By Staff
The Dowagiac Conservation Club's Annual Hunter's Rendezvous is this Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Again there will be official scorers to measure trophies and representatives from the DNR and all the major hunting and conservation organizations. Griff Cook and myself will be there to appraise firearms, both antique and modern. That's also the time to sign up for the club's annual Youth Pheasant Hunt. The free hunt is open to youths 12-15 years-old and their hunting mentors. Bring your hunter safety certificate, hunting license and mentor.
I don't know about you, but with the new fallen snow and frigid temperatures I'm drawn toward the fire rather than afield. For a change of pace I'm going to deviate from my typical topics and do a bit of reminiscing. The time was winter of 1968, back when I was an adventurous 18, in college and bored to tears. My brother's mother-in-law owned a fishing lodge in Northern Ontario that had long sat vacant. An Indian named Dominic who had guided at the lodge when it was flourishing was going to resurrect it. I'd never met him but arrangements were made for me to go up and give him a hand. Right after Christmas I turned in my books and packed my bag.
The lodge was two hundred miles north of Sault Ste. Marie. It was on an island two miles offshore in Lake Wabatongushi and only accessible by train. I found Dominic in Wawa at the old, rickety Wawa Hotel. Back then Wawa was just a run down mining town, not the modern tourist haven it is today. We left my van at Hawk Junction and hopped the train north.
My first indoctrination to winter in the far north came when the train stopped to let us off. With enthusiasm I shouldered my pack and leaped from the train. What appeared to be a foot of snow turned out to be bottomless. I jammed down into it like a yard dart, clear to my waist. I was hopelessly pinned and felt like an idiot while Dominic, with much laughter, donned his snowshoes and winched me out. With our worldly possessions on our backs and our meager supply of rations stacked on a fiberglass toboggan we snowshoed across the frozen lake to the lodge. There we would spend the rest of the winter repairing cabins and preparing for the upcoming tourist season.
According to the little thermometer hung outside the door forty below zero is the norm up there. The snow lays buttock deep to a tall Indian and Dominic was a short one. You couldn't even step out to water a bush without first putting on snowshoes. Both heat and food came from a wood cook stove so cutting firewood was a never ending chore. One day I decided to try ice fishing. I found an old chisel and lashed it to a birch pole for a spud. With spud and axe I chopped away at the ice. I chopped in the morning, I chopped in the afternoon. Many hours and feet of ice later I finally hit water. It turned out to be a fruitless endeavor for I never caught a fish all winter.
Our most daunting mission was putting up ice for the summer. The ice house was the size of an average living room. We found a place in the lake where there was two feet of ice, then a layer of water, then several more feet of ice. Dominic cut square blocks from the top layer with a chain saw. I muscled them up with tongues, loaded them three at a time on the old, trusty toboggan and snowshoed them the two hundred yards or so to the ice house. Each precious block was carefully stacked and covered with a layer of sawdust. So insulated they would last all summer. It took weeks before that dreaded building was filled to the ceiling.
When you spend a winter in the bush with someone you come out in the spring either hating each other or best of friends. Dominic and I emerged with a life long bond, broken only by his passing years later. Carpe diem.
Larry Lyons writes a weekly outdoor column for Leader Publications. He can be reached at larrylyons@beanstalk.net