DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN: A Northern Love Affair with Algoma Central Country
A Rough and Ribald Story of a Lifetime in the Bush ~ Robert Cuerrier
Chapter 13 Hazards, Thin Ice and Flies
ON ICE
They say, “If you’re walkin’ on thin ice you might as well dance.” Well that might well be a bromide for life, but when you’re stepping out on the real thing you don’t even want to do the ‘soft shoe’. Lake and river ice is dangerous, predictable sometimes but never a sure thing.
You see, ice doesn’t freeze or thaw with uniformity. It can be a foot thick in one place and eggshell thin in another on the same body of water. It depends. Currents, springs unseen, pressure cracks, winds, shade and the location of inlets and outlets, narrows, rocks, and vegetation all determine the strength of the ice.
You can’t just be certain even with a lifetime of crossing the same frozen lake. The Assom brothers, then very old men, operated likely the last steam driven sawmill in the province here in Algoma until a mishap in the late 1970’s. One of the old fellows was crossing the lake with horses and a sleigh load of logs, a lake he’d traveled on since he was a boy, when they went through in about ten feet of water. Old Assom jumped clear, undressed and made several futile dives to try to free his team. He survived to testify that you could never be sure about ice.
I’ve had a few close calls. We were ice fishing in early January and in a real cold snap too. Being cautious we were testing the ice for thickness while hiking over the lake to where we wanted to fish. I tapped the ice with the axe at one point and broke right through, hearing and feeling ice cracking, letting go around me. We flattened out, crawled away and went back to the camp and the coffee pot and spent some time making firm New Year’s resolutions.
Another time I was coming into camp on foot in early May. The ice looked punky, so I skirted the shore. The snow was still around five feet deep, mushy and rain rotted. My pack was eighty pounds or so. Slop clung to my snowshoes and I felt like a bug trying to walk across flypaper. With frustrating regularity one of the snowshoes would slice sideways and I’d go down, struggle with the heavy pack and have to right myself.
After five or six hours I was played out, pissed off and precipitant. There was a fresh moose track on the edge of the lake and if the moose could walk on that flat surface so could I. Moreover, I knew that stretch of shoreline and its shallow depths from skidding logs into the lake the summer before and that was another reason for venturing out on it. So I got out on the lake and followed the track. I was thinkin’ “This is easier”.
After a bit the moose left the lake and I carried blithely on, wondering why, when I went through up to my waist, snowshoes on my feet, packsack on my back. There had been a little drain coming in at that spot and I guess the moose sensed it: dammit, I felt damp and foolish. On a colder day it might have killed me.
Once I stupidly accepted an unspoken challenge that put me out on bad ice. My buddy Ray was another rough ticket. He’d spent most of his childhood and many adult years in lockups for assorted misunderstandings. Before his reformation Ray had been a real splinter off the devil. He was helping me make maple syrup and it was the end of the season and the last rain for the week was going downtown that day. We’d have to catch it or tough it out with dwindling supplies. But the final sap boil was going slow, so while waiting for it to come to syrup we drank the heel of a case of wine. That was distracting.
The pan came to syrup and boiled over. Ray lifted it off the stove and his bare hands got covered in the syrup foam. I looked on and for once couldn’t say a word –nobody would do a thing like that. We went back into the cabin, sat down and calmly sipped our drinks.
It was up to him. Ray wasn’t the kind of a guy you’d solicitously start performing first aid on. I just waited for him and watched the level of the bottle going down while counting the scars on Ray’s face and admiring the sweat coursing off his brow. Ray and I passed a few non-related comments.
To make the train we’d have to cross the lakes, which under the circumstances, seemed to be the thing to do if not the best idea. I also felt that I couldn’t duck into the shadows of Ray’s quirky bravado, so we decided to go. And that was the whole situation.
The ice was poor with a wide-open space between it and the shore. We got the dogs, sleigh and ourselves onto the lake in a shady spot where there was an ice bridge and hike over the rotten surface to the track.
The load in the basket was left unsecured in case we had to dump it. We traveled fast, running full out on either side of the sleigh handles in case we hit a hot spot. We figured to be able to pull out a dog if one broke through or to grab hold of a handle should one of us need skidding out. For five miles we never broke stride, our feet touching down only lightly and briefly. The Lord laid his gentle hands over us and we made it though. Holy Smokes and Holy Ghost!
Nowhere near as dangerous but a memory-maker nonetheless was when brother Earl shot a moose that found the strength to run through a wide skiff of ice, into the lake, somersaulted high in the air and landed on its back in a tremendous splash in the deep water. It was snowing too, those thick big fat flakes that pile up fast. My good eye rolled in my head as I took this all in. It was getting’ dark…
There was nothing for it but to build a big fire, put up a wood pile, strip to our long johns, take the liners our of our boots and go in after it in water near armpit deep. We made a big withdrawal on our Native stoicism and Catholic work ethic for strength and perseverance. As we made our way to the moose we broke and widened the channel through the ice.
To skid it out we cut handholds behind the ankles. First we’d grab the horns and the inside of the mouth to move the head towards shore and then pull on the legs on the underside of the animal and then return to the top: we repeated the process over and over. After an hour the moose was beached and a years’ meat secured.
It hadn’t occurred to us to hesitate –working in cold water happens on hunts. So intent were we on the task, the work so demanding that our bodies were running hot and we barely felt discomfort. We had been well-rested because we still hunt, were well-fed on a very high calorie bacon diet, were still young, fit and could take it.
Anyway, looking back on it all as a man of advanced years I’ve come to realize I was often lucky, blessed by The Great Mystery and that chancing ice and living a long life are likely not compatible notions. Hey-up.
FLY TIME
They once found the body of a black fly-maddened bushman at the base of a tree, gun in hand, his brains blown out. He’d blazed the tree with his axe and left the message “Hell can’t be worse than this, I’m going to chance it”. Bugs can be pesky.
When prospecting in mid-summer Silas and I had to walk out each evening, a mile or so, to the canoe. We were hungry, tired and the deer flies were so bad. They can chew through a heavy shirt and so we were both always on that fine edge at the day’s end. Because of it we never spoke until we reached the canoe, the beer that was in it and were out on the lake where breezes swept the flies away.
Coming in from loggin’ one day I was feeling a little itchy, took off my shirt to rub up against a tree. Earl looked at my back, was stunned and wanted to do a count of mosquito bites. He marked off a small square with the charcoal end of a fire stick, counted and then estimated that I had over 500 bites while speculation on how many it would take to kill a man of my seemingly stern constitution. On another memorable day I had the misfortune of upsetting four different hives of yellow jackets and took over thirty hits.
Now everyone’s read about the stuff you can do to keep the bugs away. From my experience a full brimmed hat is the best because in combination with fly dope it keeps them away from your eyes and ears where they cause the most stress. Mosquitos are worse early in the morning and in the evening during which times it’s good to wear a heavy jacket.
At a campsite you can throw green cedar boughs or green grasses on the coals of the fire to make a smudge. If you rub cedar leaf oils on your face and hands you’ll have some protection. My brother, Earl, swore that by sticking cedar boughs in and around your hat you’d get a lot of relief. I thought he was losing it but later read that this was a practice among the Indians and that it works. Earl use to say he was disguising himself as a tree.
Once in desperation I coated my face and hands with bacon fat like the voyageurs use to. It helps but after a few days you get little pustules all over your face. You also have to wonder about the advisability of making your head into a rancid hunk of bear bait. Another time in a crazed moment that lasted days I wiped my clothes and body with the contents of a can of Black Flag DDT that I found in a dump behind a caved in old trapper’s camp. That was good stuff.
On the other hand you can get used to them. I was sitting out in the garden on the farm here and felt surrounded by the grace of peace and serenity. Wondering why, I realized that I was in a cloud of blackflies and was feeling as at ease as I would in the bush. I made a big mistake later when I tried to share this with the Missus and got ‘The Look’ in return.
WASHING AND BATHING
Personal hygiene is relative. It all depends on where you are and what you can get used to. In fly time you don’t want to use soaps, whose scents will attract irksome insects. Forget shaving. You can scrub with sand or muck from river and lake bottoms. In colder weather you just forget the whole thing. After a few weeks your body adjusts and it doesn’t seem to bother you. Lots of old fellows used to say that when they had their occasional bath they’d find a pair or two of long johns they’d forgotten they owned.
