Child of the Wilderness

Back in the ’80s I was out with one of the dogs on the power line across Goose River. It was the middle of the day and we were having a rest. The dog, Winnie, got excited and I looked down the line and I couldn’t see anything. She got more excited so I looked up again, and out onto the power line came this huge grizzly bear. I had a licence but I didn’t want to kill a bear that far from nowhere. The only way I could get the hide out was to carry it. I decided I’d leave him alone. But he started coming towards us and when he was about 50 yards away I yelled at him. He wouldn’t stop, he just kept coming. I picked a point where I would have to shoot him. He reached that point and he was dead. Boy, then I had a job. I skinned him, carried the hide out that day.

In the spring of 1944, we got our first beaver permit. At that time you could get six. I didn’t know how to catch a beaver. I caught my six beaver, but I didn’t catch ’em in one day, I’ll tell you. It was trial and error and quite a while before I realized if you washed your sets splashed water on them and splashed the area after you’re done setting them you caught better. A fella I was with one time for a day was complaining his traps weren’t catching, so I watched him setting traps all day and asked if he’d ever washed them. He told me he didn’t, so I said, If you do, you’ll catch better. He marvelled that a kid could think like that and he said, You’re right, every time it rains I catch better.

Sometimes you’d have to keep the fire going all night to thaw fur, so you were catching sleep in small naps. Then you’d be up an hour or two before daylight to skin the stuff. Sometimes it was hard to skin because it was only partially thawed. The fur in the early part of the winter wasn’t as thick so it thawed quicker. The late winter fur was more insulated and stayed frozen longer.

We always trapped a lot squirrels. When my brother went to the Army I started snaring squirrels. I used brass-coloured snare wire. One time a native fella stopped by and saw my brass wire and told me if I used strands of wire off the coyote cable it worked better. You had to burn it to blacken it. He told me to get the stove going and toss it in and cover it with coals and when it turned red hot to take it out and let it cool at room temperature. I tried it and it worked. As ...a matter of fact he gave me the first bunch of cable, which I traded him for squirrels. We got along great. If you caught a squirrel in one of these snares you didn’t use it again. I got so good at it, one year I caught 1574 squirrels in two weeks. The winter of 1963 I caught about 7000 squirrels. At that time when guys shot squirrels, they shot up to a hundred a day. They were so thick we used to have to skin them while we were hunting them. We would watch, shoot and skin. You’d hear squirrels chirping all over the bush. The reason we went into squirrels so heavy was the long- haired fur prices were down and it paid better to catch the squirrels in the long run.

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River crossing.