At Home in the Woods by Bradford Angier & VENA ANGIER

Author:Bradford Angier & VENA ANGIER
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608934430
Publisher: Down East Books

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LIVING OFF THE COUNTRY

We had two new motives from then on. One was to subsist as much as possible on foods the wilderness so pleasantly offered. The other was to learn what we could of wild edibles so that we might compress that knowledge into a salable article.

We needed food, and we needed money. Our fiction, perhaps because the first-hand impressions we incorporated in it had little of the lupine savagery and icy peril of most of the so-called northern stories we read, was still not selling. What difference did it make if the U. S. Weather Bureau bore out the fact that it actually gets colder in popular Yellowstone National Park than at Barrow on Alaska’s northernmost tip? What did it matter if 100° in the shade has been recorded at Fort Yukon, north of the Arctic Circle?

What if more snow does fall in Chicago during an average winter than along much of the Alaska Highway? What if blizzards are actually unknown in many northern sections including Hudson Hope? What if even in the refrigerated interior of Alaska and the Yukon, thermometers drop little if any lower than in the beautiful states of Montana and Wyoming. What if elsewhere they’re surprisingly higher?

The average January temperature of such a rightfully great American city as Minneapolis runs some dozen degrees below zero. Compare that to such above-zero January averages in Alaska as 22° in Seward, 27° in Juneau, 29° in Wrangell, and 32° in Ketchikan which incidentally is south of us. But what did that matter if magazine readers wanted to picture their North as an inert, silent land of eternal ice and snow? If we were going to make any money writing, we decided, perhaps our best bet would be to try something factual.

Some have asked us if there weren’t fur-bearing animals about our cabin? Yes, there were beaver, fisher, lynx, fox, coyote, weasel, cougar, skunk, wolverine, muskrat, and of course wolves. There was a poor grade of mink. There was the finest marten in the world, with a glossy and luxuriant fur sold by some retailers as Hudson Bay Sable. Even the chattering little red squirrel was worth from a quarter to seventy-five cents, depending on market fluctuations. Some trappers, armed with the inevitable .22 rifle with which they kill everything including moose and grizzly, case and bundle two thousand or so of the tiny pelts each year.

But one doesn’t head just anywhere in the North Woods and start trapping. In British Columbia, for example, there are registered trap lines. Every square foot of the country is divided into specific if sometimes loosely defined areas. Dudley Shaw, for example, had the exclusive right to trap in the woods about our cabin. My catching a fisher in our yard would have been, in addition to a violation of law and custom, the same as stealing one hundred dollars from Dudley’s pocket.

“We might as well get at that bear meat before we do anything else,” Brad suggested the next morning.

“Shall we smoke it?” I asked vaguely.

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