Chapter 2

One winter day, I was doing my daily walk checking my traps in the woods. At the time my trap line was a triangle starting near the barn, crossing the creek and going to the southeast corner of our land, over to the southwest corner, then crossing the creek again on the way back.

I was angry that I’d caught two mink but something had eaten most of them. I saw wolf tracks near them and some of my other traps near the southwest corner. The wolf had circled all three empty traps, but hadn’t gotten within two feet of them.

As I crested the hill near my trap at the corner of my land, I saw a man standing about ten yards from a wolf caught in a trap! They were fifty or so yards from me, on tribal land that adjoined mine. He was taking a blanket out of his backpack. As I approached I saw he was a tall Native American, or what we called an ‘Indian’ at the time. In my 24 years, I’d never talked to a person who wasn’t White before. I was nervous and quite suspicious, but resisted the urge to take the 30/30 rifle from my shoulder or the .22 pistol from my belt. I thought I’d seen him at the fur trader’s a few times. I held up my hand and called out, “Hi, I’m Bruce. My land ends at the tree over there.” I pointed to it.

He waved back. “Hello. I’m Pine, Pinesong Rivers. Help me release him.”

“What? Wolf pelts go for thirty bucks! That’s a week’s pay!”

He looked at me disapprovingly and frowned. “The pack’s leader is getting old and he’s their only young male. They’ll be in trouble without him. I’ll toss the blanket over his head and grab him. You release the trap.”

I admired his bravery. There’s no way I’d get my hand near a wild wolf’s mouth! I shrugged. “Okay, if you’re sure.” I took out my trap bar, which was like a crowbar but thinner and lighter.

“On three. One, two, THREE!” He threw the blanket over the wolf’s head and grabbed him around the neck, while I pushed the spring down to release the trap. A second later, the wolf was twenty yards away and running fast.

Pine said, “It’s good he won’t come back for a long time. He ate some of my muskrats.”

“He got a couple of my mink, too.”

“I use conibear 110 traps in a wood box for mink, so coyotes and wolves don’t get ‘em.”

“Hmmm. I have good luck with number 2 traps, but a coyote ate one last year too. Using a box is a good idea. Thanks!”

“You’re the culvert guy, right? My nephew could use a job next summer, if you need more diggers.”

“Sure. Have him visit me sometime.”

I saw Pine near the border between my land and the tribe’s a few more times that year, and we swapped stories and ideas. We eventually became good friends and his nephew James worked for me a couple of summers.

Two days before Thanksgiving I brought Jake and Nora some cheese, butter, and two rabbits I’d shot. I invited them to Thanksgiving dinner, and they happily accepted. Jake said he wished they had more children, partly for help with the farm work, and I agreed. For four years after the birth of their first son Roger, they had no luck getting pregnant. My Elaine hadn’t gotten pregnant in eight years of marriage either.

While Jake walked down their long driveway to get the mail, Nora revealed a big secret. Elaine didn’t want any more kids, so at the right time of the month she drank a special tea. As I recall it had petals from two kinds of flowers, plus roots and seeds from a certain plant. It would stop a baby from growing in her! She hadn’t even told me she didn’t want more kids!

Nora wondered if their problem was with Jake. She didn’t think it was her, since she had a son. She made me uncomfortable with the fact that for over three years they’d made whoopie at least twice a week, which was triple what I got. She blushed as she also told me Jake was willing to go without the good stuff if she kissed the right part of him the right way. She was content doing it for him often, since he took great care of her and her son.

My face must have been as red as hers when Jake handed Nora a letter from her mother and drastically changed the subject. “I have some spare lumber from building the new hog barn. I think there’s enough left for an ice fishing shack. Would you give me a hand building one and getting it to the lake, Bruce?”

I smiled and replied, “Sure! You supply the nails and the beer.”

Putting together the frame, walls, and roof only took us an afternoon. Most ice shacks were 6 by 6 or 4 by 8 feet, and a few were only the size of an outhouse, barely big enough for one person to sit down out of the wind, with just a peep hole to look outside.

Ours would be an 8 by 12-foot ice fishing palace, with three windows! We built it in two halves we could move without too much trouble, then bolt it together once it was in place. Jake had replaced the wood stove in his kitchen a few weeks before. We put the old one in the shack with galvanized sheet steel under and behind it, then put in a chimney. On the side opposite the door, we built a long bench with a big storage box under the seat.

We attached a card table to a wall on hinges, so we could flip it up or down easily. On the other walls we put in screw hooks for the ice auger, ice saw, a radio, a few folding chairs for when friends came over, and several other things. I put another couple of hooks in the ceiling to hang lanterns, in case we wanted to ice fish after dark.

Eventually it had a coffee pot, plates, utensils, and a couple of pans to cook up some fish on the spot. Later we even put in a small flip-down kitchen counter with a removeable basin so we could use water heated on the stove to wash up after meals. We laughed a good bit when Nora jokingly asked where we were going to put the bathtub.

Once we had it loaded on a wagon and tied it down, Jake nervously told me, “We really want more kids. I think maybe ... maybe I can’t.” He rested a hand on my arm. “You’re my best pal, Bruce. I ... I love you like a brother. If you and Nora would ... uh ... If we could have another baby and uh ... and if nobody found out ... ah...” He was awkwardly giving me permission to make love with his pretty wife!

I stared at the ground with him and thought quite a while. “Jake, you know a married man would never do anything like that.” He smiled happily when I winked. “Let’s get this sucker to the lake, so I can be home by milkin’ time.”

When the ice was finally thick enough, Jake and I dragged the two halves of our ice shack onto the lake. I bolted it together as he gathered some wood for the stove. Soon after, we were sitting in our new home away from home, drinking coffee and listening to a football game on the radio. Every minute or two, we’d look out the windows at our tip-up fishing rigs, waiting for a flag to show. There were no other shacks or fishermen for a good 100 yards.

Talking about radio reminds me, electricity was quite a new thing. Our farms had only been wired up a year before my marriage. We had four light bulbs in the barn, two in the machine shed, another on a pole in the yard, and only five in the whole house. We were content with just those, a refrigerated tank for the milk we sold, and two outlets in the kitchen; up until we could afford a television in 1954. We only got two black and white channels, but it was a marvelous improvement over sitting around talking or singing while we were cooped up inside most of the winter.

Well, on our ice shack’s first day of use, Nora opened the door and walked in. “You’re not wearing your coats? I brought lunch and blankets in case you got cold.” I smiled and proudly said, “The shack’s as comfortable as the kitchen at home! Take your gloves off and feel it.” I pointed to the thermometer, which showed 65 degrees. Fahrenheit of course, there weren’t fancy metric degrees in those days.