Bones On Black Spruce Mountain Read online

  "Okay, don't answer! I don't care anyway."

  "Look, Seth, can't we just forget it?"

  "No."

  The boys began fixing a supper of bacon, trout, potatoes, and tea. They really didn't need the bacon, but they needed grease for cooking in the days to come. It was hard cooking without the proper fire pit and cooking range, but they managed. They ate their meal mechanically, both of them too preoccupied to enjoy themselves.

  Finally Seth gathered his courage again and said, "Daniel, are you nervous?"

  "Nervous about what?"

  "I don't know. Just nervous."

  "Nah."

  "Well, something's wrong. I haven't seen you like you were this afternoon since that first fall in school. Remember what a fighter you were? You were some mean dude!"

  Seth smiled as he said it. It was an amusing, almost fond memory for him.

  Daniel wasn't smiling. His eyes were glassy, far away. "I remember" was all he said. .

  "Maybe I am a little nervous," Daniel continued. "But I don't know what about. I just don't feel right. Maybe I'm getting sick."

  "Do you think it's the boy?"

  "Are you kidding? I told you I didn't believe that stuff and I don't. I don't even think about that story. That's not what's bothering me. Let's not talk about it anymore."

  Chapter 3

  After the boys finished supper and washed the dishes, there was just enough dusky evening light left to construct the reflector logs for the back of the fire. They cut the butt log from the hemlock tree into four-foot sections and stacked them one on top of the other to a height of about three feet. Hemlock was the best wood for a reflector because it didn't burn easily; it tended to char over and go out. They positioned the hack logs about five feet in front of the opening to the lean-to and drove stakes into the ground behind the reflector to support what amounted to a log wall be-hind the fire. The reflector logs were very important. Heat and light bounced off them back into the cooking utensils so that food cooked more evenly. But even more important, the back logs reflected heat and light into the lean-to, creating a warm, bright room in which the boys could laze away the dark hours before they went to sleep.

  Daniel had gathered some yellow birch logs for the after-dinner fire. No nighttime campfire was complete without the delicious smell of yellow birch smoke. Yellow birch smoke smelled just like . . . like . . . yellow birch smoke. For Seth and Daniel that distinctive odor was as much a part of the woods as the woods themselves.

  Now with the sweet smoke lacing the air, the boys hunkered down on the foot log of the lean-to and commenced the serious evening business of staring at the fire.

  "Got your pipe?" Daniel asked.

  "Yup. You?"

  "Yup. Where did you get the tobacco?"

  "The usual place," Seth said with a smile unseen in the darkness. Both boys filled their pipes and began to smoke. Neither really smoked, not like some of the kids at school who had cigarettes with them all the time. They'd tried cigarettes and disliked them; they'd even chewed tobacco a couple of times, just as their fathers did, but neither one of those habits had ever stuck. In fact, the only time they ever smoked was while they were camping, at times like this. Maybe it was because Mr. Bateau smoked a pipe only when he was working or camping in the woods.

  The night was quiet, the fire warm. Only an occasional crackle or spurt interrupted the perfect stillness all around them. It was like old times. Daniel felt better. He relaxed, his anger gone as if it had been carried away by the smoke that climbed high into the night sky. Now he wanted to talk.

  "Okay," Daniel said, "I admit it. I am nervous or something, at least I was this afternoon. Maybe I do think about that story more than I'd like to admit. But I still don't think we'll find any bones. It's just a story."

  "That's right," Seth agreed, "but it's hard to get what Mr. Bateau said out of your head. Say he's right. Say we do find the bones. What difference does it make? There aren't any ghosts or anything. Bones are just bones, right?"

  "I guess so." Daniel puffed on his pipe, paused a moment, and then said, "Look, this is ridiculous. We're too old for this stuff. There's only one way to settle this thing."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "Nah. I'm in no hurry. Are you?"

  "Nah."

  "Besides, we haven't done any real fishing yet. What say we finish getting the camp in shape after breakfast, then pack lunch and spend the rest of the day fishing that beaver pond we found. We could climb Black Spruce day after tomorrow,"

  "Sounds good to me," Seth said. "Let's get some sleep."

  Both boys stepped around behind the lean-to to urinate before turning in.

  "You know," Daniel said, "when I was a little kid I could pee about ten times this far. I remember, years ago, when I lived with one of my other families, I used to go out on the back porch at night and piss all over her roses. She never could figure out why they didn't do too good."

  Seth was startled. It was the first time Daniel had ever mentioned anything about his past.

  While Seth fixed the fire for the night, Daniel unrolled the sleeping bags. The boys undressed and climbed in. Each boy rolled his pants and shirt into a pillow. They settled down on the deep, soft bed of hemlock boughs, put their hands behind their heads, and lay staring at the fire.

  A hermit thrush, startled awake, sang a short, interrupted song in the night and then was silent again. The boys joined the bird in sleep.

  Morning came loud and early. At dawn, exactly dawn, long before the sun rose over the eastern mountains, the woods came alive with birds singing and chipmunks and squirrels scurrying about screeching argumentatively. The ravens, those rulers of sunrise, croaked over the treetops, flying back and forth above the mountains in a morning ritual the purpose of which was known only to themselves. Seth and Daniel climbed sleepy-eyed out of their bags and sat for a time in front of the lean-to shivering, waiting to wake up enough to start a fire.

  Both boys felt happy. It looked as though it would be a good day.

  After the fire was going well and they were waiting for it to settle to coals steady enough for cooking, Daniel began mixing pancake batter while Seth blended powdered milk, sugar, and cocoa for the morning's hot chocolate.

  When breakfast was done and the pots and pans were washed and hung inside the lean-to, the boys constructed the fire pit and cooking range. They dug a shallow rectangular hole about two feet wide, four feet long, and four inches deep, in front of the reflector logs. They lined the hole with flat stones taken from the brook. The stones held heat and improved the range as a cooking surface. Two forked sticks about three feet high were stuck in the ground at either end of the range and a straight striped maple pole was cut and laid into the fork of each stick so that it stretched above the fire. Pots could be hung from the pole. With the cooking range complete the boys would be able to cook three or four separate dishes at once. They could complicate the menu now, begin to eat in style. Tonight they planned to have a real wilderness feast.

  A few feet downstream from the camp Daniel found a small waterfall about three feet high and behind the falls, hollowed out of the ledge rock, a tiny cave about the size of a breadbox. It was exactly what he had been looking for: a refrigerator. Inside the tiny cave it was cold and damp, the perfect place to store their eggs, bacon, and extra trout. A little rearranging of stones and everything would be just right.

  While Daniel worked on the ice box, Seth cut a straight branch from a young white ash tree and fashioned some fire utensils: a poker and a pair of tongs.

  The poker was a simple matter; the tongs, however, required a lot of tooling and great care.

  Seth began with a piece of ash about three feet long and two inches in diameter. First he flattened each end on what would be the inside. Then he whittled grooves in the flattened surface with his pocketknife to improve the grip. In the middle of the stick for about six inches either way from the center, he whittled down the diameter to about one third its original thickness. Wi
th this done, he built a small fire and began heating the thinned middle over the flames. As the green wood began to hiss and drip, he slowly and very carefully applied pressure to each end of the stick. Gradually the heat softened the cells in the wood and the stick began to bend under the pressure Seth applied until Seth was able to bend the tongs in so that each flattened, checked end touched the other. Tempered as it had been in the flames, the center did not break. Seth held the now completed pair of tongs above the fire for a moment, then dashed to the brook and plunged the hot tool into the icy water. He held it there until it was stone cold, then walked back to camp continuing to hold the two ends together. When the tongs were dry, he released the ends and they leaped open with the same definite liveliness as a fine piece of springy steel.

  It was a lot of work, but Seth knew that a good pair of tongs was the most useful piece of fireplace hardware imaginable. With them he could lift hot pots, retrieve dropped pieces of food from glowing coals, rearrange burning firewood, and place hot coals exactly in the right position under a frying pan for even cooking. In a skillful hand tongs had the delicate accuracy of a pair of tweezers.

  Daniel called Seth to see his craftily devised icebox, and after the proper compliments to Daniel's ingenuity, Daniel was obliged to walk back to camp to comment on the skill and craftsmanship with which Seth had fashioned their cooking tools.

  These little touches, the icebox, the poker and tongs, were what made camp life enjoyable, made it something more than mere survival in the woods. The camp was their home, even if only for a short time, and like anyone proud of his home, the boys did everything they could to make it a good, pleasant, and livable place.

  With the camp complete, the boys, swollen with the pride everyone feels for a thing well made, stood around and admired their handiwork. They puttered about the camp, pleased to be where they were. Seth gathered and cut firewood while Daniel dug a toilet about fifty feet behind the camp. He dug a hole between two trees standing close together, deep enough to cover their waste well when they broke camp. With the hole dug, Daniel cut a smooth, round pole. He lashed it to each tree so that it passed over the hole about a foot and a half above the ground, making an improvised seat.

  There was nothing else to do, so the boys made peanut butter sandwiches, gathered up the tea pail, a little sugar and tea, and their fishing tackle and headed upstream to the beaver pond they'd found the day before. They hopped from rock to rock, picking their way upstream. They felt good. Now the only vision that danced in either boy's head was one of huge trout.

  The boys had a sorry disappointment waiting for them at the pond. They fished the deep areas all along the darn. They used worms, small lead-headed jigs, streamer flies, wet flies, dry flies, nymphs, but nothing worked. There wasn't even one little nibble.

  "Guess we better head back downstream," Seth said.

  "Yeah, I guess so," Daniel agreed. "Damn! We have the worst luck. Hey, wait a minute! I think I know what's wrong. This must be a dead pond. Look at that beaver house out there. It's covered with grass. There haven't been beavers in here for years. This water is too brackish, not enough oxygen. That's why the water is so dark coming out of here, why there's all that black moss below the dam. Trout won't live in here."

  "Maybe so," Seth said, "but we saw fresh beaver cuttings down there."

  "That's right, and that means there's heaver around here somewhere. Hey! You know how beavers always build darns in a series, one after another along a stream. How much you want to bet there's another dam above here. And a live pond, with trout in it. Those trout in the brook have to come from somewhere."

  "I'm not betting. Let's go!"

  The boys gave the dormant pond a wide berth, circled through a flat of hardwoods, found the inlet to the pond, and poked their way upstream. Now there were more and more fresh signs of beaver. Then, ahead of them, there it was, a beaver pond four or five times bigger than the one below. As the boys climbed up over the dam, a startled muskrat plowed his way through the skin of water.

  "Look at that!" Daniel exclaimed. "Muskrat. A fresh beaver house. This has got to be the place!"

  It was. It didn't matter what the boys put on the end of their lines; everything caught fish, and good-sized ones too, some of them a foot long. Any deer nearby must have gotten an odd eyeful that morning. There were two strange two-footed beasts pacing back and forth across the beaver dam, hooping and hollering, catching trout as fast as they could get their lines into the water. It was the kind of morning all fishermen dream of, but very few ever experience. Every cast, every single one, hooked a trout. No one must have ever fished the pond before. It was a trout fisherman's heaven. When the boys got home, no one would believe them, and they didn't care.

  By lunch time each boy had caught dozens of trout, but they kept only two large ones apiece, just enough for lunch; all the rest they unhooked very carefully and returned gently to the water. They could get the trout they needed for supper during the afternoon fishing.

  They found a good place for lunch near the edge of the pond and began gathering firewood. Suddenly Daniel called Seth over to a soft, muddy spot near the shore. There, printed neatly in the wet earth, was a hear track. The boys could tell by the sharp, clean lines of the track that it was fresh, probably last night's or even this morning's. The boys were more excited than frightened; in fact, neither had any fear of bears. There was little to be afraid of. If it were a she-bear with cubs and the boys got themselves between the mother and her babies, there could be trouble, but both Seth and Daniel knew that was highly unlikely. Bears were very shy and always gave humans plenty of room. Both boys actually hoped they would see the bear; they had lived around bears all their lives but had never seen one. However, they did decide then and there that when they returned to camp they would put all their food in one of the backpacks and hoist it by a length of baler twine high into a tree above the camp. A bear could wipe out their food supply and destroy the camp in a matter of minutes.

  With the fire going, Seth stuck a stick into the damp earth so that it angled over the fire and then hung the tea pail full of water from the end of the stick. As the water heated, the boys ate their peanut butter sandwiches. When it boiled, Daniel dumped in the tea and set the pail aside while Seth began to roast the four trout he had skewered with a peeled green alder branch. The trout cooked quickly and soon were done. When lunch was finished, each boy propped himself up against a tree and stared quietly out across the beaver pond.

  No beavers appeared that afternoon, but now and then a muskrat swam across the pond, busily doing something. A bright blue-and-white kingfisher swooped into the top of a drowned and naked spruce tree standing in the middle of the pond. The boys could sec him cock his jauntily crested head to the side so that he could search the water below. Then, without warning, he dropped like a stone into the pond and disappeared completely under the water's surface. Soon he appeared again, and rose in a shower of silver drops above the pond and was gone over the tree tops, a large trout squirming helplessly in his beak.

  "Roasting trout on a stick like that reminds me of the first time I ever did it," Daniel said dreamily. "It was five years ago. Dad and I were fishing the brook just above the swamp. It might have been the first thing we ever did together. Anyway, we caught a few and then we came on this little gravel bar in the brook. I was carrying the trout on a stick; we didn't have a creel that day. I remember it just like it was yesterday. I held the trout up and said, 'Boy, these look so good I'd like to eat them right now!' Dad just looked at me and said, 'Okay, wait a minute.' Before I knew what was going on, he had started a fire, and we were eating trout and drinking brook water. I don't know why that sticks in my head so clearly, but I bet when I'm as old as Mr. Bateau I'll still remember it like I do right now. And that place, that pool where we cooked the trout, I've never been there since, but I can see it. I know exactly what it looks like. Man, that was some fun day.”

  Both boys fell silent; they were tired. The lean-to ca
mp was a comfortable place to spend the night, but no wilderness camp, not even a cozy one, offers as good a night’s sleep as a soft bed in a warm house. A short nap was in order.

  Chapter 4

  The afternoon’s fishing began badly, and for a time the boys feared they wouldn’t get enough fish for supper, but slowly their creels filled.

  Seth pulled a writhing foot long trout out of the pond, seized it, and cracked it once across the skull just above the eyes with a small, heavy stick, about six inches long, tat he carried for killing fish. Both boys always killed the fish they meant to keep as soon as they caught them. It was cruel to drop live fish into a creel, where they would suffer an agonizing, slow death by suffocation. Death was involved in fishing just as it was in hunting, and the quicker and more efficient the killing could be the more acceptable that unsavory part of the game became. Seth watched the beautiful, lithe, red and black and yellow and purple and orange-speckled fish shiver its sudden way to death. Then it was still, cold on his palm. A small drop of blood appeared at the edge of the fish's mouth. Seth stared at the dead trout, and as he stared, he was carried back to a warm October afternoon last fall.

  It was the first time his parents had allowed him to hunt partridge alone. Seth had hunted with his father many times, but as yet he had never actually killed a bird. Now he was on his own and he wanted more than anything to return home with a grouse or two to prove his skill as a hunter. Seth poked his way along a hardwood ridge watching the trees for feeding birds who might sit tight, as they often did, and let him pass under them, then fly away behind him. He stopped now and then, waited, watched, and listened. All his senses were alive, on edge, in a way they had never been before. He saw things, heard things he would have missed had he not been hunting. His whole body hunted. He was sharp now, acute, the way a wild animal is all the time.

  He pushed forward slowly, cautiously. Then, a few yards in front of him, a partridge exploded in II thunder of wings and shot upward into the branches of the trees. The gun exploded too. Instinctively, Seth had snapped the shotgun to his shoulder, pointed, and fired in the smallest fraction of a second.