The Old Way
Nanook in harness on a frosty evening.
Snow devils leapt into the sky, torn free of wind-packed drifts by a howling north wind whipping the length of the frozen lake. Leaning into it, I trudged steadily along while ice crystals, fine as dust, streamed like smoke between my legs to the shoreline. Some of it lingered, finding a hold in the folds of my moccasins or racing up my body, stabbed icy needles into my cheeks and nose. My beard was already caked with ice, and frozen stalagmites of snot hung from nose to chin.
Behind me, my husky Nanook pulled steadily at the harness. The fog of his breath had formed a white rime of frost about his muzzle and eyelashes. My heart swelled with pride every time I glanced back at him. Head down, shoulders forward, tail straight out and to the side, his focus was absolute under the load of the freight toboggan that held our traps, gear and grub - our lifeline.
I carried just my rifle and axe but was not spared any labour. I was the trailbreaker, and six kilometres of slush, bad ice and deep snow were already behind us - my Huron style snowshoes packing a “float” for the toboggan all the way. The last kilometre had been the toughest, crossing a height of land between lakes through thick forest that cared nothing for our burdens. Blow-down had to be cleared, dangerous pockets of swamp water navigated and on the steep sections I had to throw my weight against the towline of our hundred and fifty-odd pound load, subsequently heaving back on the brake-line to keep it from overtaking Nanook on the way down.
We were trapping the far eastern edge of my territory, sleeping out and travelling on foot; the usual refuge of my cabin serving only as a layover and resupply point for the past two months. This was our longest stint away from it yet, eleven days without rest or human contact.
The Trail had become everything.
Day in, day out, the steady fall of snowshoes, gentle hiss of the toboggan and the rhythm of my breath, was the song of my existence within a ghostly backdrop of white silence. The simple tools of axe and belt knife, just extensions of my being as they moved and worked in my hands almost of their own accord: splitting, cutting and blazing in automatic motion for ten to twelve hours per day. Every day. This ritual of hard work in an often viciously cold environment regularly demanded more of me than I thought I had to give. And yet, I had done it. Was doing it. I had jumped in over my head and risen to the challenge.
At first I had felt overwhelmed, unsure of myself. I had been trapping for a few years and was no stranger to living out in the open air for weeks at a time, but that was always in the warmer months, and in winter my cabin was always a short trek or skidoo ride away. This was much different, and I didn’t know anyone other than a short list of people long dead from books I had read, who were still doing things in a manner I had come to think of as the “Old Way”.
I could see and feel the changes in myself, and even in Nanook. I saw it in the ease and confidence with which he handled a load nearly three times his body weight versus our first outing - where I’d had to help him with a load half that size. His thick fur hid muscles that had turned to iron.
My body had adapted too. I remember telling someone halfway through the season that I felt as if I could snowshoe to the moon and back(I would push that thinking too far and injure myself before the winter was through). The cold that I had once shrunk away from became balmy, t-shirt weather if the wind stayed down, and with enough hot food I found that I could work happily all day without any kind of sweater, gloves or hat at temperatures as low as twenty below - though, it should be noted my daily caloric intake was around five to six thousand calories, largely of fat and meat.
Other things, like slipping in and out of my lampwick snowshoe bindings without using my hands; being able to carve the proper sized notch in a leaning sapling by heart, so the jaws of a 120 conibear fit just right; or finding my way across a large lake, full of long bays, in the pitch dark of a midnight snowstorm, the only thing keeping me in the right direction and out of dangerous overflow - the subtle feel of the blown-in trail, frozen beneath fresh snow.
Though small and insignificant to anyone outside of my simple world of ice and snow, these things had grown within me a quiet sense of pride - which shattered when my bindings snapped.
I was marvelling at the wind, the cold and half lost in a trance of repetitive motion when it happened. I stepped, lifted my right leg and felt nothing - my foot was weightless in its deerhide moccasin. Lost as I was in the motion of it all, I continued forward, through two and a half feet of snow to plunge below the crust into slush. I tried to correct my next step but too late, the curved tip of my left snowshoe had dove below the surface as I leaned forward and dumped me headlong into the powder.
Pushing against the snow to stand was like trying to swim, there was nothing solid below me and my arms just went deeper towards the slush layer. Instead, rolling like a bloated seal in my big canvas anorak, I grabbed for my lost snowshoe and used it to spread my weight, righted myself and stood up on it. I looked down and saw the inch wide strip of cotton that was my binding, snapped like a popsicle where it wrapped the webbing of my snowshoes. I had gotten the bindings wet the day before and they had frozen into a solid mass, weakening the cotton fibers. A careless mistake.
A sliver of fear rose in my stomach. No bindings meant no snowshoes. No snowshoes meant… I looked down at my bare moccasin, coated in a layer of tea-coloured ice. Luckily, the slush had frozen before fully penetrating the leather, but if I tried to cross a lake that way I knew I’d probably freeze my foot.
My mind eased when I remembered that I had plenty of rope, and even without that, I could easily fashion bindings by tearing a strip of canvas from my anorak. I was ashamed of the fear that I had so quickly felt, and angry at myself for not drying my bindings out, or anticipating needing at least one extra pair. The reality of my condition struck me hard. I was a complete novice in an environment where the stakes were incredibly high. Up until now I had been incredibly lucky, every stroke of bad luck or mishap had a saving grace that brought me through a little wiser but none worse for the wear. The truth was, that could change at any moment. My “stoic bushman” ego came tumbling down for the umpteenth time.
Why am I doing this and who the hell do I think I am? I didn’t have time to answer that question as the tendrils of cold creeping in through my layers demanded attention. I needed a solution so I could continue my movement and stay warm. Picking up my bindings, I turned them over in my mittened hands and knew what to do.
Removing my mitts, I put the frozen bindings into my mouth and worked them between my teeth, sucking away the water as they thawed and became pliable. That done, I quickly took them and using a couple knots, tried splicing the two ends back together. They froze solid in seconds and I had to repeat the thawing process a couple of times before I got them properly attached to my snowshoe again - but it worked.
The cold was coming in, I needed to move. There were extra wool layers in the toboggan but unpacking them took more time, and I knew once I was breaking trail again my temperature would rise. I took a moment to cinch the fur ruff of my anorak down to a fist sized hole, slipped into my snowshoe and continued on through the blowing snow.
Coming around the tip of a small peninsula we were greeted by the humped form of a beaver lodge, buried beneath the drift. Giving Nanook the command to stay, I worked my way towards the lodge, using my axe to strike the ice every couple of steps. If the lodge was occupied, the warmth of the beavers swimming from it to the feed pile(a raft of saplings piled in front, serving as their winter food supply) would often wear the ice thin. Something I had learned the hard way in years past.
When I reached the front of the lodge, where a smattering of branches protruded from beneath the snow, I took one in my hands and rubbed my thumbnail against it - the inner bark was green. There were beavers living here. My mood instantly brightened, and I headed back to the toboggan for my trapping gear and ice chisel.
A few weeks prior, I had taken the time to visit an Anishinaabe elder I had met while guiding canoe trips in Temagami. Alex lived off the grid on his family’s traditional lands - the land his parents raised him on. He had grown up trapping by dog team with his father, living off of the land and what staple goods they could trade their furs for at the Hudson’s Bay post. I sensed there was much to learn from him, so when he invited me to come visit him during the winter, I was thrilled.
As I pulled the leg-hold trap from my pack, I tried to recall the set he had shown me at a beaver pond near his cabin...
At Al’s request I had just collected a dry spruce pole, a fresh poplar sapling and a dead cedar tree - specifically one of the curved variety that seemed to lean out from the shore of every northern lake - and returned to see him breathing heavily over a two foot wide hole he had chopped in the ice with an axe. I remember thinking that was pretty damn impressive for a man in his mid seventies as I handed over the trees and bent down to arm the trap.
“Let me show you an old Indian trick,” he winked as he knelt over the hole and gripping the cold steel of the double long-spring with a bared hand, showed me how to suspend the trap on a flake notched in the cedar, where to place it in respect to the poplar tree we were using as bait, and how to freeze it all in place using slush from the edge of the hole. His rough brown hands were red with the slush and snow all over them but he just stood and smiled as he wiped them off on his old snowmobile suit.
“The beaver will see the poplar under the ice and come to bring it into the house. He will be greedy though, he doesn’t want to leave anything behind so he’ll want to cut the branch right at the ice. He’ll push against the cedar with his feet while he chews the poplar and get himself caught. This is how my dad always caught beaver through the ice. All we had were leghold’s in those days, so you had to know how to use them.”
After laying out my gear, I swapped my warm mitts for a heavy pair of fleece-lined rubber gloves. Then I slipped my wrist through the thong on the end of my ice chisel and went to work. The first hole I cut, I broke through on top of a log. The momentum made the impact a jarring one. Too close. I moved another six feet from the feed pile and chiseled again; a few green twigs were visible but nothing that would impede my set, it was perfect - the beavers would have to swim right by it, and judging by the slimey look of the twigs that were their feed, they’d be drooling over my nice, crisp, poplar sapling.
I followed all of Al’s steps to the T, although it took me a lot longer than it had him. The wind kept whipping snow into my eyes so that I had to squint and the hole I’d cut kept freezing back over. It was getting colder, the day rapidly descending into the afternoon. I tried to hurry, as I was getting anxious to make camp and needed to find a good stand of dry timber to get me through the night. There was nothing for it, though, and even with the lined gloves I kept having to pull my hands up into my anorak and thaw them under my sweaters every minute or so.
“We picked a hell of a day for this one bud!” I shouted to Nanook over the howling wind. He was curled up, sheltered and asleep against the leeward side of the toboggan. Lifting his head, his ears drooping, he cast me a despondent glance and then plunged his nose back into his tail with an exasperated huff. Apparently, I was to blame for the weather.
Eventually, I finished the set but before we left I went to shore to cut some boughs. I laid them like thatch over the hole and shovelled a pile of snow onto them - this would keep the ice from freezing too thick before I returned a week from now. I repacked the toboggan, cinched the webbing down tight and slapped my leg for the dog to follow.
Daylight was fading faster now. The overcast sky was dulling to a grey-blue and disappearing into the horizon, so that without the treeline it would be impossible to tell sky from earth. We had reached the end of the lake and left it, now following the marshy edge of a long creek bed. It would have been faster to snowshoe the creek itself but these swamp-lands were notorious for thin ice and hollow air pockets under the snow; I had learned to play it safe when crossing them. It was really getting late, but I thought I remembered a sheltered place on an island at the near end of the next lake and if memory served - dozens of dead jack pines.
It was almost full dark by the time we made the leeward side of the island. The trees were mere silhouettes and the temperatures had seriously plummeted. I estimated it to be around thirty below celsius by the feel of it in my throat. I could usually guess the air temperature to within a couple of degrees by how much it tickled my windpipe. Whatever the number - my internal thermometer told me I would need a serious pile of dead trees. Thankfully, that’s just what I found.
Narrowly divided from the mainland by two creeks, one on each side - the island was barely one. Nanook and I had come up the east creek and followed the top of the island around to where the west creek spilled over a large beaver dam in the springtime. This portion of it was shaped with a small concave and a flat rock that jutted out below a thick forest of jack pine and spruce. Of course it was all frozen, the creek stopped up and the rock point, just a huge mound of crystalline snow, but the air was still and most importantly - there was dry wood to be had everywhere.
Helping Nanook out of harness, he licked my hand in thanks before loping off to give the area a good coating of piss - something to be mindful of when filling the tea-kettle. I climbed the hump of snow that was the rock point and began stomping down a campsite. When I had a space about twelve feet square packed solid, I set about stripping green boughs from every tree close at hand; these I piled into a thick, fragrant mattress as a bed before hanging my tarp over it, lean-to style, to catch the heat from the fire.
Next, I slid my axe out from the webbing straps of my toboggan, removed the leather mask and made my way into the bush. When I had first approached the campsite I could see the needle-less tops of over a dozen dead-standing jack pines scattered among the healthy, green ones. They were all around twenty-five feet tall, so I selected four of those closest to my campsite as the victims.
A sharp axe is a wonderful friend to have in the winter woods. Without one - and the knowledge of how to use it - you’d be hard pressed to survive. I had recently read something of the trappers of old Labarador; these men didn’t even use steel traps but would canoe for weeks to their respective grounds with just some staple provisions. They would then build everything else that they needed - cabin, toboggan, traps - with nothing but their axe. A level of resourcefulness worth aspiring to.
With the stories of these men in my mind I set out to collect my firewood. Every second swing of my well-worn Gransfors tore a satisfying chunk from the sweet smelling wood, so that in ten to twelve whacks I had dropped my first tree. This I then separated into eight foot sections after delimbing the length of it, so that by the time I was finished with the other trees I had a dozen dry, resinous logs just a little longer than my body and each about eight to ten inches in diameter - this would be my fuel for the night.
I piled the logs near the end of the lean-to that my head would be while I slept, so that they would be within easy reach during the night, as the fire needed feeding. I headed back into the bush then, to cut one live tree to act as the base for my fire. I laid all three of its sections next to one another in the snow, piled some dry brush down the length of this platform and then laid three of my dry logs - pyramid style - on top of this and then lit it from both ends and in the middle with matches. The green logs on the bottom would burn more slowly and give time for a heavy bed of coals to form before the fire made contact with the snow.
Despite the drop in temperatures, I was now burning up in my layers from the vigorous labour and I was seriously thirsty. While the fire grew, I dug my thermos of water from the toboggan, poured a cup, raised it to my lips and hit a wall. Clink! The cup met with a solid barrier. My heavy breathing had increased the frosting of my beard until it was nothing but a solid mass of ice. I felt a bit like Anthony Hopkins as I reached up to break my mouth free of the frosty muzzle and found I couldn’t do it. Chuckling at my predicament, I settled down to let the heat of the growing blaze thaw my face out.
An hour later a deep bed of glowing coals had melted a pit in the snow, the bright banks of which reflected the light and warmth of the tall flames into the lean-to where the air recirculated around me. I luxuriated in the glorious waves of heat washing over me, and stripped to just my longjohns and a single wool sweater. My moccasins hung steaming on the ends of two sticks leaning next to the roaring fire while my bare feet were slowly roasting before the coals.
Before fully settling in, I had collected some water through a hole cut in the ice for a pot of tea, laid my sleeping bag out behind me and dug up some dinner from the grub sack. Several pounds of beaver meat and two packs of noodles with rice were the fare. I tossed a pound of the fattiest meat to the dog, whose powerful jaws had the frozen block chewed and swallowed in minutes. The rest went into a pan of hot lard, where the bright red meat spit and sizzled when it hit the grease. Soon it was brown and dripping soft, buttery fat. My mouth watered at the sight of it. After a minute or so I couldn’t take it anymore and plucked a slab of the thawing meat from the frying pan and popped it into my mouth. It was stringy and tasted of blood but it was warm and the fat dissolved as I chewed it. It was heavenly.
God! Is there anything else like this?! A wild grin stole across my face as I leaned back and took in the scene: all around me, towering trunks of jack pine, spruce and balsam were lit up by the dancing, red-orange light of the flames, giving their rough outer bark an appearance of warm cheerfulness. Above, their branches sifted silver threads of smoke that rose and rose, until it was lost in the inky blackness of the sky. The lake stretched out before me as a grey-white desert. All was silent, save the moaning of the wind and the crackling of the fire.
I thought back to the questions that had arisen in my mind in the middle of the lake, my misery when on top of all of the trials of the day, my bindings had snapped. The truth was, this, all around me, was what I was out here for. Why I had made the decision to be out here, on foot with my dog like the men of old. Like Alex and his dad and every other trapper before the streak of lightning skidoos and machinery changed the game. I wanted to be a part of it, subject to the shape of the land and the moods of the weather like any of the animals. Something was lost when you only saw the bush through the windshield of a snowmachine, and I didn’t want to miss any of it.
A quote from Grey Owl’s “Men Of The Last Frontier” came to my mind, as it often did after a particularly trying day in the woods:
“A man may be soaking wet, half-frozen, hungry and tired, landed on some inhospitable neck of the woods, vowing that a man is a fool to so abuse himself. Yet, let him but make a fire, get a sheet of canvas between himself and the elements, and a dish of hot tea under his belt, and his previous state of misery will fade from his mind; and he will remark to his partner, his dogs, or his tea-pail, that "Home was never like this," or that "This is the life."
He was right.
I hope you enjoyed the read. These small stories, blogs - whatever they are - come from my heart; I share them out of a passion to create and see others inspired to make their own connection with the Wilderness. If you found value in your time here, and are inclined to do so, you can help keep me writing and buy me a coffee!
About The Author
The author with a few fish from a canoe trip down the Makobe River.
For Clint Zold, the pursuit of authentic Wilderness experiences has led him across landscapes both far and wide. Whether paddling the ancient Nastawgan of mystic Temagami, hiking the lonely mountains of the West, or snowshoeing the hunting grounds of his trapping territory in the Arctic Watershed of Northern Ontario - Clint is truly at home in the wild.
Living off-grid on the banks of the Mattagami River; the canoe, axe and snowshoe have become his daily companions in a semi-subsistence lifestyle where food, warmth and water come from the land around him. His passion for Wilderness is only equaled by his desire to share it with others