A Yankee in the Canadian Bush -- Wolverine

Me, age 8, with wolverine

Dad with wolverine that was mounted life-size in L&F office

Chapter 8 

The spring of 1961 changed us forever. So many incredible things happened to us at the camp as the ice was breaking up that none of us could ever go back to our former lives.

Bill arrived in the middle of the second day and apologized for locking all the cabins. The ice had gotten so bad, he just figured we weren’t coming until after breakup.

During the next couple of weeks, Bill and Dad prepared the wooden boats for launching and also, when the ice had melted sufficiently, took a boat down the shoreline about a mile to where Bill wanted to build his new cabin. The two men worked felling trees, clearing brush and placing wooden posts to be used as a foundation.

Meanwhile, Mom and I were thrilled by the ice-out process.

One day the ice just seemed to magically start coming onto land. Almost imperceptibly it moved up and over the rocks, shattering into icicles as it did so. The whole shoreline tinkled with the sound of a million icicles falling together. We would learn it was the wind farther out on the lake that was bringing the ice sheet to shore.

The first place to have “opened up” was just north of the camp where the narrows makes a sharp turn. The current as it goes around the bend prevents the ice from freezing deeply in the winter and in the spring makes a pool of open water that grows in size daily.

I wandered out onto a rocky point by the pool one day and was just standing there when I suddenly hit the deck. It was an instinctive response to something I had heard many times on the Pickerel River – a military jet screaming at hundreds of miles per hour just above the tree tops. The jets, coming from an air base not far from the Pickerel and practising low-level flying, would give little warning. There would just be a hint of a roar, followed by a whoosh, then ear-splitting thunder.

So, at the first bit of roar and whoosh, I fell to the rocks and covered my ears. The thunder never came. Instead, when I looked up, there floating in the water in front of me was a little brown duck with a  brilliant gold eye. Just then, another duck arrived. It came flying in so fast I thought it would go right over the pool but it abruptly tilted its wings backwards and to my astonishment made the loud roar and whooshing sound. It had just been air vibrating through the duck’s feathers! This duck was mostly white but had a blue-green head with a white spot. These ducks were Goldeneyes.

My eight-year-old Buckeye ears were fooled another time as well. I kept hearing a pack of dogs barking off in the distance. They sounded like hounds, I thought, and didn’t think much of it until it finally dawned on me that there weren’t houses with dogs here like in Ohio.

The dogs always sounded so far away. I looked down the shoreline in each direction. Nothing. Then I looked at the big hill across the narrows. No dogs there either but as I followed the hill to the top – and then above – I spotted them, in a V. Geese! They were flying thousands of feet off the ground, just specks against the blue sky. Although decades later geese would be common everywhere, in 1961 they were an oddity and I had never seen them before.

The lack of bird life all over North America was explained  the following year, 1962, by a biologist  named Rachel Carson. She wrote a book called Silent Spring about how pesticides were killing all of the birds, insects and even wild plants. It would be a decade before I heard of her work.
If the ice, ducks and geese weren’t interesting enough, one day I walked down to the point in front of Bill’s cabin, peered into the clear water and couldn’t believe my eyes. There were northern pike, by the thousands, swimming nose to tail, just a few feet off shore. Mostly they were single file but occasionally there were twos or threes. They were moving steadily to the north. Every hour another thousand would pass by the point. The spectacle lasted for days.

Of course, Mom and I quickly got our fishing rods and tried to get the pike to strike on spoons and spinners. None would.

We asked Bill for an explanation.

“They are all headed to Dean Creek to spawn. You can see them in there with their backs right out of the water. There are thousands and thousands of them.”

Dean Creek was about a mile away to the Northwest. The pike were apparently coming from Trout Bay, more than a mile away to the South. It was a fish mass migration. After a pause of about a week the whole spectacle happened in reverse but this time the fish were more spread out. They still would not bite.

Meanwhile we made another discovery -- there were nightcrawlers in the yard. We caught a bunch, put them in a can, and. Mom, who was an alpha angler if there ever was one, immediately rigged her fishing rod with a hook, sinker and bobber. No sooner would the red-and-white plastic bobber hit the water than it would be pulled under by a fish.

Her first many catches were whitefish, a species new to us. They were good to eat, said Bill, so we had a few suppers of them.

Then Mom got a lake trout which surprised Bill as he did not believe they could be taken on a worm.

“Now you have the best-eating fish in the lake,” he said. “Let me bake it and you will see for yourself.”

Bill baked it in the oven of his wood-burning cookstove. We marveled at its taste but privately Mom, Dad and I decided we really preferred northern pike, a fish that Bill absolutely abhorred.

“I call them hyenas,” he said. “If muskies are the wolves of the water, then I figure northerns are the hyenas. HaHaHa.”

Eventually the narrows was totally clear of ice and Dad and Bill took off in Bill’s 14-foot aluminum boat for the town of Red Lake, expecting to be gone all day. Instead they were back in just 30 minutes.

Incredibly, while dodging ice packs in Wolf Narrows they had struck and killed a wolverine.

Dad had thought they were extinct in Northern Ontario, and he wasn’t far wrong. This was the last one, at least for the next 30 years.

Bill, who had been trapping at Red Lake nearly his entire life, had never seen one before. Since wolverines were a protected species he wanted to just leave it right there in the lake for fear the authorities would believe he trapped it. Dad, however, thought it a shame to leave the animal to waste. It was a very large male wolverine and probably weighed 40 pounds.

He talked Bill into letting him take it to the Department of Lands and Forests. Maybe he could get a permit to have it made into a rug, he thought.

They came back to camp because the lake was still blocked with ice beyond Wolf Narrows. Bill calculated that with the strong south wind that was building, the lake would be clear the next day.

We took photos of the wolverine and put it on ice. Sure enough, the next day, the lake was open enough for Dad and Bill to boat to town and for Dad to take the wolverine into the Department of Lands and Forests office at Red Lake.

“Absolutely not!” long-time conservation officer Bert Colebourn told Dad when he asked if he could get a permit to send the animal to a taxidermist in Winnipeg.

“This wolverine isn’t going anywhere,” said the warden.

Instead the Red Lake District L&F had the creature made into a life-size mount which has been displayed in a glass case at the office ever since. That was a far better way of honoring the old wolverine, Dad agreed.

...to be continued

Other postings in this series:

Prologue

Rough Draft

Bad Ice

Why Here? 

A Gold Mine

Talking Bill into Selling

Red Lake in the '60s  

First Winter

Bullies

One busy week for this trail camera

Lynx

Red fox

Wolf

Fisher

I have another episode of A Yankee in the Canadian Bush to publish but I have been slowed down by converting some slides into digital photos. Speaking of photos ...
I quit checking my trail cameras late last winter because there was so little on them. Finally I picked up the camera above and found all of these creatures which had appeared within a week of each other.
I enlarged the shot of the fisher because he was in the far background. It is a really nice fisher. The lynx is small, probably last year's kitten. The wolf is about average. The red fox is only the second fox we saw all winter.

Red Lake 2020 ice-out today, May 13

Scene from Red Lake Marine. Bay is clear of ice. Sherry McCoy photos

I just heard from Sherry McCoy at Red Lake Marine that Howey Bay was free of ice for the first time this morning.
It has been unusually cold this spring which delayed the ice-out a little. Average ice-out is May 8.
I haven't been paying too close attention to the weather stats but still thought it would take to May 17. I'm glad to be wrong.
There has been an unusual amount of wind this spring. Many days have seen wind in the 30-40 km-h (20-30 mph). The wind has done some strange things. Here at our home in Nolalu, our 40 inches of snow mostly just evaporated. Creeks and rivers never had much runoff.

Just a day or two ago

A Yankee in the Canadian Bush -- Bullies

Chapter 7

Enrolling in Grade 2 at Red Lake Public School should have been a wonderful experience for me but it turned out to be anything but. A year earlier I had started Grade 1 in the one-room schoolhouse at Pickerel River and then transferred that winter to a school in Eastlake, Ohio. Dad spent that winter renovating the upstairs of a historic farmhouse for my uncle, Ervie Kitzel. We lived in the upstairs while he worked.

Before I could be admitted to Thomas Jefferson Elementary School I had to have an assessment which I failed, miserably. Although I could read and print simple words I just didn’t seem to be able to follow instructions. The evaluators also could barely understand me. I did not speak clearly, mispronouncing or slurring words. The evaluators were not amused by the way I could count either.

When I was a young child my mother was busy looking after my dying maternal grandmother and also my dad who had been badly injured in a car accident. My sister, Sandi, who was 11 years older than me, and my brother, Bill, who was 14 years older, largely were in charge of bringing me up. They likely weren’t as strict with me as regular parents would have been.

Bill liked to play cards with his friends and used my interest in poker games to teach me to count. I learned ace, deuce, tray, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, king.

They knew what I meant when I talked about seeing “pishers” in the photo album and so didn’t correct me.

The school evaluators wanted to send me to special school for “slow learners.” Mom and Dad were surprised and demanded I be allowed to attend regular classes; however, they did agree to let a speech pathologist conduct home visits to see if my vocabulary could be corrected. Every week for the rest of the winter a lady would come to my uncle’s house with new words for me to pronounce, starting with PIC-TURE. I was made to practise the new list and the old ones every day with my mother. Sure enough, my diction improved. An unintended consequence, however, was that the Northeastern Ohio accent was forever etched into my brain, something that would occasionally cause me problems for decades to follow.

My work at school was barely passable. When I was asked to copy new words from the blackboard onto paper I wrote total nonsense. Instead of printing LOOK, I might write down HMR. It did indeed seem like I suffered from a learning disability. Then my perceptive teacher moved me from the back of the class to the front. Instantly, I did better. She sent a note home to have my eyes tested.

I was found to have acute astigmatism in one eye and mild impairment in the other. With this revelation the school evaluators wanted to re-test me and later met with my parents beaming from ear to ear. They had found I had an IQ of 154 and wanted to enroll me in special school for gifted learners!

“Just a few weeks ago you told us Dan was a slow learner,” I remember my dad saying. “Now you’re saying he is, what? A genius?”

“Exactly!” said the two ladies.

“You know, I think we will leave him right where he is, in regular school,” Dad said.

Any chance of showing what a “genius” I could be with corrected vision was thwarted by my optometrist who was determined to train my “lazy eye.” I was prescribed glasses with the lens for my “good eye” covered. I could barely see at all. These were the glasses I wore when I entered Grade 2 in Red Lake.

It has often been noted that children can be cruel but I would add that kids are no different than chickens. They instinctively pick on anyone who is different from themselves.

I started Grade 2 with three strikes against me. 1. Not only was I the only child with glasses but one of the lenses was black; 2. I sounded “funny” and finally, 3. I was the new kid. I was a virtual beacon for bullies.

It started on my second day. I had to walk about three-quarters of a mile to school, right down the main street of town which should have been safe enough; however, there were several spots that were not in the public eye and this is where big kids would wait for me. They would beat me up, steal my lunch and, eventually, snapped my glasses in two.

Once I knew the ambush spots I would go out of my way to avoid them. The bullies, however, quickly figured this out and laid in wait on the alternate routes.

After getting a late start one day and seeing the bullies ahead of me running to beat the bell at school I thought I had found a solution – be late every day. However, as I would tear down the sidewalks at top speed so I too wouldn't be late, I would trigger a chase instinct from the dogs that roamed freely everywhere. In short order, I would be eye-to-eye with a pack of snarling huskies ready to tear me to bits. There was nothing to do but stand with my knees knocking until some adult came along.

For awhile my sister, Sandi, would walk me home each day and that saved me from a beating in each direction. However, she and her husband, Cliff, eventually left for Ohio when Cliff’s truck-driving job ended and he could find nothing else in Red Lake.

I started faking illnesses to avoid school. The bullies, to my surprise, came looking for me. One weekend I was walking on the sawdust roads behind our house when I was accosted by one of my usual tormentors. He kept me occupied while an accomplice slipped in behind and got on his hands and knees. The first thug gave me a sudden shove and I fell backwards over the other. They had picked a spot on a small cliff. I fell about 10 feet, right onto my head. Likely the only thing that saved me from a broken neck was that sawdust from the road had spilled down to this spot and cushioned my fall. I was still hurt but made it back to the cabin.

Fortunately, a calamity occurred soon afterwards that made us move back to Ohio. The airtight heater refused to burn and since the outside temperature was getting down to 15 below zero Fahrenheit at night, a remedy had to be found immediately. Dad got a ladder and went up on the roof only to discover that the block chimney which had been brand new when we moved in two months earlier was totally blocked by creosote. It was as solid as glass. The only possible remedy would be to tear down the chimney and lay another.

There was another growing problem with the cabin as well. The sawdust insulation in the walls was settling and a band of frost on the walls was growing in width each day. It was then about a foot wide. It could be fixed by taking off the top inside board and shoveling in more sawdust but all the sawdust at the mill was frozen as hard as a rock.

The final straw was that Dad was finished building cabins and could not find any other work. It was also plain that nothing else would be built anywhere in town until spring.  

A funny thing happened just before we left. My mom and I were home alone one night when a loud, eerie sound arose from atop the hill. My mom, who had grown up in Athens, southern Ohio, was sure she knew what it was.

“It’s Holy Rollers!” she exclaimed, obviously scared.

 I didn’t know what she meant.

“They’re a church where people start talking in tongues and pass around poisonous snakes!”

“Where do they get the snakes in the winter?” I asked and started to go outside to hear everything better.

Mom jerked me back in and locked the door. Now I was scared too.

We sat in the dark so no one would know the house was occupied. I envisioned that the screaming Rollers were going door-to-door, thrusting rattlesnakes onto anyone who answered.

Eventually Dad came back.

“Did you hear the powwow?” he asked. “Boy, that was really something!”

It was now early December. We took off in our old car for Uncle Ervie's again. 

We made it to Chicago when the engine started to fail late at night. Dad always had his trusty toolbox handy and worked on the motor while I held the flashlight.

There was no fix to the problem other than to get a new part, or at least, a good used one. It was late, all the garages were closed and we couldn't afford to stay at a motel. The engine still ran, but badly.

Dad started driving slowly around the back streets of Chicago, getting deeper and deeper into the city.

Mom was worried.

"I don't like the looks of this place," she said more than once.

Dad kept going. Eventually, he found what he was looking for -- a gas station with a bunch of teenagers with slicked-back hair and dressed in black leather jackets. They were lounging around souped-up cars. Likely every one of them carried a switchblade.

Dad parked the car and walked over to the group. Pretty soon they all came over to the car to look under the hood.

"It's a Canadian engine," said Dad, "but I think that distributor is the same as an American  Chevy."

They were all interested. 

"Yeah, 250 cubic inch," said one of the hoods.

"Think you can find one?" asked Dad. "It would be worth $20 to me."

A couple of the guys put a toolbox in a car and disappeared. They were back in half an hour and helped Dad put a distributor in our car. We reached Eastlake the next morning.

…to be continued

Other postings in this series:

Prologue

Rough Draft

Bad Ice

Why Here? 

A Gold Mine

Talking Bill into Selling

Red Lake in the '60s  

First Winter