Chapter 5

A light snow was falling the next morning, and Tom was frowning slightly as he sat at the table, quietly sipping his before-breakfast coffee. He looked up at Sandy and sighed, knowing he couldn’t put off his worries and apprehensions any longer.

“Sandy, I know you’ve been putting off going back to town as long as you could. Unfortunately, we need to get the rest of those supplies delivered as soon as possible,” he opened the conversation. “I was down at the lake yesterday, checking it for ice, and I think it’s getting close to thick enough to damage the pontoons of a plane hitting it at landing speed. You see, thin ice won’t support the weight, and the pontoons break through it, but then they’re hitting ice edge-on, and it can act just like a can-opener. Ice like that can slice open the pontoons, which fill with water, and the sudden increase in drag can flip the plane nose over and upside down. If Harry doesn’t fly in our supplies soon, we’ll have to wait a month or more until the ice thickens enough to hold the weight of the plane. Then, he can land on skis.”

“Oh shit, I don’t want to endanger Harry,” she said instantly, and from the surprised look on her face, he knew she hadn’t been aware of that danger. “I’ve been putting him off because I enjoy being here with you, but I guess...”

“Yeah, I’ve enjoyed having you here as well, but last year at this time, there was a foot of snow on the ground, and enough of it fell up in the mountain passes that I didn’t dare hike out. We’ve used up a lot of our supplies, and I was counting on having the second batch here by now. If we have to wait for the ice to get thick enough for Harry to use skis to land, we might be living on nothing more than venison or moose meat. Besides, what about your business?”

“Well, the business isn’t a problem because I have a retired guy who works for me and can handle things right now. The tax business doesn’t usually get busy until after New Year’s,” Sandy sighed. “The problem is that I like being here. I want to see what it’s like when the snow flies and a blizzard sets in. Besides, you haven’t cut your firewood yet or done your hunting for the winter, and you still need help to get things done here in the cabin.”

“Well, even if you stay longer, we’ll still need those supplies, and we need them soon,” Tom shook his head in exasperation and sighed heavily. “I like having you here, though, so I’m not about to kick you out if you want to stay, but it would mean you’d be here for at least another month and maybe even longer. Once the ice starts forming on the lake, we’d have to wait for the ice to become thick enough to carry the weight of Harry’s plane with a full load.”

“Let’s not wait for that. I’ll go call him on the radio and see how soon he can fly in,” she leaped to her feet and ran to the radio, slipped on her headphones, and in only a short time was talking to Harry’s office.

Tom left her to it and began to cook breakfast, only looking up when she called him.

“Tom, the gal in Harry’s office says he should be able to fly in soon, probably tomorrow or the next day, if the weather holds,” she turned to look at him as she spoke. “Besides, Harry worked out the weight of what you had in the warehouse, and there is still about three hundred pounds of weight allowance if we need anything extra. Should we have him add anything?”

“Food, if you’re staying here,” he called, “potatoes, fresh veggies, a few dozen eggs, a couple of gallons of milk, things of that sort, and maybe another slab of that home-cured bacon from the butcher. Oh, you’d better ask him to pick up some winter clothes to fit you too. You’ll need long johns, wool socks, a decent parka, coveralls, boots, and mittens because it’s going to get cold, and the clothes you’ve been wearing until now just won’t cut it. Then, if you want to come hunting with me, you’d better order a snowmobile suit as well.”

With that, he went back to his cooking and left the arrangements to her. When she had signed off and shut down the radio, she came back and gave him a huge hug and a kiss.

“And what’s that for?” he asked, still holding her.

“For letting me stick around for a bit longer,” she grinned, then stood on tiptoe to kiss his nose. “Harry’s dispatcher said he’d fly in tomorrow, barring bad weather, but the forecast looks good.”

“Well, we should go check out the lake today, and we might as well take some tarps down there so we’re prepared to cover the supplies from the weather after we unload them. In fact, if we were smart, we might be wise to throw up a temporary shelter for the supplies, just in case we have bad weather after Harry leaves, but before we can get things moved.”

“Yeah, we really should have a bear-proof cache down there, but any shelter would be better than nothing,” she agreed.

So they ate, then grabbed tools, ropes, and tarps, loading them all on Tom’s cart, then hurried down to the flats by the lake. About a hundred feet from where Harry had landed before, there was a stand of tall, straight alder trees. Tom chose four of them to use as a base, cutting down anything inside the square those four trees made. Next, he climbed the four trees so he could tie a heavy pole about twelve feet in the air by using a crotch in each of the front two trees and another one at nearly the same height on the back two. Then he and Sandy used those first poles as a footing and quickly built a floor made of poles laid down side by side, all tied in place with heavy cord. Six more poles and many cross pieces tied further up in the trees allowed them to add a sloping tarp as a roof. Then they closed in the walls with tarps and some leftover plastic sheeting. Tom built a rough ladder using poles and rope, but made it removable so animals wouldn’t have easy access to the supplies. He’d even brought down some big tin cans, and they made four funnel-shaped forms, then tacked them to the trees to prevent mice and squirrels from getting up to their stash easily. Next, he cut back any trees or limbs that animals might use as a jump-off point to leap across to the stash. The whole operation took them most of the day, so they were tired when they returned to the cabin. Still, they felt what they’d built was a rough, but workable cache which was well worth their time and energy.

The next morning, they were at the lake with a campfire going and had a pot of coffee perking long before Harry landed and taxied in to land. To Tom’s astonishment, the very first thing Harry brought out of the plane was a pet carrier, covered with a blanket.

“When we were talking on the radio the other day, Sandy mentioned that she’d seen mice in the cabin, so I brought you a pair of ball-bearing mouse traps,” Harry laughed at the astonished look on Tom’s face as he lifted the blanket to show them two half-grown kittens. “The black one is a female, and the tabby one is a tom. The vet says they’re both healthy, and they’ve had their shots. On top of that, they should be okay as a breeding pair since they’re unrelated. Hell, they’re not just different breeds; they’re even from two different towns, but both of them had mothers that were mousers, so they should be mousers as well.”

Sandy hugged Harry, then grabbed the carrier and turned to Tom with a big grin. “I don’t care what you think, mister. I think they’re a wonderful gift since I hate mice, and we’ve got a bunch in our cabin.”

Tom just shook his head, then since Harry was worried about a possible storm coming in over the mountains, they began to hurriedly empty the plane. Twenty minutes later, he was taxiing out onto the lake, then lifting off and leaving, but they’d already arranged for him to fly in and pick up Sandy in December, if not earlier. That left Sandy and Tom on the shore of the lake with about a ton and a half of material and supplies, but at least it was sorted into piles of similar goods. They knew which supplies had to be moved to the cabin right away, those which could be temporarily stored in their new cache, and those which didn’t need any protection from either weather or animals.

The rest of the day was spent moving supplies from the lake to the cabin, then storing them away. The first load on Tom’s cart was the heaviest and largest load of perishable supplies. That included the vegetables, the bacon, and other items of that sort, but the load was topped by the cat carrier tucked under a small tarp, along with the cat’s litter box and a huge bag of kitty litter. Any other items that could be damaged by frost went into the backpacks. Then they set out to shift the piles which were still sitting on the ground. Fuel oil and supplies that animals would naturally avoid were stacked on the ground under the cache, then the dried foods and anything animals might consider edible were stored in the cache. Once everything was sorted and shifted, the hard work began, because they had to make trip after trip from the lake to the cabin and back again. It was late afternoon before they had everything up the hill, but they still had to put everything away.

Once all the supplies were brought inside, the two young cats were let out of their carrying case, but they only hunkered together in a corner of the cabin, watching Tom and Sandy. Finally, after an hour or so, while Sandy and Tom were sitting down and eating, the cats began to explore. Yet by the time Sandy and Tom went upstairs to get some sleep, the cats had both found the bed and taken possession, but after some argument, they did let the two humans share.

The next morning, Tom was awakened by a piercing scream, and he jumped out of bed, ready to tackle whatever was attacking Sandy. That wasn’t the problem, though; instead, she had awakened to find a gift on her pillow, a dead mouse carefully placed only inches from her nose. She didn’t appreciate that it was there, nor the fact that after Tom saw she wasn’t being killed, he’d broken into loud laughter.

“Well, we know one of the cats is a mouser anyway,” he chortled, managing to calm his laughter slightly. “Whichever one it is likes you too, since it’s already bringing you gifts.”

“Well, did it have to drop the darn thing right on the pillow beside me?” Sandy made a face.

“Poor little kitty must have thought you might wake up hungry,” he grinned, then ducked a flying mocassin as he pulled up his pants and headed downstairs to toss a log on the burning coals in the airtight stove and opened the damper so the stove would get hot enough to percolate coffee.

After they’d eaten, things got a lot more serious since there was work to do, as well as the wherewithal to do it. Now that he had more fuel, Tom could tackle his next job, making sure there was enough wood to keep the cabin warm all winter. First he cleaned up the rough slabs, cut ends, branches, and trimmings left behind after building his cabin, then he and Sandy split and stacked it in the breeze-way, ready to use. Unfortunately, the scraps left after building the cabin wouldn’t be enough, and for the rest of their firewood supply, they needed dry wood, preferably trees that had died while standing or hadn’t been down for long. As much as he could, Tom cut them uphill from the cabin, bucking them to firewood length, loading them on his cart, and pulling them downhill. Sandy would split and stack the rounds, but Tom would give her an occasional assist when she fell behind. They devoted the last part of September and early October to the job, but in the long run, they had several cords of easily accessible firewood. It was all neatly stacked in the breeze-way behind the cabin and kept dry with the tarps that Tom used for any short-term job. While they were working, though, Tom did set aside some interestingly shaped limbs and straight, knot-free sections of timber to use for construction of various projects.

Once they had enough firewood, Tom decided their next job was to build a meat cache high in the trees, but not far from the cabin and toward the edge of the little plateau. That cache meant they wouldn’t have to hang any meat in the open the way he’d had to do the year before. The cache was a miniature log cabin, with no windows and a simple door. The walls rested on a log floor which hung about twelve feet off the ground. They even used shakes left over from building the cabin to cover the roof and keep out the rain. Since the cache was only meant to store the meat needed during the winter and was intended to be used after the weather was cold enough so the meat would freeze naturally, nothing fancier was needed. By the time they’d finished building the cache, the weather was cold enough that they could use it since the ground in the shade of the trees was starting to freeze. That meant it was time to go hunting, only they didn’t have to go far for their meat that year.

There was a light snow the next day, so the following morning Tom decided he’d best go over his old snowmobile to make sure it was ready to use for hunting. He set out to do a tune-up. He opened it up and went over everything he could, cleaning and gapping the plugs and points, then checking all the places that needed lubrication. He was just buttoning it up before going inside for lunch. Then he happened to glance up and saw something that astonished him: a four-point mule deer buck traipsing blithely across the little meadow in front of the cabin. The rifle he always carried was leaning against his snowmobile within arm’s reach, so the biggest problem he had was moving slowly and smoothly enough not to scare the deer. He managed though and brought down a full-grown buck within fifty feet of the cabin and did it only two days after the meat cache was finished.

Sandy gave him a hand, and three hours later, that deer had been gutted, skinned, butchered, and stowed in the meat cache. An hour after that, Tom had fired up the snowmobile, then with the guts and other offal loaded on his old toboggan and trailing behind them, Tom and Sandy made a trip down to the lower plateau. They dumped the refuse in a gully, then headed back to the cabin to enjoy a meal of fresh venison liver, fried with onions and potatoes.

That evening, they heard noises outside. When they checked to see what was going on, they saw that even though they had cleaned up the area where they’d butchered the deer, several coyotes were gobbling up the blood-stained snow. Tom handed Sandy a rifle, and she chased them off with a shot that threw up snow, but didn’t injure even one coyote.

“Just so you know, I missed intentionally,” she said instantly. “I know you, and if I shot one, you’d have wanted to skin the dang thing, and it’s too darn cold. Besides, it’s getting dark. I refuse to make more work at this time of day for such a piddly gain.”

“Okay, but from now on, we carry a rifle anytime we’re outside, even if it’s just to go to the can,” he growled, but didn’t look upset.