Though we definitely touched upon this topic a couple weeks ago, w.docx

Though we definitely touched upon this topic a couple weeks
ago, we’re going to spend a little more time with this unit
talking about various kinds of harvesting: hunting, fishing,
gathering, gardening, and farming. From catfish to wild
ginseng, morel mushrooms (dry land fish) to hot garden
peppers, it’s all fair game for this week.
As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in the outdoors in the
Upper Midwest, in an area with thousands of lakes and deep
state and national forests. And our whole year was filled with
subsistence activities. May and June are busy months for us:
fishing for walleye, brook trout, and bass (in different kinds of
waters), hunting for morel mushrooms, planting and tending
gardens, harvesting ramps (or wild onions). There’s a
subsistence activity for every season. In summer: wild berries
(blueberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, blackberries,
pincherries, chokecherries). In fall, grouse and deer hunting,
wild ricing, fishing for muskie, and harvesting wild cranberries.
In the winter, we’d ice fish, and most of my uncles formerly
trapped for meat and fur until the early 1960s.
There are a lot of reasons why people might hunt, fish, garden,
or gather in today’s day and age. These traditions aren’t usually
essential for our own survival today, when we can buy food
from the store—although some people (myself included when I
was younger), really need the extra food. Yet these traditions
remain extraordinarily strong in rural communities across the
country (with ample regional variations). These traditions
endure because they’re really important to a lot of people on a
deep level.
There’s no one thing as “hunting” or “fishing.” There are many
co-existing reasons people harvest their own food. One time,
when I was in grad school and money was very tight for me, I
drove north to visit my parents, and get a few days of fishing in
so I’d have some fish to eat. I returned to Madison, Wisconsin,
and was telling a friend that I was north fishing. “How great to

have that bonding time with your father,” he said. I tried to
explain that my family always considered fishing a form of
work, since we relied upon the meat. He countered, “Yeah, but
it’s all about the memories you make together.” Well, not for
us, Steve... not for us.
What “Steve” was really saying is that he had a bad relationship
with his dad, and that fishing brought them together. He then
projected that emotion and experience onto me, and literally
could not understand—no matter how many different ways I
explained it—that we were fishing for reasons that differed
from his own. Now, I’m not saying my fishing is somehow
better than his... I’m only saying it’s different, and that it’s
important to 1) always listen when people say that their
experience is different from your own; and 2) give space to
allow traditions to exist that are outside of your own
experience.
You might mushroom hunt for fun. You might hunt ducks for
sport. You might fish to bond with a family member. Your
might pick blackberries because the ones at the store are too
expensive, or grow your own tomatoes because the ones at the
store have “no flavor.” You might harvest food because it’s
what you grew up with, and it just feels wrong to not put in a
garden during the summer. You might harvest food as an
expression of your identity (or even spirituality), to feel
relationships with your food sources, or even as a political act
to support local food systems. Or maybe it’s a little bit of all of
the above, all at the same time.
One of the best parts about working in folklore is working with
primary texts, and this week we’ll be looking at a couple. Cully
Gage (or Charles Van Riper) was the son of a doctor who
grew up in Upper Michigan in the early 20th century. He
worked as a linguist at Michigan State University, and after
retiring, he wrote memoirs about his childhood and the rich
local culture of the region. Similarly, Mert Cowley is a “deer
hunting poet,” who tends to write simple rhymed verse
depicting comical situations surrounding hunting and outdoor

life. These kinds of works are extremely popular, but only
within a very small community. You might see them in local
bookstores, or even for sale in restaurants and gas stations.
Sometimes called folk literature, these authors tap into local
themes for a local audience in ways that build and sustain
community and identity.
Hunting, fishing, gardening, farming, and gathering aren’t just
ways to attain food, but rather they are a way of life. They can
represent how we understand place and time, how we
communicate, how we understand life and death, and how we
understand our own place in the world. People hunt and tell
stories about hunting. They create art for their homes that
reflect hunting themes, or even have their animals taxidermied
to hang on their walls. People buy bass license plates, wear deer
sweatshirts, and wood burn animal tracks on gun cabinets. They
study ecology, weather, and traditional hunting techniques for
fun. They learn how to process animals or tan hides on their
own. They have special recipes for game, and serve the game to
mark special occasions or to honor certain guests. People
develop unique customs to ritualize the hunt: taking a bite from
a deer heart, parading back to camp with a deer-liver on a
forked stick, cutting shirt-tales off if a hunter misses a buck.
Harvesting food is more than just a pastime. It’s how you live,
how you think, and how you experience the world.
Cully Gage’s short stories are from a series of books called The
Northwoods Reader. (Note that these scans are from many
different books, so there are some scanned pages after the
completion of a story that you don’t need to read.) Food is a
recurrent theme throughout these series, and I’ve chosen a few
examples that reflect some different ways people deal with food
“Wild Food” reflects the great diversity of foods that were
regularly eaten in Upper Michigan, and the knowledge of local
edibles that old-timers once possessed. When I first read these
chapters, I was shocked by how many everyday plants I
experienced were regularly eaten as a food source. Particularly,
I began to wonder why we are not encouraged to forage

on these plants today, but rather are encouraged to be afraid of
eating local plants. I still recall, when I was 4 years old and
visiting a neighbor, I went into their backyard and was eating
wintergreen berries. The neighbor parents (from Chicago)
panicked because I was eating
berries. My mother was called, she came over, and there was
much ado. My mom empathized with my neighbor, but I was
somewhat defiant: “Learn your berries, Marge! This isn’t
exactly rocket science.”
It does seem strange to me that people have forgotten how to eat
edible plants that grow all around us, and instead depend on
commercial food production. It seems a bit unwise from both an
economic standpoint, and from a “survival of the species”
standpoint... but maybe that’s just me. Like many
outdoorspeople, Gage is interested in bushcraft and Native
hunting and trapping technologies. Not long before his time,
people made snares of telegraph wire or even inner basswood
fire, they dug pit-traps with spears for deer, and used dead-fall
traps to kill wild game without suffering. Some Native friends
of mine still use traditional traps. They’re ingenious and
probably more humane than steel traps.
If you look at Gage’s stories, you’ll see a lot of recognizable
themes. There is discussion of poaching deer (and acceptable
and unacceptable poaching). There’s a disdain for store-bought
blueberries (since the wild ones are so much better), or the
refusal to serve wild strawberry jam to city people who won’t
appreciate it, implicitly dividing community insiders from
outsiders.
The final two selections show how oral genres of stories emerge
from hunting and fishing as a practice. The first describes a
storytelling session, in which people are story-swapping at a
bar, telling increasingly more unbelievable stories, until they
become tall tales. Tall tales are much like legends (or stories
that are told as if they are true), except tall tales are told mostly
for the amusement of the teller. If I tell a whopper of a fishing
tale, I’m testing you to see how far you’ll believe me as the

story becomes increasingly outlandish. It’s almost a game more
than a story.
Did I ever tell you about the time my uncle was fishing and a 36
inch muskie jumped into the boat with him? This was actually
witnessed by a game warden (so we know it actually happened),
and my uncle released the muskie because it wasn’t legally
caught.
One time your uncle was fishing for bass, and there was a little
red cap on his new reel that looked like a jewel. This was in the
1960s. And that little jewel just popped right off when he was
reeling it up, and it fell into the lake. Well, he was fishing that
same lake later that summer... 3 months later... and he caught a
bass, and when he filleted it and opened its stomach, there was
that same jewel he lost.
True or not? I’m told these stories are true. But I don’t really
know.
The final story involves pranks. A Norwegian and Finn, Emil
and Eino, are best friends who enjoy pranking each other. Eino
decides to tap a telephone pole, as if it’s a maple tree. Emil
thinks Eino to be a fool. When they find liquid in the sap bucket
the next day, Eino is excited and Emil is confused. When Emil
decides to prove it’s not maple sap, he takes a sip, only to
realize the bucket’s actual contents.
Often people play pranks or jokes on each other in the woods as
a sort of test of one’s awareness. One fishing guide uncle of
mine was asked by a tourist: “Whenever I’m casting, the fish
are striking short. They’re hitting the end of the lure, but it’s
behind the hook. What should I do?” My uncle said: “Put a
longer leader on it.” (For non-fishers, this means basically
using a longer line, which would have no impact on where a fish
strikes. I think it’s funny.)
Or, when a tourist saw a robin, she asked him how to lure the
robin closer to her so she could take a photo. He said: “Just
make a noise like a worm.” These jokes encourage one to pay
attention to their own surroundings, lest you face a teasing or
joke at your own expense.

Mert Cowley’s book In Camps of Orange is about deer hunting
in Wisconsin. The book is a hodgepodge of photos, reflections,
stories, and more, and what’s excerpted here is an excerpt from
a deer camp’s journal that describes 3 different years of hunting
in their deer camp.
Many hunters go to a deer camp. The camp itself can be many
things (including just being in an ordinary house), but often the
camp occurs in a fairly rustic building, sometimes lacking
electricity or running water in the backwoods. Deer camps are
filled with folklore. There are stories, jokes, and pranks. There
are recipes made year after year, and some men assume
“women’s roles” as cooks and caretakers within the camp space.
There are card games, flowing alcohol, good luck charms, art
made at camp, and lots of laughs. Not every camp is like this, of
course, but many are. I even had one former student whose
family would watch Bambi the night before the hunt, and root
for the hunters.
In many places where hunting is important, school is canceled,
local radio shows report on who shot and registered deer in the
area, and radios play a small collection of hunting-themed
songs by local artists on the radio like “The Second Week of
Deer Camp” and “Da 30- Point Buck.” (Give each a quick
sampling.) Actor Jeff Daniels, who is originally from lower
Michigan, wrote a stage play which he adapted to a film about
these camps called Escanaba in Da Moonlight, featuring fart-
jokes, incomprehensible dialects, aliens, and homemade
moonshine. Perhaps it also had something to do with deer, as
well.
Cowley is a fairly serious hunter, and that reflects in the
reading. Camp life balances serious hunting with good eating,
dealing
with weather, nicknames, jokes, “camp records,” and the “two
who tend to tipple.” You can see changes as the week goes on,
from the excitement of the night before the hunt, to initial focus
on the hunting (with precise times marked), to a retreat into the
more social aspects of camp later in the week.

The camp journal is both a serious record of the hunt, as well as
a place to enshrine tomfoolery and misdeeds. Lots of camps
have them, but not all do. I also know people who have kept
records of the hunt carved into the wood of their deer stands.
After a lot of years in the woods, the memories tend to blend
together.
I’d like you to watch an episode of the 25 minute program,
“Wisconsin Foodie.” There are two halves to the episode. The
first involves Native-inspired festival foods at Milwaukee’s
Indian Summer Festival. The second involves the revitalization
of a very old cooking technique, cooking a stuffed muskie
underground and wrapped in birchbark. This tradition hasn’t
been practiced in perhaps more than a century, until a few
people in the community decided to bring it back. It’s worth
asking, which is the more authentic tradition? Baking a muskie
in a way that hasn’t been done in a century? Or eating the tasty
festival foods you likely grew up with, but with a Native twist?
There are important lessons to learn here about how we
understand authenticity. Authenticity is perhaps rooted more in
our perceptions and personal values than in historical reality.
Some people speak of authenticity being bound to a year. Are
potatoes authentic Irish cuisine, or is
tomato sauce authentic to Italian foods? Well, if you’re talking
about today, definitely. But if you go back 500 years, both
foods were only present in the Americas. Were these cuisines
more authentic in the year 1400? Well, many of the agricultural
practices during the Middle Ages were imported from the
Middle East. So, was Irish and Italian cuisine more authentic in
the year 6000 BCE, when people were hunting, fishing, and
gathering—before most of these languages and territories were
even established in a contemporary sense? It’s an absurd game
you can play when you try to link authenticity to the past.
Everything comes from somewhere.
After all, is it more “authentic” if you ate foods from 1900,
dressed in the latest styles of that time, or expected farmers to
give up tractors? Of course not! We’d probably feel ridiculous

doing so. Authenticity is sort of a paradox. At once, nothing is
really authentic, yet everything is authentic in its own way.
Thinking of Indian Summer & the muskie bake, I think we can
find certain aspects of authenticity within both traditions. Each
tradition has authenticities within it. We maybe retcon the
entire imagined notion of “authenticity” into the past, in order
to understand the present, or in order to showcase historical
continuity of shared community values.
The last two readings turn towards plants. How we garden can
say a lot about us as people. How do you arrange a garden? Do
you separate different species? Do you plant everything in nice,
neatly arranged rows of evenly spaced plants? This is the norm
in Western cultures. But in Native cultures, where circles are
more culturally important than lines and grids, seeds were often
intermixed and planted in circles. Three sisters gardens, for
instance, mixed beans, corn, and squash. The beans vined up the
corn stalks. The squash’s prickly vines protected the beans. The
beans provided nitrogen for the corn. It remains a really
effective way to plant. So why isn’t it more common among
non-Native people?
Hoover’s journalistic piece on the Oneida farm Tsyunhehkw^
also engages the question of authenticity. Though it’s often
overlooked, Native American peoples were some of the most
sophisticated agriculturists across the globe, who through
careful selective breeding were able
to cultivate wild plants into the domesticated foods that humans
depend on today, including staples like corn, tomatoes, and
potatoes. The Tsyunhehkw^ garden is traditional in its selection
of crops and some of the harvesting activities (like braiding
corn to dry). But it also integrates concepts of farmer’s markets,
educational tourism, and country stores into its business model.
Like the television episode above, we can see that there are
certain authenticities within the farm that date to certain
historical eras, although it is a modern operational farm which
is authentic to our lives today. Once again, this is an
outstanding example of how tradition involves static and

dynamic elements, and how cultural practice is always creolized
and hybrid in nature.
Finally, Mary Hufford’s piece on ginseng is a great overview of
the importance of this plant in West Virginia, Kentucky, and
Tennessee. Like the hunting stories above, people have
traditional knowledge about where ginseng grows, how to find
it, and how best to sustainably harvest it (or to conceal it from
others). We see specialized terms to describe ginseng and
ginseng-look-alikes. There are place names that reflect ginseng.
Finding a large ginseng root is like catching a big fish, and it’s
seen as something of a hunt or competition to locate a large
plant. There are somewhat elitist tendencies that favor the
efficacy of wild ginseng over domesticated ginseng.
Hufford makes a point about “the commons” at the end of her
essay. The commons is essentially a term that’s used to describe
a kind of public land that people can use for their own
subsistence and livelihoods. The drive to privatize this land, to
restrict it in other ways, or to industrialize it destroys important
economic, environmental, and cultural resources for the people
who depend on it. Whether you’re taking away ginseng habitat,
or whether you’re trying to protect ginseng by restricting its
harvest, you’re hurting people who have harvesting ginseng
there for generations, and you’re damaging an entire way of life
for ginsengers.
Gage:
WILD FOOD
After the mine closed, the people of Tioga had some very

hard times but they managed to eat despite the lack of biting
money or any other kind. Sometimes toward the end of winter it
was bare survival fare but we always made it somehow. I've
been remembering the things we ate all through the year, the
wild food that sustained us, not only in hard times, but in the
easy ones too. Meat was basic, of course, and fortunately deer
were usually plentiful. Venison roasts, chops, steaks, in
season or out, were staples in our diet. If we'd shot an old tough
buck, we ground the deer meat into patties for our plates or we
beat the hell out of it for our stews. We boiled it, fried it,
roasted it, and sometimes fed the last remnants to our hounds.
Few of our hunters shot big bucks if they could help it; the
young spike- horns or does were much better eating. I ate so
much venison when I was a boy I've never cared particularly for
it since. I guess I can say the same for rabbits, too. Some of
those big snowshoes could also be pretty tough, especially
those from a cedar swamp. After the snows came our rabbits
were easier to snare than to shoot because they'd turned white.
Often their brown eyes were all you could see before making
out their contours in the snow. One year though, their winter
change of color betrayed them. We'd had a big early snow, and
then, when it turned very warm, we could walk along the south
sides of our granite hills and spot them easily against the brown
leaves. A lot of rabbits got canned that year. Usually though, we
got most of our rabbits by snaring. All we had to do was to find
a well trodden runway, put little fences of twigs along its sides,
then fasten a loop of picture wire in the middle of it. Five or six
of those snares would almost always yield a rabbit or two
overnight. There are old folks in the U.P. who still shudder at
the thought of eating one more choked rabbit. Deer and rabbits
provided most of our meat but we ate other animals too. A
young bear, shot in berry time or in the fall when it was still fat,
could provide fine eating. The meat was very dark, al most
black, and tasted like a combination of beef and pork. I liked it
but some people didn't, probably because they hadn't dressed it
out properly. Bears have to store up a lot of fat to hibernate,

sometimes so much you have to par- boil a bear steak before
frying it. We also ate ground hogs, beaver, squirrels and
muskrat. I never cared much for muskrat. The meat tasted like
the muck they stirred up smelled. The others were pretty
palatable when you'd sickened of venison. I even ate, or tried to
eat, an old porcupine once. Staying up at our old hunting cabin
at the time, I worked over that old porky for three days and
nights, boiling, baking, roasting and frying it. Never could stick
a fork into that tough meat but I finally cut off a small slice and
chewed on it for maybe an hour before quitting. I still don't
know how it tasted. Perhaps my trouble was that I killed that
por ky at the wrong time. I'd come across it and another one
between our hunting cabin and the lake while they were mating.
The only time I ever saw that happen! How do porcupines mate?
Very carefully! And a bit nastily, too, as I found when I
watched them do it. First, they touched noses, and then the male
urinated on the female. She didn't like that particularly but I
suppose he was just marking out his territory, like timber
wolves did by urinatng on certain stones atop our hills to mark
theirs. Anyway, after the porkies touched noses again, the
female lifted her quilled tail high and he came close and sat up
on his haunches. Then she backed into him, with nary a quill
shed. Yes, porcupines mate very carefully. I'm pretty sure it was
the male that I clubbed and tried to eat. It wad- dled more
slowly Pete Half Shoes, our resident Ojibway Indian, claimed
that you couldn't find any better meat than a haunch of wolf, or
coyote, broiled over maple c0als. I don't know. He offered me a
chunk of it once and I was tempted until I remembered that Old
Man Salo's big hound was missing. Fish, of course, were very
plentiful in the old days. Rarely would a week go by in the
summer without having at least one meal of brook trout, fried
crisp in the pan and garnished with a sprig of parsley or a slice
of lemon. I never got tired of them. Even ate the leftovers for
breakfast. These were native trout, their flesh firm and pink.
Occasionally we'd also have a huge lake trout from Lake
Superior and these Mother always baked so we could flake off

big mouthfuls from the heavy white bones. Northern pike were
good too but you had to be careful of their forked bones.
When we'd get one caught in our throat, we'd swallow a chunk
of bread to carry it down our gullets. Early in the spring, even
suckers were delicious though later they got soft and tasted
muddy. Perch and walleyes always added variety and you didn't
have to make your tongue feel around in your mouth for bones
before swallowing. Many of our Finn families made fish soup
with glazed fish eyes floating on top. I never cared much for it.
Our French Canadians often boiled a mess of fish of every
variety, even chubs, until the bones were soft, then ground the
results up fine and baked them into a loaf. Very good! In the
winter we rarely tried to fish through the ice. It was just too
cold sitting there even after you'd built up a sweat chopping a
hole through two or three feet of blue ice. No, winter was the
time for the smoked fish that had been hanging from the ceiling
of the summer kitchen, or for the marinated ones from the
barrel. Oddly enough,our cats would never eat either. We sure
did. We also had fowl, and not just the extra rooster or broody
hen from the chicken coop. Partridge was our main poultry dish,
and it was excellent if you had a strip of fat bacon to cover it in
the pan for other- wise it was rather dry. We shot a lot of
partridge every fall but never tried to shoot them on the wing.
Shells were too expensive. We'd walk along a deer trail or old
logging road very slowly, looking and listening intently.
Partridge weren't as wild then as they are now and they did a lot
of clucking before they took off. Even then, if you set off an
alarm clock in your pocket or had a good barking dog, they'd fly
up onto a nearby limb and sit there, just waiting for you to
shoot Occasionally, we'd get a spruce hen too. We called them
"fool hens" because they sure were dumb, or perhaps just
curious. They'd sit on a limb and watch you coming. Sometimes
you didn't even have to shoot, just club them if they were within
reach. Their meat was very dark and I didn't care much for it.
Partridge were much better. One old Frenchman downtown
always hung his wild fowl in the barn after they were cleaned,

until their heads fell off. "Takes away the gamey taste," he said.
Perhaps it did but they sure smelled ripe before he got around to
eating them. During their migrations, we also shot a lot of
ducks, mainly mallards, canvas backs and blue winged teal.
The teal were the hardest to shoot on the wing but were the
most flavorful. Coots or mudhens were miserable eating but the
worst of the lot were the mergansers; they tasted like rotten
fish. Once, when some of us boys were camping overnight,
Mullu shot a sea gull and that was terrible too. Sieur LaTour
told us how to set up a fine meshed fish net on sticks, put
chicken scratch feed under it, and then when blackbirds and
robins collected to eat the grain, to pull down the holding stake
with its rope and catch them. LaTour said he'd never used these
bird traps himself but that his grand pere had done it in the old,
old days. A lot of work, he said, but they made a good meat pie.
Four and twenty blackbirds! It's hard for us now to understand
how people ate almost anything when times were hard. Our
major vegetables were potatoes, carrots, cabbage, turnips and
rutabagas but there were some years when the crop was small
because of a wet spring or early frost. Then our people turned to
collecting wild vegetables. They waded the shallow waters of a
lake to dig up spatter- dock roots to bake; they spaded to get the
long roots of dandelions to boil. The pith of burdock roots was
good in stews. Cattail roots were best boiled but they could be
eaten raw too. Pete Halfshoes told us that his Ojibway mother
used to boil Jack-in-the-pulpit bulbs so Fisheye and I tried them
once. When they set our mouths on fire with their hot bitter-
ness and we complained, old Pete said you always had to boil
them three times in new water each time. Maybe so! Pete also
suggested we try skunk cabbage but we weren't too interested.
Most of us never ate any of these except experimentally but
they were available and some of our poor families used them
when they had to. We took some pride in being able to live off
the land. For greens we had wild lettuce, pursley (a garden weed
that's hard to eliminate, hence the saying "mean as pussley"),
lamb's quarters, young milkweed pods, wild onions (leeks),

fiddlehead ferns and, of course, dandelion greens. Of these, I
liked the fiddleheads best. You had to pick them in the spring of
the year when the fronds were just beginning to unfold. They
looked like clenched little green fists, when fresh, but after
being canned, they turned darker. The Finns called them
kuolema goru (the hands of death). Our French Canadians
canned a lot of fiddleheads and ate them all winter. A lot better
than spinach, they were. Somehow, when spring came, all of us
hungered for green things, not only for our souls but also for
our mouths. We chewed cuds of wintergreen leaves; we
munched soursap, an acidic sorrel. We'd nibble the succulent
bottom ends of timothy hay and wild oats after pulling them
from their virginal sheaths. But best of all were wild red
raspberry "tucks." These early shoots, when peeled of their
fuzzy surface skin and dipped in a bit of salt, sure seemed to fill
a basic need and we ate yards of them. Probably needed the
vitamins they provided. Perhaps that same need also explains
why we would often slice a raw potato and eat it with salt at
break-up time or swipe a bit of sugar to put on the first green
stalks of rhubarb. There were no salads in our houses when the
snows were deep, nor for that matter, at any other time either.
We were mainly meat and potato folk. Most of us had sugar
because it was fairly cheap. If you ran out, you could always
borrow a cup from your neighbor provided that you returned it
with a heap on. But our huge maple trees provided a bounty of
sweet sap every spring that, when boiled down, would yield
syrup, maple sugar, and maple wax. The latter was a very chewy
delicacy created by throwing a ladle of thick hot syrup on clean
snow. Sometimes maple wax glued your teeth together but it
sure tasted good. We also sucked sap icicles when it froze
overnight in sap time. Occasionally, someone would find a
honey tree by sighting the paths of bees as they went home. I
never was successful though I sure tried hard and often got
stung for my pains. I'd get a can and put it over a bumblebee on
a dandelion or some other flower, waita bit, then release it and
try to see which way it went, then can another one and look

again. Unfortunately, a lot of them got mad buzzing under the
can and nailed me when I lifted it off. I did find a honeycomb of
sorts in our garden once but the bees found me so thoroughly
too that I never got any honey out of it. Pierre Moreau got
honey every year and Fisheye and I watched him do it one
winter day when the tem perature was way below zero. He'd
spotted the tree and blazed it the summer before so he knew
where to find it. As Pierre sawed it down, we could hear bees
buzzing around inside and we kept away, much to Pierre's
amusement. Finally, when the tree was down, the bees died
immediately in the frigid air. Some- times they popped. Pierre
made another cut, then slabbed off a huge chunk to reveal a
long comb along its hollow. He gave us each a piece full of
honey and grubs and dead bees but I knew my mother wouldn't
be interested so I threw mine away before getting home. Tasted
like honey all right, but it took three days before my face and
hands stopped feeling sticky We also ate mushrooms and nuts
that we gathered in the woods. Morels, those wonderful
wrinkled brown soldiers standing to attention in the spring
woods, were hard to find but easy to eat when fried by
themselves or better yet when used to smother a steak. We
carefully guarded the places where we found our morels,
making sure that no one else was following us, because they
usually popped up in the same vicinity every year. The other
mushroom that was commonly eaten was the white oyster
mushroom. It appeared on dead logs a couple of times each
summer, usually after a wet spell. Oyster mushrooms arranged
themselves in layers on the log and you had to get them early or
the insects and deer would eat them. We also ate the fairy ring
mushrooms that came up in our pastures at night. All of these
mushrooms were dried for winter soups and stews by threading
them on fishline hung from the tops of our window for a week
or more. There were few nuts in the U.P. Itwas just too cold for
such trees to grow there but, like the red squirrels and
chipmunks, we sure stored up a lot of hazel nuts. They were
small nuts, about the size of a finger- nail, and they came in a

greenish brown husk full of prickers that in- serted themselves
into the hands that picked them. We'd soak a burlap bag full of
hazelnuts in the creek, bang it repeated ly on the ground to
thresh them of their husks, then pick them out to put in mason
jars for the winter. Or we'd crack them with our teeth to eat
them on the spot. Hazelnuts got better as they aged, and on
many a winter night, we munched upon hazelnuts by kerosene
light until it was time to go to bed. As I recall, my life as a boy
in the U.P. at the turn of the century, I was always nibbling
something. In the spring, I ate the little bulbs of spring beauty
flowers, or violet leaves. In the summer, I munehed on thistle
shoots or young burdock stems. In the fall, I chewed wild rose
hips, thornapples, wild rice and cranberries. Indeed, we sampled
almost anything that grew. Once I dug up what I thought were
ginseng roots and was sick for three days after eating them... If
there were nothing better, I chewed maple twigs or straw or
spruce gum. It took a lot of unpleasant work to get that spruce
gum so it was free from pitch after we had scraped the globs of
resin off the trees. Spruce gum was a grayish-pink in color but
it chewed good. Sure made you spit! For fruit, we had apples
and berries. Many of our houses had old gnarled apple trees
behind them, usually of the Dutchess or Yellow Transparent
variety. They bore heavily every other year but always provided
enough green apples for our bellyaches. Every dirt cellar in
Tioga had many cans of applesauce on its shelves and also some
boxes or barrels of eating apples, especially the Greenings
which wouldn't begin to rot until March month. Also, up around
the mine and in many little abandoned pastures, we could find a
wild apple tree with good fruit. Most of the apples from these
wild trees were poor eating without much flavor and only the
deer fed from them, but there were a few that had excellent
apples. I still remember one snow apple tree down by Maler's
homestead that every year bore a good crop of bright red apples
with streaks of pink threaded through the crisp white flesh.
You'd bite into one of those snow apples and the juice would
dribble from the corn- ers of your mouth. Back then our apples

had no scab or other disease and no one ever had to spray them
with po ison. We ate them baked, in sauce, in pies, or just in
hand. But our major fruit consisted of berries. Wild
strawberries, red raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, thimble
berries, blueberries, we picked them all in huge amounts each
summer and they served as our desserts all winter. First in the
season came the wild strawberries. Rarely could we pick enough
to use them in pies or shortcake. They were mainly for jam or
jelly. I remember that once my father insisted that no wild
strawberry jam be served when a visitor froma city down below
came to our table. "No one who's never picked a wild
strawberry deserves to eat that jam," he said. Spread upon
buttered home-made bread, fresh from the oven and washed
down with cold milk, they were indeed ambrosi a. Unlike wild
strawberries, which you picked while appropriately on your
knees as if in prayer, our red raspberries could be gathered
standing up. We found them everywhere along the edges of the
old fields or rockpiles. Some of the best ones appeared along
the logging roads a few years after hardwoods had been cut.
They weren't hard to pick but you could never really get a heap
on your pail of raspberries that would last more than a few
minutes because they always settled. With the pails strapped to
our belts, we could pick with both hands, the right one for the
pail and the left hand for the mouth. Our women canned
hundreds of quarts of red raspberries each year. In season, every
house had a little sugar sack fastened to the cup- board above
the sink from which the scarlet juice dripped into a pan below
so jelly could be made. Oh, those raspberry pies with the red
juice coloring the latticed upper crust! My mouth wets with the
remembering! Raspberry tarts, hot from the oven, steamed
raspberry pudding with hard sauce, or just a dish of newly
picked raspberries sprinkled with sugar and swimming in rich
cream! Ah, we lived well up in the U.P.in berry time! And I
must not forget the warm fruit soup the Finns and Swedes made
with milk and eggs and raspberries. Just a bit of nutmeg dusted
on top of the bowl was the final touch. I haven't tasted it for

sixty-five wasted years. Thimble berries were a lot bigger than
raspberries, although not as flavorful, but your pail filled up
fast. Some of us mixed them with rhubarb or apple or both to
make a better jam. Gooseberries, once they got thoroughly
brown or almost black, were very sweet but the green ones were
so sour they'd turn your face into a dead man's skull. Goose-
berry jam was excellent on heavily buttered toast and my father
preferred gooseberry pie to all others except blackberry Anyone
picking wild blackberries pays a price in scratched hands and
faces or in torn clothing, but they're worth it. I had one special
private patch of blackberries that surrounded a deep running
spring which I visited every year to bring back the best
blackberries known to our parts. Heavy with huge berries, the
tall bushes drooped from their weight into the water. I could fill
a ten quart pail in a hurry., Then came blackberry pies,
blackberry cobbler, and, after straining the juice, the making of
blackberry wines or cordials. Our French Canadians always
stored up some blackberry juice for the treatment of
constipation, but that was made from dewberries, a smaller,
ground hugging variety of blackberry. The great crops of
blueberries, however, provided most of the fruit that covered
our cellar shelves. We picked them by the gallon, whole
families sometimes traveling miles to find the best patches.
Every June we explored the plains and granite hills to make sure
some late frost had not hurt the little white bells that were their
flowers. A failure of the blueberry crop meant that the coming
winter would be a deprived one for all of us. There were two
varieties, the blue ones and the black ones, and both could be
found either on high bushes or low bushes. The black ones were
not as tart or as good for pies but they were always sought after.
The people who picked blueberries were of several kinds too:
the sitters and the stoopers, and the clean and the unclean
pickers. Clean pickers prided themselves on never letting a twig
or green berry or stink bug enter their pails and, consequently,
they often were slowed down by their persnicketiness. That one
little green blueberry seemed to have an almost uncanny ability

tobury itself the moment you tried to remove it. My Grampa
Gage never bothered. He just stripped the bushes with both
hands going at once, much to my grandmother's disgust when
she had to elean them on the kitchen table afterwards. "Hell,
Nettie," he'd say when she gave him the devil for it, "those
green ones give character to the pie, and the twigs and leaves
soak up the juice." Most of us were cleaners. The monstrous
tame blueberries of today that come from the grocery stores
bear only a faint resemblance to the wild ones of the U.P. at
least so far as flavor is concerned, and I will nevereat another
one. They lack being covered each moring with that Lake
Superior dew; their color is comparatively dull; there is no
reflection of our clean blue skies on their surfaces. They have
no tang. I'd bet even the hungriest U.P. black bear would spurn
them if it had a choice. Our paneakes, muffins and cakes with
wild blueberries sprinkled through their batter seemed to
shorten our winters because they tasted of summertime. But, oh,
those blueberry pies!I've never been able to decide whether
blueberry pie is better hot or cold. With a piece of yellow
cheese to restore the tastebuds of your tongue and palate to a
new virginity after each bite or two, you'd always want more.
After the first fall frost, we'd find a lot of drunken robins
stagger- ing around under the chokecherry bushes. Before that
time, chokecherries can pucker up your mouth so much you
can't whistle, but not after they've been frozen and have started
fermenting. Chokecherry wine is very good, much better than
that we made of our black wild cherries or dandelions. Enough!
Surely by now you know that we managed to eat pretty well in
the U.P. without spending any money. No wonder our kids come
back from Detroit when times get hard down below! No wonder
we lived long and triumphantly in that hard, but lovely land
without vitamin pills! No wonder we had sisu! P.S. If you want
my recipe for sugarplum pie, let me kenow.
MUSTAMAYA
It was after supper and four or five men were belly- up to the

bar in Higley's Saloon telling their fishing lies as usual. "You
know that deep hole just below the Narrows?" asked. "Well, I
caught a twenty-one incher there yesterday. A sloib! Never
caught a bigger brook trout. "Aw hell, I caught one that went
twenty-two in the Spruce River once," said another. "A big old
spawner she was. You ought to see the eggs come out of her.
Mighty nigh a pint of 'em." Higley, the saloon keeper, couldn't
stand it another minute. He smote the top of the polished bar
with a mighty fist. "You're just a bunch of bloody liars." he
roared. "I bet not a one of you ever caught a trout you had to cut
to put in the frying pan." The men were stunned. The unwritten
law was that no matter how outrageous the fishing lie, you
always nodded your head and then tried to tell a bigger one.
Higley was hotted up. "By God," he said. "I'm sick and tired of
hearing all them fish lies. Tell you what I'll do. Any man that
brings me a trout bigger than nineteen inches, I give him a ten
dollar goldpiece and keep the fish." He went to the back room
and brought back a heavy leather purse. "And here's the
goldpiece. I'll glue it to the under- side of the glass cigar
counter so you can see it every time you come here. So put up
or shut up!" As you can imagine, news of Higley's offer swept
through town like wildfire and the Tioga River and its
tributaries sure caught hell, Most of us had never seen a ten
dollar goldpiece. A lot of money, those days. Higley's business
sure boomed, so many came to look at it. "Yeah, he assured
them. "You catch me a trout bigger than nineteen inches and the
gold piece is yours. But no dynamiting! If the eyes are pop ped
out and its bladder busted, that don't count.
Trapping
Like all the other boys in Tioga I had to learn to trap but it was
never an obsession with me as it became for some of the other
kids. The work involved never seemed worth the little money I
ever got for the pelts. Most of my friends learned from their
fathers, but my own, the doctor, was too busy to serve as a role
model. So I learned from my friends and a bit from Pete Half

Shoes, the old Chippewa Indian, who was so kind to me in so
many other ways. When very young I had trapped a lot of mice
in our house and barns and also for Aunt Lizzie and I had
snared many rabbits. One fall when I was nine years old I
snared so many of the latter our family got thoroughly sick of
eating them and forbade me from getting any more. They were
easy to catch. All I had to do was to go down behind our grove
to the beaver dam swamp, look for a well traveled trail made by
the snowshoe rabbits, line up sticks and branches on both sides
of a likely place and place my snare, a loop of picture wire, in
the runway. If possible I hung it from a bent sapling stuck in the
ground and held there with a forked stick so that when the
rabbit got caught and struggled the sapling would get loose and
hoist the rabbit high in the air. If no sapling was available I just
tied the wire to a tree or strong bush. Each day I'd put out four
or five of these, collect the rabbits the following day and reset
the snares. Rabbit skins were worth nothing, but weasels could
fetch three dollars and mink paid five or six, so my first
efforts at real trapping involved these. I remember my first
weasel very well. Mullu had showed me how to set the trap by
our chicken coop after one of them had got in one night and
killed three hens. He gave me one of his steel traps, baited it
with the head of a partridge he'd shot, and placed it on the front
step of the coop. Next morning I found the pure white varmint
(except for a black tip on its tail) caught by one leg and
struggling to get away from the chain. Somehow when I tried to
club it to death it got out of the trap and instead of running
away, it ran toward me and began to climb my leg before I
brushed it off and stomped on it. They're ferocious little devils
even though less than a foot long and he actually scared me. I
caught a number of them, but never liked the job of skinning
them, scraping the hides, and tacking them to the wall of the
barn. Holding those tacks in bitter cold was a miserable task.
Then I graduated to mink trapping. Brown in summer but black
in winter, mink live near water, along streams or at the edge of
lakes. We had to scout along the shore, looking for the parallel

tracks with a line between them where their tails dragged until
we found their burrows or dens among rocks. I used a sardine
for bait but did not place trap. Usually there was a "way" or
path leading to their den and I made an off-shoot path leading to
a circle of rocks with one entrance, put the trap in the path and
the sardine beyond it, always covering the trap with on the a
few leaves or a sprinkling of new snow, and hiding the chain
that was fastened to a strong bush. Mink aren't very wary so I
caught five or six of them before I quit. I remember the last one
I caught along the shore of the little creek that flows out of
Beaver Dam Swamp into Lake Tioga. When I first saw him he
was motionless, but suddenly all hell broke loose. He suddenly
contorted his body, thrashed around violently, heaving his
flanks and making gut- tural noises as he chewed at his leg
furiously. I had to club his head repeatedly with my hatchet
before he died. Though I got six dollars for the skin, I just
couldn't trap another one. When, shamefacedly, I confided my
distress to Pete Half Shoes, he told me the old Indians never
used steel traps. They got their skins by using deadfalls which
killed the animals instantly. When I asked Pete if he would
show me how to make one, he took me over to Mud Lake and
made two of them, one for a mink and the other for a pine
marten whose tracks we had discovered en route. Martens are
mainly tree dwellers while mink like the water, but both feed on
about the same prey The deadfall he made for mink consisted of
a large flat stone weighing at least thirty pounds. This was
propped up on one end by a curious set of three sticks arranged
so that they resembled the figure 4. The longest stick went
under the rock, and the bait, the head of a partridge he'd shot,
was wired on its inner end. When the animal tried to bite it off,
the whole thing collapsed, the big rock fell down upon the
animal and killed it immediately. Pete tried it several times and
it worked well. Pete also made a similar deadfall near the base
of a tree where we'd seen the marten tracks, but because there
were no big rocks around there, he used a heavy log instead and
shot a red squirrel to serve as bait. As he blazed a trail on our

return so I'd be sure to find both of them, he told me I had to
check them both every day. Well, I did and caught a mink the
second day, but never caught the marten. I understand they have
a wide range. Though it was very interesting, I never made
another deadfall myself, mainly because I wasn't strong
enough to carry such big rocks or logs. Using steel traps was
cruel, but much easier. About November the rooms in our High
School usually had the faint aroma of skunk and so did most of
the boys who trapped them. Skunks were very easy to trap. All
you had to do was to follow their tracks to the den and set the
trap baited with a rabbit's head or sardine or cheese beside it.
Often breaking an egg yolk over the bait seemed to help. My
trapping of skunks was minimal because I hated having to kill
or skin them. It just seemed impossible to do so without getting
polluted and then you had to bury your clothes in the garden for
a few days before taking them to your reluctant mother to
wash. Now, I understand they soak them in tomato juice, but we
rarely had it in our home. No tomatoes ever ripened in the U.P.
I trapped only two of them, one a bugger that kept prowling
around our chicken coop and the other for Aunt Lizzie who had
a skunk that made a den under her house. I didn't skin that one,
but she paid me five dollars for catching it-but only after I had
carried it far away and promised to trap any other one free of
charge. Once I went with Mullu and his father as they checked
their trapline, a task that took almost a whole day. It was spring
and we collected three muskrats, two beaver, and a red fox.
Two other traps were empty, three were sprung, and one had a
squirrel in it. Somehow it seemed to be a hard way to make a
living. Not Before Breakfast t had been a hard day for Pierre
LaFont and Jacques Broussard and a very hot day, too. They
were section hands repairing the railroad track near Clowry,
east of Tioga. That morning they had put in a new rail near the
bridge over the Escanaba and all afternoon had been spent
digging up old railroad ties and replacing them with new ones.
After the last one, they lay down to rest because they still had
to pump the handcar eight miles back to the depot. "I don' know

bout you, Jacques, mon ami," said Pierre, "but me, I got so beeg
a thirst I could drink Lac Superior." "Oui," replied Jacques,
wiping his brow with a big red bandanna handkerchief, "Wot
you say we go saloon tonight? Me, I can't wait for Saturday,
non." They agreed to do so, but for one reason or another were
not able to get to Higley's until eleven, only one hour before
closing time. They did their best and downed two pitchers of
beer, but were still thirsty when Higley rang "What you say,
Pierre, we buy four bottles beer and lak old times go build fire
by creek. "Oui, ze bouche (mouth) she is still dry," said Pierre,
so that is what they did. Neither particularly wanted to get
drunk because they knew they had more hard labor coming the
next day and, moreover, both had wives waiting at home for
them. So they made a bargain. When either one of them began
to see two moons instead of one, they would quit and go home
to bed. Long ago in Tioga when I was a boy the men often
spoke of two moon drinking sprees. the gong. Well, they had a
fine time there by the fire singing the old French songs and
telling of their youthful escapades until finally Jacques said,
tree. WHAM! Down went that deer. Broke his neck. Dead as an
old tama- rack in the swamp. That was all. Slimber took another
snort of his beer. There was utter silence until the little
salesman said, "Sir, I have only one question. How come you
didn't break your own neck?" Then he picked up his sample case
and fled into the night. For a moment there was absolute silence
before all the men hollered, "Yah??? Yah, Slimber? How come
you didn't break yer own neck?" Slimber didn't bat an eye.
"Well, boys, it was like this..“
Hunting
No account of how we lived in Tioga seventy or eighty years
ago would be complete without a description of hunting. It was
a major part our lives. Nowadays a sport, back then it was much
more. Few of us could afford store bought meat and the snows
and ice were too deep to get the fish we had all summer. No, we
needed the game we shot to make it through the winter. The

household that didn't have fifty jars of canned venison or rabbit
on its shelves or the car- cass of a deer in the shed or barn was
doomed to long months of eating potatoes, rutabagas and beans.
A boy learned to hunt as soon as he was able to go into the
woods alone, or even before that. We started by shooting
chipmunks, rats and birds with our slingshots, then with our BB
guns. I got my first Daisy air rifle at the age of six, my first 22
calibre rifle at ten, my first shotgun at fourteen. All of these
were single shot guns because my father felt that I would
become a better shot if I knew I had to make that first bullet
count. Moreover, shells were very expensive and my father
insisted I use my own money to buy them, As a result I learned
to aim very carefully and became pretty good at it. I never used
anything but the air rifle for target shooting, but whenever I
missed with the rifle or shotgun I went back to the air rifle to
practice. So powerful was this early training that even as an
adult when I bought repeating shotguns and rifles I rarely shot
more than one bullet. Game was very plentiful in the U.P. at the
turn of the century mainly because there were so few people and
because the logging of the great white pine forest had opened up
the woods to provide lots of second growth timber. One day I
went up with my father to make a call at the millionaire
McCormick's resort on White Deer Lake and counted 42 deer on
the way up and 31 on the return trip. Of course we were in a
horse and buggy, but even so, to see that many on a trip that
was only about 24 miles both ways shows how numerous they
were. They invaded our yards and ate our apples every fall.
Partridge killed themselves by flying into the fence of our
chicken yard every October, the month of the Mad Moon.
Rabbits plundered our gardens. Every pond held some ducks or
an occasional goose. Oddly we never hunted anything but
rabbits with dogs. No, that's not quite true. We once had a
mongrel that Dad used in partridge hunting a few years. The
mutt couldn't point them or retrieve but he sure could bark
whenever he spotted one and then the partridge would fly up on
the limb of a nearby tree and wait there looking at the dog until

Dad shot it. I had a white horse called Billy that was almost as
good as having a pointer or set- ter because he saw them in the
thickets along an old logging trail better than I could and would
stop and stay firm while I shot it from his back. But usually I
hunted on foot along streams that had both young and mature
poplars on their banks, walking slowly and quietly until I heard
one clucking as they usually did before taking off in thunderous
flight. Never was there time to take aim, I just pointed the gun,
made a quick snap shot and got so good at it I rarely missed
except when a partridge flew directly toward me and over my
head. Oddly much later when I hunted pheasants in Lower
Michigan I had a terrible time hitting them. They flew so much
more slowly. Only when I finally learned to aim at the bird
rather than leading them was I successful. I found ducks easy to
shoot on the wing, especially the mallards, but rarely was I able
to down a blue winged teal. They just flew so fast. My father,
on the other hand, was a whiz with them and shot many on the
ponds of Beaver Dam Swamp. But again I never was very
successful with woodcock or snipe, both of which would leap
into the air explosively and zigzag upwards and be gone in an
instant. Some people said they had a corkscrew flight, but I
never saw much of a consistent spiral. I think I only shot two or
three of either of them in all the years I hunted and since their
breasts had only about four ounces of meat, I gave up the quest.
Our major quarry of course was deer. Deer season back then
started on the first of November and lasted the whole month.
Each hunter could shoot two bucks but no does legally but some
violations occurred throughout the year. We shot extra ones
for the poor families who hadn't been able to fill their licenses
or whose men were away in the lumber the winter. No stigma
was attached to such violations and the game war- camps for
dens were viewed as our enemies. Every year someone got
caught, paid his fine or went to jail. That's just the way it was,
the gamble we took. Our people needed the meat. It was as
simple as that. It had been that way since the earliest times.
Sieur La Tour, the old- est man in the village, who settled in

Tioga long before the mines opened or the railroad came, told
me what the deep pits were along the east shore of Lake Tioga
"They were deer pits," he said. "Back then most of the deer
migrated south in winter and a major runway, almost a foot deep
passed there. Shells were hard to come by and the Indians
taught us how to dig those pits, drive in stakes and sharpen their
ends, then cover the pits with loose branches and stuff. The deer
would break through the covering, skewer themselves on the
stakes and couldn't get out. He also told me that when the first
railroad came, people would cut sections from the telegraph
lines and use the wire as deer snares on the runways. "We had
to have meat," La Tour said. For all of us boys in Tioga there
were two rites of passage into adult- hood: getting your first
pair of long pants and shooting your first deer. At fifteen when
I shot my first one, a little spikehorn by the old charcoal kilns
north of town, I really felt that I had become a man. I killed it
with a shotgun, using a cut birdshot shell. My father, I think,
was delighted, but he gave me hell. "You can ruin a shotgun
that way," he said, but the next day he bought me my first rifle
and didn't even mention that deer season was still a week away.
So important was deer season that High School boys were
excused from classes just as they were for potato digging in
September. All over the U.P. there was the yearly exodus to
deer camp. Some of our men hunted near town but most had
built a cabin, a camp, in the forest where deer were more
plentiful. Rarely did they own the land. They just found a like-
ly spot, cut the logs, took a stove apart and hauled it up there in
their packsacks. Most of these hunting camps were small,
except when groups of men hunted together. Our own was a big
one, about twenty by fifteen feet, with such a short door
someone always banged his head on entering, but it had four
bunks big enough for each to sleep two men. Because I have
already described the joyful days in deer tales of Old Napoleon
and To My Grandson in other Northwoods Readers I shall not
repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that my experiences in deer
camp were some of the best I've ever had in a long life.

Wonderful as it was to roam the forest, intensely alert, reading
the animal tracks, enjoying the contours of the snow and the
sounds of a snapped twig or the creak of a sliver cat (two trees
rubbing together) the best part was the camaraderie. Man talk,
freedom from jobs and chores and wives and children, poker
and whiskey after supper and the yell of "Daylight in the
Swamp" before dawn. Gargantuan meals, lots of laughter and
lies and practical jokes. Somehow I never could explain to my
wife how much meant to me. Although I usually shot my buck
and sometimes another for the camp deer or friend, that was not
at all important. Often I felt I was carrying on an ancient
tradition stemming all the way back to our primitive ancestors
who were hunters, too. I write this on November 14th, the day
before deer season opens. I camp in my shall not be able to go
north again to the Old Cabin, to walk the trails and look for
deer. I shall not sit by the fire listening to my friends telling
their tales of the day's hunt, for they are dead, as soon I too
shall be. But I have my memories.
Games
When I last visited Tioga I was again impressed by the changes
that had occurred in that little village. The whitewashed log
cabins were all gone; so were the barns and chicken yards and
fences. The lawns were neatly mowed and the houses painted.
No cows or horses roamed the streets. But the thing that struck
me most was the absence of children at play. Where were they?
Not in school, because it was July. Were they inside their homes
watching television? In the early years of this century our hill
street constantly swarmed with kids of all ages having a fine old
time. An old friend suggested that the children were there, but
there were not as many of them now, because people had
smaller families or that perhaps they were down at the beach
swimming in Lake Tioga. "I think you'll see more of them
playing after supper," he said. That made sense. Those
delightfully long summer evenings in the U.P. when it doesn't
become dark until after ten were when our chores were done and

we could play. I left my old home now owned by my sister and
first walked south to visit Mt. Baldy where my Grampa Gage
and I had acted out our fantasies so often and where we kids had
built shacks and rolled the great boulders down the north slope.
I found no evidence of any recent child activities there.
Retracing my steps I passed Sliding Rock where countless of my
playmates had worn a fine sheen on their pants sliding. It was
very weathered and no longer smooth. No kids around. Then I
walked up the street past where Flynn's store had been, past
Easy Street and Aunt Lizzie's house to the level field that once
had been the site of the iron mine. Once that field had been our
baseball dia- mond. Now it held only little spruce trees and
brush. Making Maple Syrup was remembering about making
maple syrup today because I saw a squirrel licking an icicle
from a broken branch of a maple tree. As a boy those sap icicles
were the sure sign of spring and sometimes we even broke
maple branches on the trees so they would form. Not that the
taste was very sweet, but there was enough hint of sugar to keep
us licking. So I chased off the squirrel and tasted it too. Our
maple syrup making was pretty primitive compared with the
commercial processes today. First we made our spiles by
hollowing out sections of elderberry branches, reaming them
with a piece of telephone wire or round file, whittling the end of
it so it would fit in the tree hole and notching its end to hold the
pail or can in which we collected the sap. Then we drilled a
hole in the maple tree with an auger, going into the tree about
two inches. Usually we hung only one pail or can on a tree and
drilled the hole about three feet above the spot where a big root
emerged from the trunk because that produced the most sap.
Also we usually drilled the hole on the south side of the tree. A
few maples were "good milkers" and in them we hung buckets
on the east and west sides as well. Boiling the sap down into
syrup was usually done on the kitchen stoves of Tioga, but my
mother said no. I'd done it one season and that summer the flies
on the ceiling of her kitchen were horrendous, probably because
the vapor from the boiling sap had condensed there. So I used

the range in my father's old hospital. Lord, the wood it took to
get any syrup at all.With a ratio of 40 gallons of sap to one of
syrup I think the most of the latter I ever got in one season was
about four gallons, and these were then canned in mason jars
and put in our cellar for pancakes to come. My father preferred
cornmeal pancakes; my mother wheat, and I liked buckwheat
ones, especially those made from dough that had risen
overnight. A bit sour tasting, but that just made a fine contrast
to the maple syrup. Hauling all that sap from the maple grove
behind my father's hospital could be a chore when two feet of
snow still lingered under the big trees. I recall getting up in the
darkness to gather it, although the night run of sap was never
copious. After school, though, the pails were full and the hard
lugging took again to dark. That and the gathering of wood for
the fire. I'd fire up in the morning just before going to school,
again at lunch, again after school and finally just before I went
to bed. I still don't know why I found syrup making so
fascinating when it meant such hard work, but even after I
became a professor I still made syrup year after year and I think
I still have a quart of it down in the basement, one with a big
sugar crystal inside it. We boiled the sap in a large open kettle,
skimming off the crud that came to the surface now and then,
stirring it with a large wooden spoon and tasting it interminably
as it gradually thickened. Since we liked our maple syrup much
thicker than the watery stuff you can buy now, we had to be
very vigilant as the boiling reached its climax. That moment of
truth! If you waited too long you'd have a caramel caked mess
in the kettle, almost impossible to scrape out. We never used a
thermometer, just our tongues and eyes. When you threw a ladle
of the almost finished syrup on the snow and it immediately
thickened to make our favorite U.P. candy, maple wax, the
batch was done. A neighbor, Mr. Rohr, made his syrup
differently. Early every spring when the sap was flowing, he'd
cut down a lot of big maple trees and strip them of their bark
and he boiled that bark in a big iron kettle suspended from a
wooden tripod over an open fire. I've tasted it and it was very

sweet, but it was also black as tar and my folks threw away the
jar he gave them. To0 strong a flavor, even when you put it on a
piece of sliced and salted raw potato. I don't know why we
always ate them that way in sap making season, but we did.
Vitamins after the long winter, or just the contrast of salt and
sweet? Frost is predicted tonight so I guess I'll go out and break
a maple branch so I can have another sap icicle. The Happy
Undertaker he happiest man in Tioga was our undertaker, Lars
Stenrud. Always smiling, joking or singing except when doing
his funeral duties, he was just fun to be around. Everyone liked
the jolly fat man in red suspenders and bright yellow
lumberjack shirt. They loved the way his belly shook when he
laughed out loud or was just react- ing to some hid den
merriment of his own. That happened sometimes even when he
was helping in a funeral service, though he always wore a black
suit then and an appropriately long face. Lars had a thousand
jokes, all of them enhanced by his broad Swedish accent, for he
had come to this country as a young man after serving two
apprenticeships in Sweden: carpentry and embalming. Be- cause
our people in Tioga were a healthy lot, Lars was an undertaker
only part time, only when needed. An excellent carpenter and
woodworker, he not only built his own coffins but also houses
and barns, cupboards and tables, whatever, and when at work he
was always singing. Mostly Swedish songs they were, but folks
said they'd heard him singing "Oh the worms crawl out/ and the
worms crawl in/ and they crawl all over your mouth and chin"
while he was hammering out one of his coffins in the back
rooms of Callahan's store where he had his body shop. I saw
that shop, or rather funeral parlor, only once when my mother
sent me down to Callahan's store to buy some korpua and
hardtack which wasn't available at Flynn's store uptown. We
were to have important company from Down Below and she
liked to surprise them with Upper Peninsula foods: pasties,
saffron bread and such. We kids always enjoyed seeing those
visitors tackling a piece of black hardtack with their dessert

Fishing
Our diet in Tioga in the old days varied with the seasons
although always we ate potatoes, onions, turnips and rutabagas
throughout the year. Winter meant meat and summer meant fish
and berries. Fortunately the lakes and streams were full of fish
of many varieties and we caught them with hook and line, with
nets, and occasionally by dynamiting. Early in the spring suck-
ers were our quarry because then they ran up the streams from
the lakes to spawn. Though full of fine bones, at that time of
year their flesh was hard and sweet. Many were canned or
marinated, processes that softened the bones. Northern pike also
ran up the rivers in the spring and every bridge held several
fishermen angling for them with chubs or shiners for bait. Many
of these were dried and smoked before hanging them in the
sheds or summer kitchens. After being cleaned, they were salted
thoroughly, laid on the slats of the shelves of the smokehouse
so they wouldn't get soggy, and kept there for about five days to
be dried and smoked. We had no hickory in the U.P. so used oak
chips and bark when available or willow when they were not.
These chips were set afire in a big cast iron pot or on the dirt
floor and tended so that the building was full of smoke for
about five more days or until a brown crust covered the fish. It
was a lot of work and often several families would pool their
fish for the smoking. Pike, walleyes, and lake trout were the
ones most often smoked, The smokehouse was usually a crude
structure of logs and only partially chinked so that the smoke
could emerge between the logs, Some Finns used their saunas as
smoke- houses. When prepared for eating, the fish were
sometimes soaked overnight to get rid of the salt and then
parboiled or just eaten as they were. Many households had
marinating barrels holding fish of all sorts, even chubs and
shiners, rough fish that we usually used only as bait. I don't
know what spices were used, but I recall the smell of vinegar.
Never ate any myself. Most of our northern pike were caught in
summer by trolling for them along the north shore of Lake
Tioga or around the islands using very large spinners with red

feathers on them. We rowed the boat slowly and used a very
heavy line and sinker. The line was coiled in the bottom of the
boat and when a fish struck it was hauled in hand over hand and
clubbed when we hauled them over the side, for they thrashed
around violently. Many were very large fish, weighing ten
pounds or more. Old man Elvis fished for them almost every
summer day of his life, arising before dawn but always quitting
by ten o'clock. You could set your watch by Old man Elvis. In
the dog days of August, however, he quit at eight o'clock,
saying the pike had sore teeth and didn't bite very good. We
always wondered how he knew. Lake Tioga held a lot of big
walleyes too, but they tended to bite best after dark, so I rarely
fished for them even though they were wonderful eating.
Several times though, Mullu and Fisheye and I would camp out
overnight at the old concrete dam where the Huron River runs
out of the lake, build a fire, and fish all night between naps and
korpua. Walleyes did not put up much of a fight. A few of our
lakes contained large mouth bass, but few of us ever fished for
them, considering them unfit to eat and too hard to scale and
clean. Once my father and I caught fifteen of them one
afternoon in Splatterdog Lake and had to bury them in the
garden because none of our neighbors would accept any of
them. That didn't hold true for bullheads though. Their flesh
was very white and tasty. Like walleyes, they bit best at night,
so we boys would build a campfire along the edge of a slough
just upstream from the bridge over the river, string about five
hooks on a trotline, tie on a stone, then throw it far out into the
water and wait and wait, until the line had quiv- ered five times.
That meant each hook had a bullhead on it so we'd haul it in, re-
bait with more worms and heave it in again. Most were about
ten inches long, but one I caught was twelve inches. You had to
be careful taking the bullheads off the hooks because they could
inflict a nasty wound with their horns. I once had a wound that
took five days to heal. When cleaning them, we'd nail their
heads to a barn door before stripping the entrails, but at least
there was no need to scale them. We did little ice fishing

because of the amount of labor involved when the snow was
four feet deep on the lakes and the ice underneath was three
more. Blue ice, it was; hard ice. Mullu, Fisheye and I tried
once, but gave up before we ever hit water. I never sawa fish
shanty on Lake Tioga. Indeed the only time we fished in the
winter was when men made ice for their icehouses. Several men
and a horse and sleigh would go down to the lake, clear off the
snow and, with a one man crosscut, saw the big squares and
have the horse skid them onto the sleigh. When they were
finished, we would go down to the opening and fish for lawyers
using red- worms from the innards of a manure pile for bait.
Lawyers are land-locked codfish with a long fin running along
their upper back. They were very easy to catch, didn't fight at
all, and froze instantly when thrown on the ice. Sometimes we'd
come back with a sled stacked with them like cordwood. They
were excellent food, but my mother always hated to fry them
because even when thawed and cut into chunks the pieces would
jump reflexively in the pan. But such fish were secondary.
Trout fishing came first. Of all fish, they were the most
delectable and we never tired of eating them or fishing for
them. Salmon fontanalis, brook trout, trout of the springs. To
catch them we sought the coldest waters that flowed through the
most beautiful parts of the forest where every rapid and pool
was a visual delight. In 1905 when I was born, the daily limit on
brook trout was fifty and they had to be seven inches long. I
never had the heart to catch that limit nor even to fill my wicker
creel as my father always did. Often I filed off the barb of my
fly so I could release them without harm. It was enough just to
see them leap out of the water to take it on the way down.
Sometimes when I'm hurting and cannot sleep, I wade the pools
and rapids where I have caught them and the remembrance is
almost real. Because of the new roads along the streams I knew
so well, there are only a few brook trout left and I no longer
fish for them. Except in my dreams. In 1937, the year after I
married Milove and introduced her to the joys of fly fishing for
trout, we explored a lot of the U.P so she could know its

enchantments too. After spending a wonderful night on the
Grand Sable dunes near Grand Marais, I drove her to the Two
Hearted River northwest of Newberry. She too had read
Hemingway's story of the blissful time Nick had experienced
fishing that stream. Neither of us then knew that it was the Fox
River, not the Two Hearted, that he had described. The road in
was terrible, just a two rut lane through the forest, but near the
mouth of the stream we found a good place to put up our little
tent before flyfishing. It was so windy it was very difficult to
cast a fly and the trout weren't rising. Nevertheless, she caught
three small ones, enough for supper, while I had been
thoroughly skunked. So I left her and waded upstream, finding a
good pool shaded by a big maple tree whose lower branches
almost touched the water. There a larger trout was feeding on
some large bugs falling from the tree. I couldn't see what they
were, but guessed they might be bees, so I tied a McGinty which
resembles a bee, on my leader and prepared to make the cast. It
was apparent that the only way I could put the fly under those
branches above the big trout was to make a perfect side rolling
cast. It's a tough one to make because the line comes back to
you in a circle before it shoots outward. Knowing that I'd have
just one chance, I backed downstream a little way and practiced
that difficult cast until I had a reasonable chance of making it
under those maple branches where the big trout continued to
feed. OK. One more trial and then I'll go after him. Alas, I
never did. A sudden gust of strong wind on that last practice
cast buried the fly in the cartilage of my nose. I couldn't unhook
it so I cut it off the leader and felt like a fool when I returned to
my wife to ask for help. She laughed when she saw me and even
kept giggling as she tried to work the McGinty loose. "You're
beautiful, Cully," she said. "I like you with that ornament in
your nose. You ought to wear it more often." But she stopped
giggling when she found she couldn't get it out. And when I got
some pliers from the car and asked her to use them, she refused.
So I had her fit the pliers to the hook and tried to yank it out
myself. Three times I tried and the pain was so terrible the tears

came to my eyes. "I've got to go to town to get help," I told my
new wife. She insisted on coming with me. So I drove in to
Newberry and inquired about a doctor. The man at the filling
station laughed as he told me to phone the county nurse. "I have
a fly in my nose. . .," I began. "Well, why don't you swat it?"
she replied and hung up. When I told my wife what she'd said,
the unfeeling wench started giggling again. Finally I found
where a doctor lived. When I knocked at his door, his wife
appeared and grinned widely as she told me he was out fishing,
but should return fairly soon because by that time it was getting
dark. Then he came, took one look, laughed, shot some
novocaine into the nose and cut out the fly. When I paid him he
said, "You damned fool. Serves you right, trying to flyfish in
this wind and using a McGinty that big, for God's sake. Next
time use a number sixteen." Fishing isn't always fun.
Slimber Has a Wild Ride
It was seven thirty that night when the regulars gathered in
Higley's saloon to spend a few hours nursing their beers and
telling tales. Pete Half Shoes was in the corner of his booth, the
card game hadn't started, and most of the men stood at the long
polished bar joking and laughing. Higley filled a mug from the
spigot of the big beer barrel, wiped his hands on his apron, then
slid it along the top so it would stop directly in front of the man
who had ordered it. Higley was good and knew it. Sometimes a
man would take his place at the very end of the bar just to see if
Higley could slide his mug right to him. Higley always did. This
evening the men were talking fishing and hunting stuff and Lafe
Bodine, the best poacher in Tioga, had just finished telling how
he'd outwitted the game warden by changing the straps on his
snowshoes so his tracks would look like he was goi north. All
his listeners had heard the tale before, but they acted as though
they hadn't. That was the custom. Another custom was that you
never appeared to doubt any tale told by a fisherman or hunter-
no matter how outrageous the story. No, you just said, "Yah"
and never with an upward inflection. Always "Yah" but never

"Yah?" Lafe was saying, "I never paid a fine nor spent me a
night in jail for poaching." That we knew was true. Lafe had
made a monkey out of every game warden who ever came to
Tioga. "Well, I wish I could say the same," said another man at
the bar. "The game warden he catched me once and they put me
in the pokey fora month. Took my rifle too." "How did he catch
you?" asked the man next to him. "Oh, Father Hassell squealed
on me, but it was my own dumb fault. It was September and we
were sick of fish and wanted red meat, so I thought to shoot me
a deer in the woods back of Keystone Hill. Well, one afternoon
I was walking down the old right of way of the Northwestern
Railroad tracks back of the Catholic Church when a big buck
comes out of the brush right in front of me. So I let him have it.
One shot and I'd got him. Then what to do? I couldn't drag him
back through town in broad daylight and I couldn't leave him
there. Too many people walk them tracks. Well, I should have
drug him back into the woods by Mt. Baldy but that would of
meant too much extra dragging when I come after him that
night. So instead, I figured it best to hide him in the women's
part of south when actually he was going the church outhouse.
"There's a lot of spruce trees between the church and that there
outhouse and I knew nobody would be using it, not being
Sunday, so I stuffed him in there. But the only way I could fit
him in was to sit him on top of one of the holes. Looked kind of
funny seeing that buck looking as though he's taking a crap."
The man paused to take a big gulp of his beer. "Well, how did
they find out?" someone asked. "From what I hear tell, Sylvie
Vautrain, Father Hassel's ugly house- keeper, went out back to
do her duty and found that buck sitting on the hole and run back
to tell the priest. Hadn't figured on that happening, dumb me.
Father Hassell, he got mad and tells the game warden and he
was waiting for me when I come that night to drag it home. So
that's how I got caught." "Yah," said the men in unison. "Yah,"
echoed a a little salesman sitting at the end of the bar. With his
sample case beside him, he was passing the time until the next
train arrived. Others told of their poaching exploits and then the

conversation turned to other things. "I seen an albino deer
once," someone said. "Pure white, he was, and he had pink eyes
just like that Sleeman kid. What makes them albinos, anyway?"
No one knew, but some remembered the albino wolf that used to
hang around the Haysheds Dam, the one that Eric Sippola killed
before he himself died "I shot an albino partridge, once," Pete
Ramos offered casually. When no one said "Yah" he felt he had
to add something. "Yes, that pat was whiter than a leghorn
chicken ." Henri Poule, an old French Canadian trapper, rarely
spoke, but this time he did. "Non, non. Zat was a ptarmi- gan.
Lots of zem I see when I spend two year trapping up by ze
Hudson Bay. Lots in Canada up zere." Then came stories of
freak animals. One man told of a beaver he'd caught that had no
tail. Another claimed that he'd once landed a brook trout with
two heads, one above the other. A pause occurred before the
"yah's" were heard on that one. The lies were beginning. "I shot
two deer with one shot," one man claimed. "Buck and a doe
standing side by side. Hit the buck back of shoulder and bullet
went through and got the doe in same place. One shot, two deer.
"Yah." "Could be," remarked Pete Fant. He was the man who
claimed he'd sailed all around the world and wrestled with the
crocodiles in the Zambesi River of Brazil, when we all knew
he'd been no farther than Green Bay. A liar, but a second rate
one. "I once shot a big buck," he said "and when I went over to
see it, I couldn't find where I'd hit him. No wound. No blood.
Then I seen I'd hit him right in one eye and the bullet come out
of the other." Pete didn't even get a single "Yah." Slimber Jim
Vester could stand it no longer. Slimber was Tioga's treasure,
the best liar in the whole U.P. His tales were told for years in
our town, the tales of the giant mosquitoes, how he crossed a
heron with a duck, how he taught a frog to jump, his tale of the
three legged chickens. There on the wall behind the bar was
Mustamaya, the great trout he claimed to have caught with a
posthole digger. When Slimber spoke, everyone listened.
"Boys," he said, assuming his saintly look and stroking his
white beard, "I don't doubt a word of anything you've been

telling me and know I've a repertation for telling the truth, the
whole truth and nothing but the truth, swelp me. I've a mind to
tell you about something happened to me when I was a young
man but I'm afeared you'll think I was lying. Anybody wants to
buy an old man another beer?" Several of the men put down
their money on the bar. "Well," Slimber drawled after taking a
huge gulp of the beer, "I was a young buck myself back then,
strong as a horse too. Could bend a horse- shoe with my bare
hands. Well, one day I was out deer hunting out of season up
in them old beaver meadows by Bulldog Creek. Tall grass there,
waist high, and there were deer trails everywhere. So I sank
down besides one of them waiting, and sure enough along
comes a big ten pointer. Big as a horse he looked. Well I
aimed at his head to save the meat and down he went, kerplunk.
I was a good shot them days. Well, I went over to see it and the
buck was dead all right, just twitching a little, so I straddled
him, took out my knife and began to cut his throat. Lots of hair
there but, when I finally draw a little blood, up jumps that
damned buck with me atop him." Slimber filled and lit his pipe
to help the Somebody bought him another beer noo suspense.
Well, there I was, hanging on to his antlers for dear life as he
takes off across the marsh to the tall timber, running like hell,
and I'd lost my knife in the commotion. A what you call it, a
perdicament? He didn't buck at all like a colt that's not been
broke, but just kept running fast. What a ride that was. I see
what happened. He'd lowered his head just as I shot and my
bullet had knocked off part of one antler and just stunned him. I
thought of jumping off his back 'cause his backbone was sure
ahurting my crotch, but then he might turn and gore me.'
Slimber lit his pipe again. "Go on, go on, what happened?" one
man shouted. "It come to me that maybe I might jump off,
holding his antlers and break his neck like old man Charon did
to that buck he killed on Donegal's hill, but I wasn't sure I could
do it so I just kept on riding him. I seen that I could steer him a
little by turning his head. A deer always goes where his nose is
pointed. "Well, at last he run out of the swamp and up the hill

and I knows I had to do something right away so I steered the
bugger into a big pine tree. WHAM! Down went that deer.
Broke his neck. Dead as an old tama- rack in the swamp. That
was all. Slimber took another snort of his beer. There was utter
silence until the little salesman said, "Sir, I have only one
question. How come you didn't break your own neck?" Then he
picked up his sample case and fled into the night For a moment
there was absolute silence before all the men hollered, "Yah???
Yah, Slimber? How come you didn't break yer own neck?"
Slimber didn't bat an eye. "Well, boys, it was like this.
APIL FOOL ON YOU, EMIL
In our little forest village of Tioga, April Fools Day was taken
seriously, almost religiously. All day long you had to catch
someone else and avoid being caught. Even the little kids would
go to the window and cry out, "Hey ma, there's a robin. Come
see!" though there were still patches of snow on the ground and
the maple trees were just beginning to fill the sap buckets on
their waists. Hell, the crows had just started to come back No
one loved the day more than Emil Olsen, our town's practical
joker. All year long he was always pulling some trick on
someone. Why once he even greased the grave digger's shovel
and laughed uproariously when the clods stuck to it instead of
covering the casket. But April Fool was his day of days and his
favorite victim was Eino Tuomi, his best friend and neighbor.
Every year when the evening mail was being "disturbed"
(distributed) in our little post office, Emil would be there in the
anteroom telling all the tricks he'd played on Eino that day.
"Oh, for stupid! Oh, for dumb! Eino, he fall for anything I
do!" And then he'd tell how he put a horsehair in his pipe or salt
in his sugar bowl, or glued the pages of the Sears Roebuck
catalog together in his outhouse and nailed his barn boots to the
floor. And more. Oddly enough, Eino never resented the tricks.
He just said patiently, "You crazy, Emil. You nuts!" But I'd
better tell you something about these two characters so you can
understand and appreciate how Emil finally got his

comeuppance. Both had been hard ore drillers and had worked
together for many years in the Oliver Iron Mining Company's
deep Tioga mine until it suddenly shut down. Evidently the
management had robbed the supporting pillars of ore that held
up the overburden a bit too much. Anyway one afternoon when I
was playing in the sideyard, a monstrous roar occurred, our new
cement sidewalk cracked, and the house shook. A great cloud of
dust obscured the sun. "Cave in! Cave in!" All the people along
our street streamed out of their houses and started running
toward safety for they knew that the whole west end of town
had been undermined. However, as things turned out, only an
area about the size of a city block had collapsed but what a huge
gaping hole remained. For years, we kids used to go gingerly to
the edge of that hundred foot deep pit and wonder where the two
men lay who had been buried in it. Anyway, the mine shut down
never to reopen and Eino and Emil were too old to hunt for
work elsewhere so they stayed, eking out a precarious existence
on tiny pensions and their own hard work. Perhaps an account
of how they managed it will show you how our people survived
hard times. After the mine closed, Eino and Emil moved into
two log cabins that had been abandoned. They were well built,
snug structures of square hewn logs, warm in winter and cool in
summer and they sat side by side across the street from the
cave-in pit. Eino always had two old chairs in his front yard and
it was there that the two old men would sit on a summer's day
smoking their corncob pipes and arguing. Always arguing. Why
they'd even argue about which bird would fly off the telephone
line first. Eino, the Finn, was a small but wiry man with a soft
voice but Emil, the Swede, was a huge fellow with a voice like
a bull. You could hear him bellowing all the way from Flinn's
store. At first, I thought they were mad at each other, but
instead, they were great friends, almost inseparable. They had
evolved a symbiotic way of living that really worked. Eino had
a barn behind his house and kept a cow; Emil had a
chickenhouse and a big garden full of potatoes, rutabagas and
cabbage which both helped till. They shared everything and we

never saw one without the other. Why, when Eino's cow had to
be serviced by Mr. Sulu's bull, they both held the rope that led
it, almost hand in hand. Didn't bother them a bit when the usual
bystander made the usual bawdy remarks about their mission. (I
always hated thatjob when I had to take Rosie, our Jersey cow,
to the Sulu's bull. It was interesting once I got there, but oh,
how everybody kidded me along the route. "Wassa matter,
Cully? Why you no do it yourself?" (Stuff like that) So they had
milk and butter and eggs and occasionally they stewed a tough
old rooster all day and night on the kitchen stove. Or if the gods
were good, they had real meat from a young steer they'd raised
instead of the usual illicit venison. Once Eino traded a calf for
two of Delong's young pigs but the bear got them before they
could be butchered. Besides berries, the only fresh fruit they ate
were apples they had picked from a tree at one of the abandoned
houses. And they had fish, of course, fresh trout or pike in the
summer and smoked or marinated for the long white of winter.
They didn't fish much with hook or line for the trout though.
Instead, as they showed me once, they'd take a stick of
dynamite, a blasting cap, and length of white fuse, put it on a
raft in a promising beaver dam, light the fuse and run like hell.
Then they'd scoop up all the trout, suckers and chubs, put them
in gunny sacks and dump them uneleaned, guts and all, into the
marinating barrels in their cellars. Almost every family in town
had dynamite after the mine closed. Very useful in making a
new outhouse hole or getting rid of a big stump. We kids used
to have fun throwing chunks of ore at a blasting cap trying to
get it to go off until once one did and Nicky Johnson lost an
arm. For the necessaries, the two old men had to have some
biting money and that came from odd jobs or the thirty dollars
pension checks that came to them each month. I was up at M.C.
Flinn's store once when they came there to have the checks
cashed. Emil, who Could neither read nor write, always got red
faced when he had to put his mark (X) on the check and when
Mr. Flinn wrote "Emil Olsen, his mark. M.C. Flinn,
storekeeper" under it. They always bought the same stuff: a pail

of Peerless smoking tobacco, two dozen circular discs of black
rye hardtack, a bag of korpua (a dried toast flavored with
cinnamon), coffee, sugar and salt, a chunk of salt pork, and a
half slab of bacon. Once a year they bought a sack of flour and
some baking soda for their pancakes. Like all of us, they made
their own maple syrup, so all in all they ate well and lived well.
Nobody thought of them as being poor, nor did they. On the
afternoon of the last day of March one year, I had been selling
copies of Grit up and down the street to my regular customers
and somehow had an extra copy left, so I thought I'd give it to
Eino who could read fine. I'd done that before and was always
rewarded by having them tell me stories of mining in the old
days or hearing them argue over something in the magazine. I
could hear them hard at it by the time I got to Flinn's store.
With a brace and bit, Eino was drilling a hole in the telephone
post beside his house and Emil was giving him hell. "Oh, for
dumb!" he was yelling. "You no get any sap from telephone
pole. It dead wood. It got no roots. Eino, you crazy dumb!" The
little Finn was not bothered at all. "Oh, yah, I get sap. Best
sweet sap. More sweet than maple tree give." "No!" roared
Emil. "Look, dummy. Hole is dry. Pole is It no give sap, stupid!
Oh, for dumb!" Eino, unperturbed, took a length of elderberry
stalk out of his pocket, slit it in half, scraped out the pith to
make a little trough, hammered the spike into the hole and hung
a pail from it. "Sure, Emil," he said. "No sap now. It come at
night. You see in morning I get pail full." They were still
arguing when I left, but I heard Eino say, "I make pancakes
tomorrow for new syrup. You come eat my house, Emil. Bring
eggs. I got sour milk." According to the way Eino told the tale
at the post office that next evening, on his way to breakfast,
Emil had stopped at the telephone pole, put a finger first in the
sap pail and then in his mouth. His face red with fury, he
charged to the chair where Eino was sitting. "You sunabits,
Eino, you peed in sap can. I going bust you in nose!" Eino
didn't get up. "Apil Fool, Emil! Apil Fool. Old Eino, he not so
dumb!" spruce, dead spruce.

Cawely
Camp Foolishness
(Come to think of it that's a dandy name for any deer camp.)
Deer hunting, as we all know by now, is serious business. One
must always stay wide awake and on his toes, for who knows
when that big buck might come crashing out of the swamp.
Come to think of it, one can only be legally in the woods 10
hours out of a day. That leaves 14 hours out of a day to relax
and prepare for tomorrows hunt. After all, who in their right
mind would expect you to stay at full alert all day long?
Witness if you will, hunters during these hours as they attempt
to improve not only the skills required of them as hunters, but
also improve themselves, in order that they may become better
campmates.
Author's Note:I wish to thank the camp reporter, Al
Kramschuster, and the "Buck's Lodge Crew" for allowing me to
delve into their private journal to remove excerpts from their
many hunts, in order that I might produce "The Buck's Lodge
Camp Log. In Al's very own words: This is a camp diary of one
deer hunting crew. It's members always come together or
separately. It is a fairly factual account from 1975 until 1980.
From 1981 on it will be kept current as the season progresses.
Consequently the early years are vague in terms of anything
other than deer shot. From 1981 on it will occupy a number of
pages each season as we can better remember deer shot, missed,
and seen. NOTICE: To all camp members: Do not write in this
journal without prior approval from Al Kramschuster (Hoople)
as I can make enough misteaks without your help. Al
Kramschuster Opening Day Eve - Roll Call: Alvin Henry
Herman Buchholtz Darrell Ervin Pagenkopf William Alvin
Buchholtz Randy Joseph Carlson Norbert Arthur Martin Keith
Alan Young Hugh James Fleming Alan Jon Kramschuster John
Michael Deminsky Dana Dean Remillard Rodney. The Friday

night tradition is being upheld by 6:08, "The Two Who Tend to
Tipple" have been here since about noon so you can draw your
own conclusions. Alvie is in charge of the heat and it is a
comfortable 91 degrees in here. Norbie said this is the worst
crew he has ever hunted with. Randy and Hughie are talking
business (boo -hiss). The "social hour" and "double bubble" are
running concurrently this year from 5:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. Wet
tonight - forecast is for a low of 36 and a high of 40 tomorrow
with a 70% chance of rain tonight and 60% chance tomorrow.
Rod, Bill, John D., and Darrell have hunter's choice per- mits so
we have 4 hunter's choice and 8 buck tags to fill. The DNR
expects a 200,000 plus kill this year, but I don't think it will be
that high Norb is cooking a moose roast that Norm Henneman
gave to Rod. Norb forgot to thaw the moose so it went in the pot
frozen. It will still be delicious when it's done at 9:00 or 10:00
or 11:00 or Randy brought some sausage (8#) and chops (5#)
from a bear he shot this year and some salmon from the Kenai
peninsula. Norb brought some muskie too. Norb is really
thinking about the squeaky mouse but hasn't got any cheese. Oh
well - tomorrow is another day. Day 1 Alarms off at 4:30. Bill
is bound and determined to leave at 5:30 for his stand. It was
raining hard but we all got ready to go. Temperature was 45°.
The rain let up and we took off Bill,Rod, Randy, John, and Al
K. went back behind Beaver Lake and Alvie B., Norb, and
Darrell went down on the land. The absolute BEST opening day
we have ever had was about to start. Randy went on landing # 2
on the land and at 7:06 a big buck came from the south along
the tamaracks about 100 yards away. One shot and a huge 9
point was in the bag. Darrell was sitting down on the south end
of the land. At 6:30 a big buck came up behind him about 10
feet away. It was so dark that Darrell could only watch it go by.
Then about 7:00 he saw two more but couldn't scope them for
horns. Then at 7:26 Darrell nailed a 4 point with 3 shots. The
buck almost ran him over. Bill B. shot a 5 point (most guys
would call it 4) at about 7:30.3 shots. The buck had a big body
for so few points. He hit it at least twice out of the three shots.

Bill saw a doe and a fawn go down by the lake. John got a 4
point at about 7:50. He hit it in the lungs and it ran about 200
yards. He went and gutted it and dragged it back to his stand,
sat down, took two sips of pop, put his pop down, picked his
gun up, and drilled a big-bodied 8 point Al K. heard John shoot
the second time and John started yelling "Rod! Rod!" for Rod to
come down and tag the buck. Al K. thought he was yelling
"Buck! Buck" so he got ready and about 2 minutes later a buck
came from John's direction, then turned and ran up to Al and he
got a 7 point (most guys would call it 5) We had six bucks by
8:151!! Rod saw 10 deer - all bald. Alvie saw nada. After we
got the deer in we figured we'd go down and drive the land
cause Norb was still standing on the south end. We drove it to
the end and Rod jumped a buck but couldn't shootright away
cause Darrell was in the line of fire. Rod got a shot but missed
and then Norb got a shot while the buck was going like a raped
ape. Norb's still got it - one shot - one 4 point buck. SEVEN
bucks on the pole. We had to put bucks on two hunter's choice
tags. Day 1 additions and corrections: Alvie saw a doe and two
fawns but no tubing. Darrell saw two baldies about 1:00. AI K.
and Bill saw a doe off Al's stand when they were dragging their
bucks out Opening Day Night - Rod and John missed supper -
some mysterious urge drove them to continue the pursuit on into
the night. Darrell, the human tweezers, tried to remove a black
hair from the end of Alvie's nose using only his teeth. He
couldn't do it but liked trying so much that he tried a couple
more times. Norb made another great supper. Muskie. He had a
16 pounder and a 35 incher he had to kill cause it had the
bucktail way down in the gills. TERRIFIC! Al K. carried two
bucks (one at a time-of course) up the A-frame hill yelling "I'm
a man!" all the way. He must be in terrific shape. In fact, he's
going to bed at 8:44 tonight to make sure he stays that way. Bill
and Alvie are already in bed. Everyone else is out hoping a deer
will run by a tavern and shooting today's bucks over and over
and over and over Day 2 Weather today was there alright-yup-
we had weather all day. In fact the weather was right out there

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