre spots him laggin, he gives him a tap with the whip - spruce up in there. You had a lot more power with the old sweep-power, but it was hard on the horses. "Thrashin was something you wanted power for. First we used to thrash with tread-powers and then sweep-powers and then steam engines. Steam engine would be about, I'd say fifty feet from the cylinder of your thrashin mill. There was a small pulley on your separator and a big pulley on your steam engine and a great big long drive belt on them. That gave you the speed and the power too. It worked good. Run on wood — had a man feedin it all the time, watchin it. "Oh, thrashin, it was quite a job, dirty job, ya know. There'd be eight or ten men come over to help ya for a day, maybe two days, depending on how much grain you had. Everybody had to be fed and the womenfolk had to put up good meals. Took a lot of food to fill those bastards. My mother was always glad to see the end of the damn thrashers." Len often talks about how hard his mother had to work, especially when his father was away. "She looked after the outside work as well as the inside. She fed and clothed the family and she had to get up in the morning early, by Jesus, and milk nine cows before breakfast. When we got old enough, us kids would help too. We'd help her bring the milk and separate it - had a Delaval separator - and then put the cream in cans and send it to the creamery. She'd get

The ol dog-power

in the world for exercising hounds before huntin season and he wanted to buy one right on the spot. I had that dog-power for years. I either give it away or sold it to old Stringer Archie down here just to get it the hell out of the road in the woodshed. "Your first horse-powers were pretty much the same principle but they were way bigger. You had a big, big flywheel and you used a team of horses - run the separator or thrashing mill, see. Then they come out with the sweep-power which give you a lot more power for thrashing or cuttin logs. See you could use six, maybe even eight horses in a circle single file. In the middle you had a big box with all the gears and you had six or eight hardwood poles about two feet off the ground coming out from this box. Each horse had his ass-end hitched to a singletree, which was attached to one of these poles, and he was tied by the head to the pole that the horse in front of him was drawin. The steel driveshaft run right along the ground out from the centre to your coupling but the horses soon got used to stepping over it. You had a man sitting in the middle on top of the gearbox with a bull whip tryin to keep every horse doing their bit. A horse will lag, you see, he gets a chance. 113

on Sunday nights and this day my mother had been out pickin raspberries and she made a great big raspberry pie in a big bread pan almost two feet long. Big fat pie, good n deep, lots of raspberries, and ol Clark went right at it. My mother, she could really cook pies."

The ol sweep-power set up for thrashin

a cheque back around the end of every week and that helped a whole lot too. That's where you got your living from. The milk went to the pigs and calves and we kept a bit for our own use too. My mother used to churn her own butter and we'd have buttermilk to drink. She had to feed the chickens two, three times a day, and she sold eggs too. I can't remember what she sold them for but it wasn't very much. Later, when I was workin on the Clement lot, I used to pay ten cents a dozen in the store. Then the calves had to be fed and the pigs and sheep and in the summer she had the garden and the berries to pick." Minah Holmes died at home at fifty-three. The specific cause, according to Len, was "inward goitre", but one can't help but suspect that the rigours of farm life and raising seven children must have undermined her health. In those days farmers' wives often died young. Cooking for nine people was simply a routine chore to Len's mother, but she was particularly good at it. One of her specialties was making pies. She was as good at making them as Len is at eating them. Len remembers one pie in particular. "My oldest sister Mildred, she was going with ol Clark Graham, Belle Shay's brother. He used to stay for supper sometimes

Len's mother bought very little food save sugar and tea. "All our flour was made up in Bancroft. There was a flour mill up there and my dad used to ship his wheat up by train and then they'd ship it back to him all milled. Have our own flour all year that way. My mother always made her own bread, ya know. And then we'd have our porridge too made out of the wheat. It was strong - a little on the coarse side - but any bowl of it I ever et was all right. Stick right with ya. Good stuff to work on." Len also remembers his mother making all her own pickles and preserves. "She had all kinds of old crocks. She used to make chowder - that's green tomatoes and onions and stuff like that. It was nice with potatoes and meat. Then she put down all kinds of pickles, cucumbers, and onions and she put down preserves every summer - apples, blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries - and all that stuff was kept down in the stone cellar on shelves. Nothing ever froze in there. Many a quarter of venison hung down 114

My mother sent them out this dandelion wine, cold, right out of the cellar, and she didn't know how thirsty they were and they got into this wine and I guess they really enjoyed it until they had too much and then they had a picnic out there on the stumps. My mother knew how to make it. It put them up in the riggin pretty quick anyway." Like many country women, Minah Holmes knew quite a few home remedies and treatments. In the absence of doctors and hospitals, you had to know something about medicine. She made her own cough syrup and would render the oil out of the fat of a goose and keep the grease for rubbing on the children's necks and chests when they got colds in the winter. "Soon as we got colds, on went the goose oil and she'd tie a flannel cloth around your neck to keep it warm and rub your chest all over with it. If you were very bad, you had a flannel on your back and on your front." Besides her home remedies, Len's mother used Dr. Thomas' Eclectric ("Electric") Oil, Zam-Buk's Salve, and various liniments for aches and pains. In spite of all her efforts, she still lost two children to illnesses. Her second daughter, Ruby, died at eighteen of appendicitis and her third oldest girl, Minie, died of "rheumatism" at eleven. Len remembers the feeling of helplessness when Minie died. "Her hands all withered up to nothing and her legs too, all skin and bone. She was no weight at all,

there and kept for days and days. She kept all her vegetables down there too. The cabbage and turnips was hung up by the roots with the heads down. The onions all hung there in bunches after they'd been dried in the sun, you know. She kept beets and cahrrots in boxes of earth and pumpkins and squash on shelves. There used to be citerns all along on top of the stone foundation and three big bins of potatoes the full length of the cellar - two to use or sell, and the third had potatoes of a small run for seed or for pig feed with ground-up oats. She kept her eggs in a big wooden box of unmilled oats and salt. Dozens of eggs went in that for the winter purpose cause the hens would slow up in the winter months and wouldn't start to lay again till the spring of the year. Those eggs'd last all winter, just like fresh eggs, so you never had to buy any in the store." Not only did Len's mother grow and preserve practically all her food, but she made wine too - dandelion wine and raspberry bitters. According to Len, her dandelion wine packed quite a punch. "My old man wasn't no drinker. He'd take a drink of dandelion wine or hard stuff, but I can't remember him ever buying anything. He smoked steady, smoked a pipe as long as I can remember, but I only seen him upset by liquor once. He and ol Geordie Stephenson, they were pulling stumps out where the old horse stable used to sit and it was a damn hot day. 115

losing flesh day after day. They couldn't do anything for her." Although there were no doctors or nurses closer than the town of Haliburton, there was a midwife in the area when Len was young. "There was an old nurse, Mrs Strudwick was her name, lived on the beech ridge up here about a mile past the turn going into Maple Lake. There was an old road going down to Clear Lake just past the old Hillis place where Art Mumford used to live, and she lived right there on that corner. A lot of women from around here when they were going to give birth, why they'd go up in the horse n buggy and pick her up. She knew quite a bit. She went all over this country back here deliverin babies. I guess she was in on several births in our family, Minie, John, maybe Daisy. My mother had her children right at home, ya know. I was never aroun though. I guess I was shipped outside to play or something.

I can offer no opinion, but I think I'd try it out on a horse first. Poor diet was never a cause of illness in the Holmes family. Even before Len began to hunt, the family was never short of meat and they ate it at every meal. They raised geese and chickens for food, and Len's father always kept five or six pigs for slaughter. Although they would occasionally slaughter a yearling calf or a sheep, the mainstay was pork. The pigs were fattened up in the fall with small potatoes and chop. Some of this would be wheat chop left over from the wheat that was sent to the flour mill in Bancroft and some of it would be coarse oat chop. Len's father would send his oats down to H.S. Mulloy's water-powered mill on the Burnt River in South Wilberforce to be crushed. Mulloy had a big water wheel and it could be hooked up to both his sawmill and his grist mill. The grist mill was only a small one but it was ideal for grinding oats for pigs and horses. "Coarse or fine. Anyway you wanted it," says Len. Len and his father, of course, did their own slaughtering and butchering. I asked Len how it used to be done and he gave me all the grisly details. "Some people hits them on the head with an axe, but there's a lot of people that don't believe in that. They just grab ahold a them by the right front foot and upset the buggers and ram a good sharp knife into them. Squeal? Oh hell yes, squeal to beat hell. Then let em go. They won't stand up too long; just stagger around a bit and first thing you know, down they drop. If they don't get up no more, they're dead. When you're feeding pigs, scratch their back for them, get em used to it. Same thing when you're in there puttin in fresh bedding. They soon get tame and they're not scared of you. That makes it better when you go to kill them. They're not expecting the likes of that and they figure you're just gonna play with them, see. A farmer, he goes through quite a lot." Len's father always had plenty of animals to eat and sell because he bred all his own livestock - pigs, sheep, cattle, and horses. "Had our own bulls with rings in their goddamn nose and we always kept a ram for the breedin purpose. In the wintertime my dad'd hafta put an apron on the ram, cause he didn't want the lambs to come too early before the snow went off. That'd keep him from gettin at the yoes, see. For the mares, there used to be a fellow come around with a stallion tied behind a cart every couple of weeks in the summer. There'd be notices up

"With no doctor around, you often had to do your own doctorin," says Len. "I mind one time here Les got sick after my mother died. He was pretty bad and I couldn't think what to give him, cept Medical Wonder. I always kept it in the horse stable long with 'Gyptian Liniment, ya know. The horses would get colic or they'd get a bellyache or something, I'd give them a dose of this stuff on their tongue and, by God, it'd straighten them up. So I give some to Les this night. It said right on the bottle, Tor Man or Beast.' I thought, 'Well, hell, I'll take a chance on it, cause it's always good for horses.' So I give him a dose of a few drops - it said right on the bottle so many drops for a human person - I give him whatever it called for and, by God, inside of half an hour he was feeling better! Mildred, she thought I was gonna kill him but it worked. Medical Wonder - it was good for a lot of things." Shortly after hearing this story from Len, I came across a bottle of "Dr. Bell's Veterinary Medical Wonder: The Cattleman's Standby for Cattle, Swine and Other Farm Animals". There was nothing on the label to indicate that it was suitable for human consumption, but perhaps this was a label of more recent vintage. In any case Les certainly survived and is alive and well today. In the old lumber camp dump at Rock Lake I also came across an old bottle of Douglas' Egyptian Liniment. Len claims that this too was "for man or beast". Since the label was long since gone from the little brown bottle I found, 116

what day he was comin through and he'd breed everybody's mares. Great big Clyde or Perchon stallion. Firing pin on him two feet long. Never travelled too many miles in a day, ya know, and the stallion had to be well fed to stand up to that every day. Breed him to quite a few mares in a day, long as they didn't come too close together. The man that ownded the stallion, he was at no risk. If the stallion damaged the mare, cut er with his shoes or anything like that, the man that ownded the stallion didn't have to come good for it. That was right on the bill. The mares' owners was responsible. The fee at that time was ten dollars; twelve dollars to guarantee a mare. You paid twelve dollars, well the last run he'd make, why you'd bring your mare to the stallion and she wouldn't take the stallion, you were pretty sure she was in foal. If she did take the stallion, well then you didn't have to pay again." The family homestead had five bedrooms upstairs and a large hall at the top of the stairs where the boys would sleep if guests came to stay. Downstairs, in addition to the halls, there was a large kitchen with a pantry off it leading down to the cellar, a combined dining room and living room where the children played, and a large but seldom-used parlour the width of the house. As in most farmhouses, the kitchen was the centre of daily life. "I think the parlour was only practically used just the odd time through the winter months when company came. That meant another stove to keep going on top of the big cook stove in the kitchen and the box stove in the living room. That meant a lot of wood to be cut, see, to keep three stoves going. So the parlour stove wasn't lit too often." Meals were eaten in the kitchen except on festive occasions and when company came: then everyone ate in the dining room. The family even washed in the kitchen as a rule. There were, to be sure, washstands with big water pitchers and bowls, soap dishes, and looking glasses in every bedroom, but these were used mainly by guests. Since there was no inside toilet, the chamber pots in each bedroom did not have to await guests to be put to use. In Len's early days, home entertainment was largely self-made. Most families had a musical instrument of some sort, such as a violin, a mandolin, or a guitar. Len's family had an organ which his mother had received from her parents as a wedding gift, and his sister Ruby used to play the organ both at home and in the

Len and his father

The family homestead

church. No one in the area had a radio in those days, but Len remembers their old phonograph with particular fondness. "When the Edison phonograph come in, why you had a gold mine. They weren't too expensive and everybody could afford to buy one. They come into this back country with a tin horn on them, and every record, as it finished playing, you'd wind er up and put another one on. The records were kind 117

of a round cylinder or drum, not flat like later. Boys, at that time, we thought that was good entertainment. It was all there was. Oh, you had your newspapers and you could buy books if you wanted to, but for real home entertainment, you couldn't beat the old Edison phonograph." Len does not remember having much free time as a child. Monday through Friday he was either in school or helping his parents around the farm. "Generally I had to do chores when I come back from school - had to dive in and get them done before it got dark, so I never played much hockey or anything." Saturday was also a routine work day on the farm. One event he was allowed to attend on Saturdays, however, was the weekly hockey game. "On Saturdays the Wilberforce skating team would go to Bancroft or the Bancroft team would come down here. They'd come down by train around noon and have their lunch in Mrs White's boarding house and then the two teams'd go at it. They used to play on Dark Lake right in front of our house. The rink'd be all ready because they used to flood it and then use a scraper on it with an old crosscut saw blade on the bottom of it and two handles on it like a walkin plough. They'd attach a horse to it and someone would walk behind and scrape er right down to clear ice. Saved a lot of shovelling, you know. Oh Christ, they'd have banks of snow around it eight, ten feet high. Nice clean rink - boards all around it. All's ya had to watch out for was the horse shit. They had a gool at each end and those stakes was froze right into the ice, see. If I remember right, I think they even had lines on er like they do today. They used to have some whalin good hockey matches there when I was a young gaffer. Fight like hell, ya know. Ol Mandy Connaghan, he used to play - pretty good player too. And Bert Patterson. And old Irey Liscombe. Quite a lad to drink, Irey was. And there was ol Frank McCully too. Frank was in wherever the bottle was. They all got along good together. Play hockey and celebrate afterwards." Sunday was the big day of the week for Len because you didn't have to do anything except chores unless something had to be done urgently, like getting hay or grain in before it rained. Sunday morning Len's mother would take all her children to the Anglican Church and Sunday School. "It wasn't compulsory," says Len, "in one sense, but yet we generally went with

our mother. The old man never hardly went but my mother was quite a church goer. She used to go out to the Ladies' Aid and help to quilt, you know. Raise money for the church. Us kids, we generally went to Sunday School in the forenoon and there was lots a times we'd go to church with our mother at night. She was quite religious. We never said grace at the table - the old man wasn't much on that - but mother always had us say prayers in bed at night." The church that Len's family attended still the only church in North Wilberforce - was formerly the bunkhouse of the Spears and Lauder Lumber Company. "Upstairs, that was the bunkhouse where the men slept and down below was a storeroom where they kept grain for the horses and baled hay - everything like that. They used to hold Sunday School and church up overhead where the men had slept. Sometimes I'd go down early in the morning and start the fire - keep the place warm. That's where I done my Sunday School days. Then my dad moved the building to where it sits now using huge rollers and several teams of horses. They took out the ceiling and put church windows in it and fixed the place all up. It's been a church for a good many years now." Sunday afternoons were exciting times because the children could go out and play in the fields in the summer or skate and play hockey in the winter. Sunday afternoon was also a time for visiting. "You did a lot more visitin then than ya do now," says Len. "Sunday afternoon we'd take the horse and cutter and go over to another farm for a visit. And there was always someone or other droppin in at the house and my parents'd always want em to stay for a meal. See there was no telephones or televisions in those days. You wanted something to do or to catch up on the news, you went visitin." Every so often on a Sunday afternoon in the summer there would be a Sunday School picnic. They were usually held at the sand beach at the south end of Grace Lake right where Farquhar Creek comes into the lake. In late summer when the creek was low, the children could play in it and even walk right across it. "There was a little fireplace there where the women would make the tea and you sat down on an old pine log close by the fireplace and drunk tea and et sandwiches and cookies and stuff like that. There was a little table and bench just made out of rough lumber and all the food would be put on that. Usually had pretty good 118

A Sunday School picnic at the sand beach on Grace Lake; Len's mother, Minah, is fourth from the left and Len is standing at the back of the canoe.

food. It was a day of outin. There'd be games and races and swimmin and fishin for the older kids. No hymns or anything like that. They were pretty good that way. Later on, I used to take all the kids up there in my big boat with a motor. They used to like that." The one holiday that Len could remember well and was willing to talk about was Orangemen's Day, the twelfth of July. One year the Orangemen would have their parade in Wilberforce and other years it would be in Gooderham, Essonville, or Highland Grove. Len remembers the men, some twenty-five or thirty of them, parading along the main drag with their big orange sashes, and he also remembers the big white horse with King Billy on it. Best of all, however, he remembers the band and all the drums. "They had a whole bunch a little drums and one great big one that a man would just hammer hell out of it." In addition to the parade, there were games and various stands. "There was all kinds of games - swimming, canoe races, leg races. Two guys'd have their legs tied together and try to run that way, see. And there were sack races where the men'd get into these damn sacks and then try to jump. Then there was walkin the greasy pole out over the water at Dark Lake. Put a dollar out at the end of it and whoever in hell could get it, well, he was welcome to it. But you got out the far end of it where the dollar was and the old pole would start to spring up and down and you had to have good balance to stay dry. That was a lot a fun to watch. Pole was well greased too. They had a place to eat and they always had stands or booths where they'd sell oranges and bananas, and chocolate bars and gum and ice cream. My 119

mother used to give us kids some change and we never had any trouble spendin it. The more people come out to watch, the better they liked it, cause there'd be more money spent, see. It was quite a day." Probably because he did not spend a great deal of time in school, Len remembers his schooldays well. "I started goin to school when I was a young gaffer, seven or something like that. Some of the kids had the good luck of they could stay in school and go ahead, but lads like me, when you're taken out of school in the fall of the year to work on the farm and then go back for a little while until you're taken out again in the spring, you don't get a hell of a lot of schoolin. Les and I both quit school early, and John, soon as he got big enough to work, he got out. I got my second book but I never got into the third one. "I spent my schooldays in the old white schoolhouse where the Terrace Inn is now. There was just one room with everybody in it together. It was heated with a box stove that took a stick about three feet long. I can remember one of the lads, ol Bill Liscombe, lighting the fires there. He was old Andy Liscombe's son that had the long white beard. Sometimes ol Bill'd be about the last one to get there. He'd walk up Dark Lake on the ice and by the time he got to school there'd be the goddamnedest snot running down over his chin you ever saw. The ol schoolhouse'd be so cold your feet would be freezin and you couldn't possibly study. Once the stove got going though, we were never cold in there. "The schoolteacher and the blackboard were up the front and there was a water pail in the corner that everybody used for drinkin out of. Ol Bill Liscombe, he had the reputation of pissin in it, ya know. I'll never forget the time old Bill went down to get a pail of water from the spring there an he saturated, the ol bugger. He had to have a leak, so instead of letting it go on the snow, he let it go in the pail. Some of the lads caught him at it. By Jesus, the water looked kind a riley. He got a prunin for it. Ol Bill, he was never too good at learning, ya know. "Ol Belle Shay that died here not too long ago - she couldn't have been too far off a ninety - she taught us and she didn't stan for any nonsense. Strict. Ol Belle taught all the different levels. One teacher for everybody. They earnt their money those days. There'd be so many in the third book and so many in the second book, and the kids that was just starting, they'd be in

Single-furrow walking plough

the primer book. She'd have easily twenty-five pupils. You could get your entrance there - my sister Ruby did. She was quite good in school. But if you wanted high school or college or anything, you had to go somewhere else, Lindsay or some damn place. "Some of those kids had a long ways to walk to school. They didn't have rides at those days. You had to foot it. Regardless of how cold it was in the morning, you walked. I lived right close by, but lots of the kids weren't so lucky. The Webber kids walked right from the farm out there on this side a Otter Lake up the railroad track to the Burleigh Road and then up to the school. That was quite a haul. Oh Jesus, I'll tell you right now, on a frosty morning, they knew it. They'd be half froze when they got to school. Kids those days, by God, they knew what cold weather was like." The schoolteachers in Len's days were not much older than the pupils. On a tape made by Gertrude Miller, a former nurse at the Red Cross outpost in Wilberforce, Isabelle Shay recalls: "I went to school till I was about fourteen. We went till we tried our entrance, you see, then we went to high school in Minden. My sister and I went just one winter... . We went to school only three months. Now the kids go - some of them - till they're married, but we never got that chance. Then after I quit going to high school, the inspector gave me a school - he gave permits, you see. I went away to South Monmouth .... I guess 120

I was between sixteen and seventeen when I started to teach. The inspector gave me a permit and I was just teaching a month when he gave Ella, my sister, a school at Hotspur." Although Len didn't see too much school when he was young, he saw plenty of work. "My dad never had any hired help, you know, and I was the oldest boy. When I was little, I looked after the horses and once I got a bit older, the cattle n sheep as well. I can remember helping my dad when I was pretty young up in the haylofts, trying to keep the hay away from the hole where he was throwing it in and I found it damn hard work. When I got old enough to jump onto the plough handles, I was put on that too. Single-furrow walkin plough, you know. It was all metal but the handles was wood. You'd have a team of horses on it." Besides helping with the farm work, Len also took on all manner of odd jobs to help his parents with the bills. I asked him if he could remember the very first money he ever earned. "Well," he replied, "01 Frank McCully used to pay me to keep my mouth shut. He stayed at my dad's place for years, boarded with us, you know. Had his own bedroom and he was just like one of the family. Made his home there till he got married. Used to work for the Virginia Graphite Company and then later he became boss up at the Avey sawmill at Benoir's Lake. He married Emma Avey, and her father, old Jim Avey, ownded the mill. I guess it was him sold it to the Harper Lumber Company. It was Frank that give my dad the job there. He was a smart lad, well educated, but he was a bugger

to drink. He'd go down to Gooderham - Gooderham and Worts had a store down there sold liquor - and come back on the train with maybe half a dozen bottles a liquor and he'd stay right with that liquor as long as it lasted. He used to pay me a quarter to keep my mouth shut and hot tell the folks where the whisky was hid. At that time, twenty-five cents was quite a bit of money. It was good to me in those days." Not surprisingly, the first work Len ever did away from home, other than trapping and guiding, was various kinds of farm work. He used to help Ed Newbatt cut Johnny's Marshes. They would go up and stay in a marsh hay wigwam which, according to Len, was quite dry. "Marsh hay is better to turn rain than what tame hay is." The first day they would tear out the beaver dam and drain the marshes. Then they would cut the hay with scythes, coil it, and carry the coils on poles over to the stack where it was left to dry. Ed would draw it home in the winter down the ice on Farquhar Lake. "Old Ed Newbatt cut all them marshes for years - Johnny's Marshes, Newbatt's Hay Marsh ... . It was him and ol Sid White cut the marsh at the head of Yanktown and Bick's Marsh and Colbourne's Marsh. At that time it all used to be good blue joint. Makes damn good cow feed if it's saved properly." After working in Black Archie Scott's logging camp following his appendix operation, Len worked for Black Archie on his farm the rest of that summer and right up until hunting season. "When the hay come ready to be cut on the farm, Black Archie come along one day when I was skiddin logs and he says, 'Len, how would ya's like a change of work?' I says, 'I don't give a damn what I work at, long as the money's good.' Just kiddin him, you know. 'Well,' he says, 'tomorrow morning, come out onto the farm and take the hay off. There'll be some help for you there, Charlie Scott, Albro Palmateer, and ol Charlie Townsend. You run the mower and they'll help you to draw the hay in. And,' he says, 'when you get the hay drew in the barn, you can jump onto the binder and cut the grain.' I was there quite a while. Had a hell of a good time. Old Archie, he knew my side was still botherin me a bit after my operation and he never worked me too hard. Len, as we know, did not restrict himself to farm work. He branched out into trapping and guiding fishermen and hunters while still in his mid-teens and by his late teens he was

Len's shanty at Clement Lake: one of his earliest attempts at construction

going into the logging camps every winter. "Any damn thing at all that had money in it, why I had a go at it. I used to unload box cars at the train station. I can remember my mother worrying about me on account of it was such heavy work and I was so young. But I'd work at anything. I got a chance of a job in a sawmill for a while, I'd take it. Oh yes, many a bill I helped out on to keep things out a debt." One thing Len did quite a bit of was cut pulp wood for himself and sell it. After he started to work in the logging camp for Alf Willows, he managed to save a bit of money and in 1928 for $100-63 cents an acre - he bought the big lot 34 in concession xvn of Monmouth which was the old Clement lot. "I ownded that whole lot," says Len. "Big lot - round one hundred and sixty acres. I kept my horses in the ol haunted house. Never seemed to bother them none. I never seen them walkin around when I went in to feed them in the morning. They were always jus lookin for the hay and oats. I took the timber off the lot, whatever was saleable. Rather than keep the lot and pay taxes on it, I ended up lettin ol Stringer Archie have it for a few days' work. 01 Stringer lived there for a while in the haunted house — take more than racket to scare ol Archie 121

- and then he sold out to ol George Anderson which cooked for me at Cross Lake, and he lived there for a while. He never had no trouble either, but I don't know who the Andersons sold to." Needless to say, I pressed Len for details about the haunted house, asking him why it was considered haunted and what was all this about "racket". "Well," said Len, "there's supposed to be a ghost in there. I don't know how that come to get started. I never heard of anybody getting slaughtered up there or anything, but people livin in there heard things at night. Around the end of the First World's War, Billy Drumm, that used to sell my dad lake trout, he moved in with his family but he only stayed there for a little while. Couldn't take all the racket at night. He had to move out. It got on his wife's nerves, you know. They moved into a little frame shack south of it on this side of the barn that used to sit there." Shortly after hearing this story from Len, I happened to be in Ed Mumford's house in Harcourt and I must have somehow mentioned the haunted house because Ed suddenly told me that his mother, Annie Drumm, was Billy Drumm's niece, the daughter of Billy's brother Tom who lived in town. Ed told me the following story which he had heard from his mother who, he stressed, never took a drink in her life. "One night Billy's wife came down to my grandparents' place around midnight, crying, and with the baby in her arms. My grandparents went back up with her and they heard the ghost and asked it 'What do you want?' See every night at a certain time, probably midnight but I never heard that for sure, the dog would go round and round the house barking. Then they'd hear a swish at the window like someone with a raincoat coming through the window, and they'd hear a woman with heels come down the stairs right to the bottom step. They'd ask her what she wanted but she'd always go back up. If Billy's wife ever put the kids in that upstairs room, in the morning they'd wake up with the mattress on top of them. And if they ever planted flowers under the window, they were always torn up. I don't believe in ghosts," concluded Ed, "but that's what my mother told me, and she never lied." When I confronted Len with this tale, he said, "I tell ya what it might have been. There were some tamarack trees very close to the house and there might be such a thing maybe on windy nights the limbs might a hit the roof or some-

thing and made a noise. That's what some people thought it might be. I think it was something like that started the whole thing. I don't think there's such thing as a ghost." After he stopped logging, Len also supplemented his trapping income in the winter by cutting ice on Dark Lake. It was tough work but a job he could count on, because everybody always needed ice for the following summer. Len would cut a hole through the ice with an axe and an ice chisel and then start sawing the ice in long rows. After this he would saw across the rows to produce square blocks. Len used a proper ice saw which is something like a crosscut saw with one handle, only the blade is much heavier and the teeth much bigger. Like a hand saw, an ice saw has no rakers. "You kept it sharp," says Len, "and you could pull her all day. But you'd be tired. Oh Christ yes!" "I've seen me cut over a hundred blocks a day with it. Your ice'd be a couple of feet thick, sometimes more, and then you'd be cutting through the slush ice as well as the blue ice. After you pulled your block out, you'd take the slush ice off and only save the blue ice because it'd last much longer. We used to use big ice tongs to get the blocks up out of the hole. Heave on them and out they'd come. I have seen us build a kind of derrick too with a tripod and a long pole that had the tongs tied to the end. Same principle as what you're diggin a well. You'd fasten the tongs to the block of ice and then pry up on the long pole and that would lift the ice up out of the water, and then you could swing it around, d'ya see. It makes things much easier. You could pull a lot of ice out in a day that way. "One thing you needed was a damn good pair of rubbers or your feet would be soakin wet, specially with all that slush from your saw. And you had to make damn certain you didn't fall in cause it could get slippery out there. One winter we were takin out ice down on Dark Lake and old Ez Ames, he slipped into the hole. Went right in - we had to haul him out with the ice tongs. By Christ, he had to get home in a hurry and get a change of clothes. He only had about four hundred yards to go but when he reached home, he was shiver in an shakin like a dog shittin razor blades. Been a real col' day, he might not a made it. Could a froze. "At those days, everybody used to have icehouses. No electric fridges. Alls you had for the summer months was ice. For a long time all we 122

Cutting ice

had in our family was our cellar, but later on I built a log icehouse. Most of the icehouses around here was log. We used to get our sawdust from Willows's sawmill and pack our ice in that. Oh, I drew sawdust all over the country with my team and sleigh. Had a damn good team too. Sandy and Major - they was my horses. I drew sawdust to Pine Lake for Hayes's and to Straggle Lake for Smiths. Packed all their ice for them. Cut it, drew it, packed it, and charged by the block. Used to pick up a little extra money shovellin the cottagers' rooves too. But I never got rich doin that." Although Len never got rich building log cabins either, he did make enough money at it to keep him building for quite a long time. Before he began building for other people, he had considerable experience building for himself with logs. Of his many bush camps, at least four were

made of log: the two Barnum Camps, the Hemlock Camp at Buck Lake, and the Far Camp. All four camps were made with round logs and saddle-notch corners, the traditional style of building in the Ontario bush. The next most common style in the Haliburton area was round logs and dovetail corners. The best example of this style that I know of is Len's Palmateer Camp at Buck Lake. Len used this style for the log icehouse that he built out of cedar because this was the style of the big barn on his farm. One style that Len never used was the hewntimber style. It wasn't that he couldn't hew. He always used a broadaxe for the floor and ceiling beams and rafters in his cabins, and he had acquired a certain expertise from making rail-

.Ross Shaver in front of Len's icehouse at the homestead: round cedar logs with dovetail corners

Len with tourist at his second Barnum Camp; note the saddle-notch corners

123

Log cabin corner techniques

road ties. Len never built with squared logs because he liked the look of round logs better. "To my appearance, a cabin inside or out looks nicer if the logs is round. And besides, I think they turn the weather better and ya don't waste near so much wood." Waste not, want not - the frugality of an old bushman. Perhaps the reason that Len didn't like the looks of squared-log buildings was that he hadn't seen enough of them to get used to them. The style, although not unknown in eastern Haliburton, was never popular in the area. It's a German style and this was a predominantly Irish and Scottish region. Of the fifty families identified by ancestry in the 1881 census of Monmouth Township, only six were not of Irish, English, or Scottish origin: three German, two French, and one half-German and half-French. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the few examples of squaredlog building around Wilberforce is the old haunted house, because Martin Clement who built it came to Canada directly from Germany. Len prefers the vertical cornerpost style. Before I ever saw any of his bush camps, I had seen six cabins that Len had built in this way, and I assumed that this was the style he had grown up with and used all his life. I was the more surprised, therefore, to see all his bush camps built with saddle-notch corners. I asked him why he had suddenly switched styles and where he had learned cornerpost construction which, as far as I knew, was not common around Haliburton in the old days. "First post corners I ever seen was at Grace Lake," replied Len. "Germans from Kitchener made them. It was them brought that style up to this country. The first post-corner cabin on Grace Lake was Herb Powell up at the head of

Grace on the east side and the second one was Bob Walter. 01 Bob, he was a German, and him and Powell brought up some workers from Kitchener, Germans, you know, and they knew how to build log cabins. These cabins was built with upright corner posts spiked into the logs. That's where I learned that style — Germans. They were buggers to drink. Every Saturday night ol Bob Walter would come in from Kitchener with a big slug of wine and beer for these workers. Drink! Bastards, they could really polish her. But they knew how to work too. And good work. Oh Christ yes." Soon after he learned this style, Len put his knowledge to work in the camp he built at Pine Lake and later sold to the Hayes. Of all the cabins he has ever built, the nicest, in my opinion, is the north cabin at Pine lake which he built expressly for Charlie and Phyllis Hayes. Not surprisingly, it is the last of the four log buildings that Len put up on this site. Actually, I should really say "of the five log buildings," because the Hayes have the finest log outhouse that I have ever seen. It is one of the few outhouses in which I do not mind spending a good deal of time. Of the Pine Lake buildings, Derek Hayes' favourite is the old horse stable, and he plans to convert it from a workshop to a sleeping cabin. It really is too nice to be used as a workshop, let alone a stable. Whoever heard of a varnished log stable with windows and a pine floor and roof? Nothing was too good for Len's horses. "I built a tramway out of poles for the horses to get up into the stable. I made a little stall inside for them and had baled hay and grain there. By Jesus, she was warm. When I got through plastering between the logs, I didn't have to put any blankets on my horses. They 124

thought it was pretty nice in there. It was a hell of a lot better 'n leaving them out in the cold to freeze." The north cabin was built some fifty yards up the shore from the others because it was intended as a private cabin for Charlie and Phyllis who, by the time they commissioned Len to build it, had two growing children. It is built on a rise about forty feet back from the water's edge and has windows all along the front. The log work is impeccable. All the sills are made of sound cedar and rest well off the ground on cement piers. The exterior foundation is walled in with nice stone work to keep out the squirrels and porcupines, although there are large screen ventilators to ensure good air circulation under the cabin. All the corner posts are made of large spruce, which is tougher than cedar and balsam, and they are the same size all the way up. Nowhere have they been nibbled away with an axe to accommodate a log that was cut a half inch

too long and, perish the thought, nowhere does one see any seams or, worse still, wedges where a log was used that was actually a little bit too short. From the floor to the very peak of the gables, the spruce and balsam logs are all practically the same size — about nine or ten inches in diameter - and show relatively little taper. This symmetry, together with the thirty by eighteen-foot dimensions, gives the cabin the most harmonious lines I have ever seen. One would be hard put to find a single axe mark on any log. Every log is smooth and unbruised because all the logs were cut in the winter, skidded by horse with the bark on over the snow to a skidway, hauled on a sleigh to the cabin site, and peeled during rainy weather in the spring by a peeling spud which leaves no marks. "Lots a rain helps for peelin. You don't get the rain, the bark won't come off so quick. Generally, your best time for peelin is when the black flies is good." These logs even have relatively few knots because Len likes to get his logs in thick swamps where the trees are not

Len in front of the main cabin at Pine Lake; note the vertical cornerpost and the log outhouse

The horse stable at Pine Lake; note the log tramway in front of the door

The original main cabin at Pine Lake 125

TTie Pme La&e Camp

see, and one helps to grip the other. Makes a nice tight job, specially if you've given your logs time to dry first." "Me, I always worked slow, but I done a good job - best I could do. I wouldn't work any other way. Only once I ever had any complaints about workin slow. Some people I was workin for thought that it was takin longer to put the windows in than what it should have. That made me a little bit sore, so I says, 'Well, I'll tell ya the difference between a fast worker and a slow worker.' I says, 'I can work a hell of a lot faster than what I do, but I won't guarantee my work.' And I says, 'Would you like to have a goddamn air space in between the window and the casing that the wind's gonna whistle through on a cold windy night?' 'Nooo.' 'Well', I says, 'you'll get lots a men in here puttin in windows and doors and they might work fast, but,' I says, 'when they're done, you haven't got a job worth the powder to blow it to hell.' I says, 'I build a cabin puttin in windows and doors and I put em in the best I know how. It may take me a bit longer, but I don't rush the job. I want a good job,' I says, 'cause material costs money.' I told them that right there to their face and they never

only sound right to the butt and practically the same size all the way up, but also tend to have branches only near the tops. Even after all these years the cement chinking is in pretty good shape because Len let the cabin season for a year before applying the chinking. This gives the logs time to dry and shrink so that one does not get cracks between the cement and the logs. Then, of course, Len was not stingy with the nails that hold the chinking. Derek says it is hard to believe how many nails Len used. "Put the nails right to her," Len said, "inside and out both. What I done was go from post to post. Put your nails about an inch, inch and a half apart - rusty nails or any old punk nails that you don't give a damn about. They're just as good as new ones. Put one nail down and one nail up, one down and one up, all the way from one corner post to the other, and when you get your outside done, why go inside and do the same. Then when you put your plaster on, you'll have a job. Plaster inside and out and in all the places where your logs ain't touchin, your one plaster will join the other one, 126

Smith's main cabin completed: " ... but I done a good job." Smith's main cabin under construction: "I always worked slow... . "

thought of taking the credit, but then decided to confess that not I but Len had done it. "I know," said Carson, grinning. Looking back over all the trades followed by Len in his life, one can see that they were all trades performed by an individual who had nobody to rely on but himself: farming, trapping, guiding, cabin building... . Len could never have worked in a sawmill or factory all his life. It just isn't in his nature. After five years in the logging camps, he decided that he would rather be his own boss trapping and cutting ice and pulp wood than work for someone else. "Generally, if there was any bossin to be done, it was me that done it. But I guess I'm done with all that now. My workin days is pretty well over, ceptin for a bit of guidin in the summer, a bit of trappin and helpin youse fellas out on the road there. Long as I can get three square meals a day and have a good bed to sleep on and can do a little deer huntin in the fall and fishin in the summer and winter, I'm happy. Can't complain. I've had a good life but I don't aim to end it sittin on my ass. When I go, I'd like to go on the trail." Last week when I dropped in to ask Len a few questions and check out a few details in my manuscript, he didn't have much time. It was already mid-November and he had just taken a whole week off for the deer hunting season and he was hard at work. The new doghouse or palace he is building has to be completed before the snow flies as, of course, does the new icefishing shack. Then there is the new bedroom he is putting in upstairs... .

bothered me again. Had no reason to, see. They couldn't complain about my work and they knew goddamn well that they couldn't. I'll tell ya right now, there's no use a doin a thing twice. Do er right the first time and then you'll never have to worry about it again." That has been Len's motto in everything he has done in life. "Take your time and make a good job of whatever you're doin and you'll never be sorry." Everything that he has ever turned his hand to, Len has performed to the best of his abilities. Even the seemingly unimportant things of daily life are either not done at all or done right, usually the latter. I remember once the tongue broke on my trailer way back in the bush, and I tried everything I could think of to fix it well enough to get it to a welding shop where it could be permanently repaired. I used wire and poles and could only limp several hundred feet at a time: the poles kept working loose or breaking — it is a heavy trailer - or the wires would slip and I'd put another piece of wire on only to have it break or slip. Finally I abandoned the trailer in despair and went to town to find Len. After hearing me out, Len disappeared in his shed and reappeared with two hardwood staves, about two miles of heavy wire, and his favourite set of pliers. By the time he was finished with it, I'll bet that trailer was sorry it ever broke. Len had it trussed up like the Christmas turkey. Later, when I was paying Carson Bamford for the welding job, I inquired about the two hours of labour he was charging and he told me it took him over an hour to cut, hack, and finally burn all the wire off. He guaranteed his job, but said it probably wasn't any better than the way I had fixed it. At first I 127

Afterword "There's no farm in there," the driver replied. "Nobody back there but me and the wife here." "Oh," I said disappointed. "Mr Holmes used to know people that lived somewhere around here in the twenties. They had a farm with an old log house and several barns." "Well," said the man, "there is an old farm back there with nobody living on it. Is that what you're after?" "I think so," I said, adding, "it's an historic site. The house is made of squared logs and I think it may be over a century old, perhaps the oldest house in all of Harcourt Township. Mr Holmes remembers seeing several old graves beside it which, if I'm lucky, may have names and dates."

One evening quite recently I told Len that I was going up to Fishtail Lake to look for Tom Scott's old place and the farm where Ernie Palmateer, Jack Ragan, and Sime Siple had all lived at one time or another, and I asked him if he would like to come along. He'd like to but no, he didn't think he could. Too much work to do. Instead, he gave me an elaborate set of directions. I told him that I was particularly interested in the old graves he remembered seeing beside Ernie Palmateer's log farm house because if the markers had names and dates that were still legible, they would be very important witnesses to the early settlement of Harcourt Township. Half an hour after we had gone to bed that night, I saw Len's bedroom light flick on and to my amazement I heard him coming to my room. "McCrea was the name on them graves," he said. "It just come to me." I was not surprised when Len announced the next morning at breakfast that he was coming with me. His curiosity had obviously been piqued. As we headed north over the Long Crossway on the Elephant Lake Road, Len began to reminisce and he never stopped all day. Countless bits of information that I had not known about came out. Every turn in the road led to a new stream of reminiscence. We went to look for the McCrea place. We soon found the right road, but while heading west towards Fishtail Lake we were surprised to meet another vehicle. Since the dirt road was only one lane wide, I pulled over to let it pass, and when we were alongside one another, the driver stopped and politely asked us where we were going. "We're looking for a farm that's supposed to be back in here," I said.

"That's the place all right," said the man. "I saved the wooden grave markers. They'd fallen over, so the inscriptions were still preserved. 'Charlotte and Iris McCrea. Aged 12 and 6. Died 1871 of an epidemic." Paydirt, I thought. The McCreas were among the very first settlers. "Several hundred yards ahead you can see where the old house was," added the man, glancing at his wife beside him. "Was?" I asked apprehensively. "Well, you're a bit late for the house," was the reply. "I bulldozed everything into the ground on Wednesday. The kids were getting into it, you know," he added, by way of explanation. The house was there from at least the 1860s. Pope goes to see it on November 13, 1982, but it was razed and buried on November 10. Three lousy days. I couldn't even get a photograph for Neil to draw from. 128

Who is going to write the history of this pioneer farm? Who were the McCreas? Where did they come from and how did they get to Fishtail Lake? Was this the family of the James McCrea who was born in Huntington, Quebec, in 1837 (according to his gravestone in the Essonville Cemetery) and who had lived in Maynooth before settling near Essonville not later than 1881 (according to the census)? If so, the family probably came to Maynooth in the 1860s along the Opeongo Line and the newly opened Peterson Colonization Road, soon moved further east along the Peterson and Kennaway Roads to Fishtail Lake, established the farm, and then moved on to Essonville via the Kennaway and Burleigh Roads, leaving a brother or son behind on the Fishtail farm. Why did Matthew John McCrea (James' nephew or grandson?) and his wife sell to Ernie and George Palmateer on April 25,1913? What brought the Palmateers to Fishtail Lake? Why did they sell to the Lewises in 1924? How did Sime Siple come to live on it? How did it happen that the farm included such a large part of Fishtail Lake? How did the Masseys acquire almost all of Fishtail Lake which is still largely without cottages and unspoiled, unlike the less fortunate Benoir's Lake? This information cannot be found in the Registry Office. The documents record only the facts, not the stories behind them. As I progressed with this book, I developed a sense of urgency. Much of this area's brief history exists only in oral form, so if this material is worth recording, it must be done quickly. I was fortunate with Len, but time and again old so-and-so, who could have told me exactly what I wanted to know, had only just died. Much of our local history seems to be slipping away from us. It would be a shame not to record it before it disappears forever.

129

Glossary Of Snyes and Snibbies, Gads, Swales, and Gibby Tongues

burl

to stand on a log floating in the water and cause it to roll

alumium

aluminum

bushed

aree

area

slightly crazed from being in the woods too long alone

bambegilya

balm of Gilead poplar

cadge

barrl

barrel

barber

of a tree (usually with a heavy lean to it) - to break prematurely while being felled, leaving a slab attached to the stump with the result that the stump looks like a barber's chair with a flat seat and a back rest; used as an adjective, as in "a barber tree" - a tree likely to barber

cahrrot

provisions, supplies, food stuffs; as a verb — to haul provisions (usually by wagon) carrot

cam

calm

cant-hook

a tool used for moving logs and consisting of a wooden lever and a sharp, movable, metal hook ("the bill") attached near its end

castor

perineal gland of a beaver, located on the uppermost inside of each back leg and containing an oily dark-coloured substance of strong odour

cat's arse

number one quality, the cat's pyjamas

chickadee

a man (usually old), who does maintenance on logging roads and hays the hills

citern

citron, a type of hard yellowish melon with a hard rind that is put up as preserves

cove

a ravine with steep, rocky sides; used by Wordsworth in this sense

culbert cummins

culvert cum(m)in,a dwarf plant whosearomatic seeds are used for flavouring

deckin line

a long chain used in decking logs

deef

deaf

barber chair a stump with a flat seat and an upright slab attached to the stump bear trap a metal device used to tighten chains (similar to that used by truckers today) blacksnake

to hold back, to be lazy, not to do one's share of work

blanket

a particularly large beaver hide

blue joint

a type of marsh hay

bog

of a beaver (particularly in the spring) - to come to shore and leave scent from the oilstones and castors on a little pile of mud and marsh hay constructed specially for this purpose

buckjump

an approximate measure of distance - anywhere from a few hundred feet to several miles or more 130

Democrat

dinner in

jobber: one who does this

a light (farm) wagon with several seats which is usually drawn by a team to eat dinner in camp instead of out in the bush

joner

a Jonah, someone believed to bring bad luck, one who jinxes things

link

lynx

dippo

depot

mushrat

muskrat

dog

of an animal — a male; a metal gripping device usually made with a hook (gibby tongue) of some sort; to walk through the woods with one or several hounds in order to flush deer, hence dogger: one who does this

nahrras

narrows

out front

the more settled area of Southern Ontario ("in the front country")

pahradise

paradise

patridge

partridge

pennacle Perchon

pinnacle Percheron

preem

prime, the very, as in "chew the preem piss out of ya"

pup

see gibby tongue and dog

quick

of a canoe - tippy

race

the action that takes place when a deer is being chased by dogs

rat

muskrat

rollway

a pile of logs stored on two or more skids on a slight downhill slope

sandpiper

a man (usually old) who is in charge of spreading hot coals and sand on a particular hill on a winter logging road

scours

diarrhoea

section

a portion of a railroad track under the care of a particular person who patrolled it by means of a "handcar pumper" and in more recent times a "gas jigger"

doubletree

a crossbar to which two singletrees are attached for harnessing two horses abreast

drag

a raker tooth of a saw whose purpose is to clean out sawdust; a fallen tree too small for saw logs which has been dragged to a skidway to be sawed up for stove wood

drag saw

gad

a heavy six-foot-long saw similar to a crosscut but with no "belly" in it which is used for cutting drags a small sapling, particularly of the kind that come up where larger trees have been removed or that choke old logging roads

gibby tongue a gib or iron hooked projection used to hold something in place; as a logging tool, like the "bill" of a cant hook, only it fastens directly onto a chain gool

goal

heifer dust

bullshit

shine

moonshine

herring

heron

shoein

Ivory Johnson

Tver Johnson (a firearms manufacturing firm)

jinksen

ginseng

shoeing, the protective metal sole running from end to end of a sleigh runner ("the very underneath it")

job

to perform one or more parts of a logging operation as an independent operator who has contracted with a lumber company (usually involves taking the timber off of a certain area for so much per thousand feet); hence

sidlin

sidling, sloping (usually fairly steeply)

singletree

the horizontal bar to which the traces of a horse's harness are fastened and which is itself attached to a plough or a vehicle or a doubletree

131

skin skipper snibby

the piece of metal with two teeth or small prongs shaped like a "v" on the end of a cant hook which ensures a good grip

snucks

partnership, cahoots, as in "to be in snucks with someone"

sny(e) start

trail cut through the woods to get a deer moving; hence a start - flushing a deer, hopefully the beginning of a race

stub

a tall dead branchless tree stump usually killed by fire or lightning

swale

a low-lying area with water (usually stagnant) often full of tag alders, "never too big as a rule"

tally stick

the stick to which a trap is attached

tongue

of a dog - to howl, especially when chasing a deer

tricker

trigger

trough

a hollowed-out length of split log (usually cedar) used in making shed roofs

turkey

a lumberman's bag or packsack of clothes a big wooden box or trunk kept in the cookery where the boss of the lumbercamp kept matches, tobacco, and other small articles for sale to the crew

van

water

Illustration and Photograph Credits

to clean out everything (e.g., all the fur or trees) from an area a tiny insect that infests cheese

Page 12, Page 34, Page 41, Page 45, Page 46, Page 48, Page 60, Page 86, Page 92, Page 95,

photograph by Susanne Jeffery photograph by Ida Holmes photograph by Wilf Loewen photograph courtesy Edna Tighe photograph by the author photograph courtesy Edna Tighe photograph by the author photograph by the author photograph by the author photograph courtesy Mr. and Mrs. R. Schofield

All other photographs are from the family collections of Len and Ida Holmes and Mildred Holmes. Back cover: photographs of Len preparing a beaver set by the author photograph of author in canoe by Judy Turner All Illustrations for cover, map and inside pages by Neil Broadfoot.

to chase something into the water as when a dog "waters" a deer; also, to take to the water - a deer will "water" if chased for long by a dog

yoe ewe This glossary does not pretend to provide exhaustive definitions. It only seeks to clarify the particular meanings of each entry as it is used in this book.

132