sleeping bag trouble

The first time I went deer hunting at the shack with grandad, there were a lot of other hunters there. I think there were four other hunters staying in the cabin with us, and two or three others in a camper on the back of a pickup truck that was parked outside. In later years, there were not so many other guys, which I liked better. It was more fun for me to hang out with grandad without so many guys I didn't really know around.
Soon after arriving that first time, I learned about the "Five Step Rule." One of the guys was giving another guy a hard time because he hadn't obeyed the five step rule. It seemed like he was half joking, so I couldn't figure out if it was some kind of hunter's gag or if it was something real. At first I thought it might be five steps to follow when making sure your gun was not loaded because the rule breaker was saying how cold it was as an excuse for breaking the rule. Then the criticizer said how simple it was to take at least five steps from the door, even when it was cold, instead of pissing from the doorway. At that point I understood the five step rule.
The next day I noticed that there was a sort of ring of yellowish snow and ice from about twelve to fifteen feet out from the door. It looked like some people adhered to the five step rule, but only barely.
A number of the guys were easily fifty years younger than grandad. Grandad liked to go out to the country bars and have a drink or two some nights, but some of the younger guys liked to go into town and have more than a drink or two. I think a couple of the guys would drive all the way to Tomahawk at night because they really liked a bar there. Or perhaps one of them had a local sweetheart there.
One night one of the guys didn't come back. No one really noticed until the next day, and some were concerned he might have crashed his truck on the way back to the cabin and frozen to death over night. Fortunately it was nothing that bad. He had merely been arrested after getting in a fight with some local guys and then doing doughnuts in the middle of the main street with his truck. He was bailed out of jail and was back to hunting the next day.
Of all the times I went deer hunting there, I only once saw a deer in the woods during the day when I had my gun. It leapt across the logging road about a hundred yards ahead of me. I only saw it for a fraction of a second, and there was thick forest on either side of the logging road, so there was no time to even raise my gun.
I did see quite a few deer though. Almost every time we would drive to a bar or to town at night, some deer would run across the road in front of the car, or be standing in a field by the road, or occasionally standing in the middle of the road. The theory was that the deer had learned to lie low in the swamps in the daytime during hunting season, and be active only at night. Grandad was convinced that if we could get a few more guys to start at one end of a swampy area, and station the others on the other end, we'd be able to drive some deer out of the swamp to the hunters waiting on the edge. We never had enough people or got organized enough to do that though.
Only one guy shot a deer while I was up there. He was in a tree stand, and it was right as the sun set. I'm not sure, but it might have been a minute or two, or maybe even ten after the official end of shooting time. Fortunately there were no game wardens in the area to raise that question. That night we ate very fresh deer heart and liver.
A few of the guys had some amusing hunting stories to tell. One of the stories I remember supposedly took place a few years earlier during bow season. A group of hunters were going to try to drive deer from a section of woods, and three hunters were stationed along a fence line at the edge of the woods. There was one tree stand, and a hunter, who we will call Bob for the duration of this story, climbed up in the tree stand. He had a bit of a reputation for being not the most dedicated hunter, but they let him use the tree stand because he promised to be vigilant and take a shot at any deer that came within range. After a while Bob realized he had to pee. He climbed down from the tree stand and put his bow up against the tree. He was peeing when a big buck came crashing out of the woods and ran right past him. The buck jumped over a fallen tree that was in front of the fence, but it must not have seen the fence because it came down right on a fence post and fell over dead. Bob finished peeing, and started calling out to the other hunters. Bob told his story several times as the other hunters arrived. No one would have believed him but for the dead deer lying by the fence. The hunters stood around the deer and started discussing what they should do. Although the hunters that were trying to drive the deer had caused the buck to run, which led to its death, they agreed that it was clearly Bob's deer since he had been urinating near where it died. They were kind of making fun of him, and implying that was the only way Bob could get a deer was to have it drop dead near him. Then Bob realized there might be a problem when he brought the deer in to register it. The game warden might notice there was no arrow wound, and ask him if the deer was roadkill or something, and that might cause complications. So Bob got his bow and shot an arrow into the deer's chest.
Some of the hunters accompanied Bob when he took the deer in to register his kill. The man who registered the deer kept looking at it and shaking his head. Bob was a little nervous and asked the man if there was anything wrong. He replied that he had been registering deer during bow season for almost twenty years, but this was the first one he had ever seen that had been shot by a man lying on his back. The other hunters stifled their laughter, and Bob said nothing else, but he realized he should not have shot his arrow into the bottom of the deer's chest while the deer was lying on the ground.
One of the first nights I spent in the cabin during deer season, after the gasoline lanterns were turned off, and the kerosene lamps were blown out, everyone was in their sleeping bags on the bunks. The wood stoves had been loaded up with large logs and the flues closed in hopes they'd burn all night. There was silence except for the soft crackling of the fire in the wood stove, and the occasional creak of a bunk bed.
The silence was broken by a loud fart from the lower bunk by the kitchen. Someone in the bunk on the other side of the room groaned in disgust. A few seconds later, there was another groan of disgust, this time from the bunk from which the fart noise had emanated.
A voice said, "That's the trouble with sleeping bags. There's only one way out."

tough

When my brother, uncle Bill, grandad and I arrived at the shack, the screens on the formerly screened in porch were mostly rusted away. Grandad decided that one of the projects of the visit would be to put some new screen up. I wasn't really sure what the point of screening in the porch would be. The porch wasn't very big, and it was pretty full of shelves, an antique ice box, a table, cans of paint, jars of nails, sacks of seeds, rolls of tarpaper and uncountable other miscellaneous items that might accumulate on the front porch of a cabin in the woods. So it wasn't the kind of porch where you'd be able to sit in a rocking chair sipping lemonade enjoying a summer evening. The view from the porch wasn't that great either. Instead of looking out over the lake and seeing the reflection of the trees on the other side, you'd probably be looking out at your car parked in front of the cabin, and a bunch of pine trees.
But the screened in porch turned out to be quite valuable. If you caught some fish, you could clean them on the old wooden table on the porch and not be molested by flies in the middle of the day, or mosquitos in the evening. In the summer, from evening until morning, going outside meant being attacked by hordes of mosquitos. As you came back into the cabin, you might be followed by fifty mosquitos, and if you were lucky, you could leave thirty or forty behind when you shut the screen door of the porch, and then you might be able to leave half of the remaining ones behind on the porch when you slid in the cabin's screen door. The screened in porch served as a sort of mosquito lock, so you'd only have five or ten mosquitos to contend with inside the cabin, instead of two or three times that number. Then later when I came during hunting season, the screen helped keep most of the snow off the porch, and slowed the bitterly cold wind down a little bit, so not quite as much cold air would blow in when you opened the cabin door to go out or come in.
We drove into town to get nails, staples, screen and some other supplies for the screen project, and some food and ice for the cooler.
We went to the old hardware store grandad had been going to for decades, and the hardware guys seemed to know him. Grandad opted for the aluminum screen even though it was more expensive than steel. That seemed to be a good choice. It lasted for many years without rusting away like the previous screen. But then I'm not sure how long that previous screen had lasted. It might have been there for thirty years or more before it rusted away.
We also got some more mosquito repellant, and grandad asked if there was anything better than fly strips for killing flies. One of the hardware store guys showed him some spray, and these little cardboard things that you hang up in the middle of the room and they're supposed to kill flies. The cardboard was printed with dark wood grain, but I don't think anyone would be convinced that they were made of wood, not even flies. They had three circular holes on each side. I guess the flies were supposed to go in those holes and touch the yellowish material inside, or maybe the yellowish material emitted poisonous vapors through the holes. He said the hanging things worked pretty good, so grandad told him he'd take a few of those. Then the hardware store guy pointed out that the warning label said not to use them around children or pets, so he probably would not want to use them in the room where my brother and I were staying, it might not be good for us. Grandad said it was fine, he'd take them anyway.
He looked over at my brother and me and said, "It'll make 'em tough."

better not

Grandad always liked to extract the maximum amount of work from my brother and I when we visited. We would mow the lawn, split and stack firewood, weed the garden, pick apples from his tree and do various other "stoop work." So when we went up to the shack with uncle Bill and Grandad, one of the things we did was cut down some trees for firewood. Uncle Bill brought his chain saw, and he would cut down the tree, and it would be our job to cut all the small branches off with a hatchet and a couple of bow saws.
I was really impressed with uncle Bill's skill with the chain saw. He was pretty old, and a fairly small man, but he'd start the chain saw right up, and wield it like it was an extension of his arm. Sometimes when someone is really good at something, they just do it quickly and want you to stay out of the way. But uncle Bill would always tell us what he was doing, and give us little safety tips for cutting wood and tell various stories about people getting injured doing such work.
There was a popple that was growing right up against the outhouse, and grandad decided it should come down before it did some damage to the outhouse. Growing up against the outhouse had caused the tree to lean away, so uncle Bill pointed out that since there was no wind that day, we could be reasonably confident that it would fall away from the outhouse. He cut a wedge out of the trunk of the tree and told us how the tree would fall towards the wedge if he cut in from behind the wedge, about an inch or two higher. He warned us never to cut all the way through the trunk because the weight of the tree can then fall on the blade of the saw and bind it, and even bend it. Or the trunk could slide off the stump, hit the ground and fall in a different direction. The outhouse was a bit of a special case because there was no way to get the chain saw blade behind the popple, except by cutting through the outhouse, which he wanted to avoid. He cut a little further into the wedge, then made some cuts into the sides. He gradually pushed the tip of the chain saw into the tree just behind the wedge until it was most of the way through the tree, then moved it back towards the outhouse, then towards the wedge again. He withdrew the saw, and pushed against the trunk, and there was a cracking noise. The tree started falling as he turned and walked away from it. He made it seem so easy, almost casual. I did notice that the chain saw had left some marks in the wall of the outhouse though, but I didn't say anything.
As we were cutting off some of the smaller branches with the bow saws, he told us that when we were using a chain saw we should never cut anything above shoulder height. He told us a story about a guy who climbed a tree to cut some limbs from it and his wife was below on the ground, dragging away the limbs he cut after they fell. He noticed a limb above him that he wanted to cut, and he figured he'd save some time by just reaching up with the chain saw to cut it, instead of climbing up higher than the limb and cutting it from a better position. The guy never finished cutting through that limb. The chain saw must have hit a knot or something and kicked back. The man's wife heard the chain saw suddenly stop, then heard two things hit the ground. At this point, uncle Bill paused and looked at us from under his glasses.
"One was the chain saw, the other was her husband's head."
As you can tell, I haven't forgotten the story.
My brother and I each got to use the chain saw a little bit, but it was mostly uncle Bill who did the chain sawing. This little old man shuffled along next to the trunk of the tree, bending over slightly, slicing through the tree like it was butter. Each piece of the trunk was almost exactly the same length. It was easy to tell that he'd cut a lot of trees in his life.
The next day when we were driving on the old logging roads, grandad spotted a couple of mature maple trees, and decided they'd make great firewood. We came back later with the chain saw. The hard maple was more difficult to cut than the relatively soft popple, and we had to deal with a lot of undergrowth and brush, instead of the grassy field the tree by the outhouse had fallen into. We stacked the maple by the side of the logging road so it could dry out. Grandad figured if we brought it back to the shack, someone would probably burn it while it was green. He took his firewood seriously and wanted to burn it when it was dry for maximum effect. In fact, he decided to take two or three of the thickest pieces of maple back home with us so he could burn it in his fireplace (after it dried out of course).
One evening, a local guy, Bill Darlek, stopped by the shack for a beer. Grandad and uncle Bill had known him for years, and hunted with him and had many a drink with him. Grandad paid him to mow the logging roads a couple of times a year. I think he also cut the lumber camp for hay sometimes. Sometimes grandad would have him plow some areas and plant clover, which the deer really liked.
Grandad, uncle Bill and Darlek were reminiscing and telling stories about various things that happened in and around the cabin.
Darlek said, in his Wisconsin accent, "Oooh boy, if these walls could talk."
Uncle Bill looked around threateningly at all the walls and practically growled in a loud voice, "They'd better not!"

accelerate

Uncle Bill and aunt JoAn (grandad's sister) would often come over to grandad's for dinner if we were there for a holiday, or we would visit them when we were in Racine. They lived on a street with a view of Lake Michigan. When my brother and I were pretty young, they got us a membership in the WWF and a subscription to Ranger Rick magazine. I think uncle Bill was involved in the yacht club, and aunt JoAn was a member of the Audubon Society and a prairie preservation group.
Uncle Bill was a fairly short compact man with a wry sense of humor. He had large thick glasses and always seemed to have his pants hiked up too high, but that's the style for some old men. When he was telling a story, or a joke, he would often be looking down at something else he would be doing at the same time. When he got to the most interesting part of the story, or the punch line to the joke, he would pause, and look up over his glasses to watch the listener's reaction. It seemed he was always saying something interesting or funny, so I'd be watching him waiting for the punch line, and he always seemed pleased that someone was paying attention.
One summer in the eighties, my brother and I took the train to go visit grandad and Carolyn, our step grandmother. The train was only about five hours late to Chicago. I'm not sure if Carolyn had called ahead to find out if the train was on time, or if she'd killed five hours doing things in Chicago, which wouldn't be hard to do.
We spent some time doing things in Racine, and then got ready for a trip to the shack. Uncle Bill came with us. On the way up, grandad was driving and I was in the passenger seat. Ross and uncle Bill were in the back seat. Uncle Bill had dozed off. We were on a divided highway, and I noticed some signs indicating there was construction ahead and that the lane we were in would be closing. I kept waiting for grandad to switch lanes, but he didn't, and he didn't seem to be planning to. We had pulled up next to a big truck, and I saw that it wasn't very far to where our lane ended.
I said, "Grandad, this lane is ending, we need to get over."
I expected he would slow down and slide in behind the truck.
He said something like, "What? Oh, yes, I saw that."
But I wasn't sure that he had. He jammed down the accelerator and we started passing the truck, but the lane started narrowing and it didn't seem like we would make it past the truck before the lane ran out. I think grandad must have floored it and the car downshifted and the engine roared as we were about to clear the truck. As the car squeezed in front of the truck, there was a loud crash and a thump as we smashed over the last construction barricade. A shower of plastic and wood splinters flew up onto the windshield and over the car. I was stunned. A large piece of orange and white reflective painted board slid over the hood and came to rest in the middle of the windshield. It seemed like it was sitting there for a long time, but it was probably only a fraction of a second before it was blown up and over the car.
Uncle Bill was roused from his nap by the loud noise and the bump.
He said, "What's all the racket?"
Grandad said, "Nothing, go back to sleep."
The windshield was cracked and when we stopped for gas, we saw that the driver's side headlight and running lights were smashed, the top front part of the fender was completely stove in from where the battery of the construction light hit, and there were scratches along the fender and hood. Grandad acted like it was no big deal, and uncle Bill just shook his head.

split pea soup

Uncle Bill was a teacher by trade. For a while, many years ago, on the morning of the last day of school, he would get up very early and pack his car for a trip to the shack. He would park his pre-packed car in the school parking lot, and as soon as classes finished, he'd walk out to his car and drive straight up to the shack. Grandad and some others would often drive up a few days later, or sometimes the same day, but a few hours later.
Uncle Bill was quite the drinker in those days. Grandad told me that sometimes he'd arrive, even just a few hours after uncle Bill, and he would already be drunk. Also, uncle Bill liked split pea soup, and he liked to make split pea soup.
One summer, grandad drove up to the cabin after getting off work, and of course uncle Bill had a head start so he was already there and settled in. As he pulled up, his headlights swept across the shack, alerting uncle Bill to his arrival. Grandad got out of his car to see uncle Bill, completely drunk, stumbling out the door of the shack, carrying a large metal tub that was normally used to collect rainwater.
Uncle Bill said to grandad, "I hope you're hungry."
The metal tub was full of gallons of split pea soup that uncle Bill had made earlier in the evening as he was getting drunk.

top view

Below is a view from above of the shack and the area around it. The approximate locations of some features previously mentioned are indicated with text and arrows. I'm not sure if the lake has an official name, but we called it Lake Kemosabe. It's fairly easy to see the logging road (the term road used in the loosest possible way) which went around to the logging camp. It's not as easy to make out the path of the road which ran a bit to the south and looped around to meet the other one. The "gate" was a steel cable strung between two sturdy posts. It hung across the dirt track which led from the end of the dirt road to the cabin.
The images below were downloaded from the terraserver, thanks to Microsoft and the U.S. Geological Survey. The photographic image is from 1999.



Here is a topographical map from 1984 of the same region as the photo above.



Here is an crude map which indicates the general geographic location with a small white star.

i am sure of it

Uncle Bill, my great uncle, told me that many years ago, he was at the shack by himself and was shaving in the kitchen. There was a splash in the bowl of water he was using for shaving, and he looked down and saw a snake in the bowl. He looked up the wall where the snake had fallen from, and there was another snake on the wall which seemed to be looking down at the snake in the bowl. He said he was convinced that the snake on the wall was the wife of the snake in the bowl, and she was scowling at him for falling off the wall into the bowl. The snake on the wall made a hissing sound, which translated into english was: "You get back up here, right now!"
That was the first time I heard about there being snakes in the cabin. After that, my brother and I were always on the lookout for snakes. We found some snake skins in kitchen, left behind when the snakes shed their skins, but it was years later before I actually saw a snake slither up the wall. The cabin is made of logs, with oakum chinking between the logs. There was plaster between the logs to cover the oakum, but it had come loose in a lot of places. The logs and loose plaster gave the snakes enough non-vertical surfaces so they could find a way to slither right up the wall.
Snakes slithering up the wall is one of the reasons that some people do not like to stay in the cabin. Also mice scampering across the floor, up the walls and in the attic. The occasional uninvited bat also causes some people to look less than favorably on sleeping there. In fact, when we visited in the early seventies, my mother and father pitched a tent over by the dam, and that's where we slept.
Some people choose the Skyline Motel or the Timber Inn Motel in Phillips. I think my brother and his girlfriend chose the Skyline Motel after she tried unsuccessfully to get the snakes on the wall to go away by spraying perfume on them.
I felt fortunate that my girlfriend was the type of person willing to spend some nights in the cabin, despite the potential for various reptilian and mammalian interlopers. I suppose we were really the interlopers. The animals had the cabin to themselves probably more than ninety percent of the time. I'm sure it was annoying when some big mammals arrived out of the blue and came in acting like they owned the place.
When we arrived, there was a birch tree fallen across the dirt track in front of the cabin. The track actually looped around, so it was no more than a nuisance to have to back the car up and drive on the other part of the track to get past the tree. It seemed strange that all the small branches on the lower side of the tree had been carefully cut off. We wondered why someone would have done that. Upon closer inspection, we realized that it wasn't someone, but some thing. The tree had been felled by a beaver, and all the branches of beaver height and lower had been gnawed off and carried away. Fortunately, the beaver seemed to be thinking ahead when it chewed into the trunk of the tree. If it had chewed about ninety degrees counter clockwise, the tree would have fallen on top of the shack. That would have been bad for the beaver, because it wouldn't have been able to get very many branches, and bad for us, because it probably would have caused the roof to cave in.
There was a log book in the cabin, that people who come there sometimes write in. One of the other owners of the place had been there a few weeks before my girlfriend and I arrived, and had written about the tree being across the road, and that they couldn't do anything about it, since they didn't have a chain saw. We didn't have a chain saw either, but there were a couple of bow saws and an axe in the shack. It didn't take us very long to cut through the little bit of tree trunk the beaver hadn't already cut through, and drag the tree so it was parallel to the dirt track, and no longer blocking it. Grandad had already told me what a poor opinion he had of that other owner, and when I told him about the log entry saying they couldn't do anything because they didn't have a chain saw, he had yet another confirmation. He was pleased when he found out that I had written in the log about how easy it was to move the tree without a chain saw.
The tree was still kind of in the way though, and it was a good sized birch, so we decided to cut it up for firewood. Doing that without a chain saw is hard work, and I wouldn't have blamed someone who neglected to do that part because of lack of chain saw. But we enjoyed doing things the hard way sometimes, so we worked away at it the next day. One of the bow saws was big enough for two people to use it, so we would get on either side of the tree and one would push while the other pulled, and vice versa. Towards midday it was getting pretty hot and I took my shirt off. She remarked that it was sometimes annoying that guys were free to take their shirts off pretty much whenever they felt like it, but it was unacceptable for her to do the same. I told her that out in the middle of the woods, it was perfectly acceptable to me for her to take her shirt off. She said it probably wouldn't be a good idea in case someone showed up there. I told her that I was sure no one would show up, and she could take her shirt off if she wanted. She didn't seem quite convinced. I reminded her that we had put the cable back up across end of road, and it was padlocked in place.
She seemed marginally convinced, and finally took her shirt off, much to my satisfaction. To be cutting firewood with my girlfriend in the north woods, without our shirts on, had to be one of the finest experiences in my life. We were both sweating by then, and resumed the push, pull, push, pull of the bow saw with renewed vigor. We were making pretty good progress and probably had three fourths of the tree cut and stacked by mid afternoon.
We had the tree partly up on an old sawhorse someone had left there and were about to saw another log off when I heard a strange sort of thumping noise. It was pretty far away and indistinct, but I wondered what it was. A minute later, I could tell it was coming from somewhere out towards the road, and as it got clearer, it seemed more like a chugging. She heard it too, and we both stood there staring down the dirt track towards the road. I walked a little ways towards the cabin so I could see further down the track, and I recognized the sound as the putt putt putt of an old tractor engine just as I saw an old tractor rolling down the track. I felt a panicky feeling and told my girlfriend that someone was coming. She gave me a little scowl as she quickly went to get her shirt which was still lying on the grass. She was just finishing putting it on as the tractor came around by the cabin.
I recognized the old guy on the tractor as Bill Darlek, my grandad's friend who used to come by and chat and have a beer sometimes when we were hunting there. He was a local farmer, and kind of looked after the place. It turns out he was paid to come with his tractor and mow the old logging roads once or twice a year, and he was there to do just that. And that's why he had a key to the padlock on the cable at the end of the road. He set the mower down and drove off towards the dam and the logging roads, and we got back to sawing firewood.
My girlfriend kept her shirt on, and after we finished cutting the next piece of wood from the tree, I put mine back on too.
"No one will be coming, eh?"