One man’s wilderness Read Free Page A

watched him take off like a giant loon. He was really banking a lot on heaven. He said he was ready for the Lord to take him anytime. He was even looking forward to it. I just hoped that when the time came he wouldn’t be disappointed. I watched him until the speck went out of sight over the volcanic mountains.
    It was good to be back in the wilderness again where everything seems at peace. I was alone. It was a great feeling—a stirring feeling. Free once more to plan and do as I pleased. Beyond was all around me. The dream was a dream no longer.
    I suppose I was here because this was something I had to do. Not just dream about it but do it. I suppose, too, I was here to test myself, not that I had never done it before, but this time it was to be a more thorough and lasting examination.
    What was I capable of that I didn’t know yet? What about my limits? Could I truly enjoy my own company for an entire year? Was I equal to everything this wild land could throw at me? I had seen its moods in late spring, summer, and early fall, but what about winter? Would I love the isolation then, with its bone-stabbing cold, its brooding ghostly silence, its forced confinement? At age fifty-one I intended to find out.
    My mind was swarming with the how and when of projects. Could I really build the cabin with just hand tools to the standards I had set in my mind? The furniture, the doors, the windows—what was the best way to produce the needed boards? Would the tin gas cans serve as I hoped they would? Wasthe fireplace too ambitious a project? The cabin had to be ready before summer’s end, but the cache up on its poles? Surely that must wait until next spring. There were priorities to establish and deadlines to meet. I would need the extra daylight the summer would bring.
    The most exciting part of the whole adventure was putting self-reliance on trial. I did not intend to break any laws. No meat would be harvested until hunting season. Until then fish would be a mainstay of my diet, along with berries and wild greens. I would plant a small garden more out of curiosity than actual need. Babe would supply those extras that provide a little luxury to daily fare. He would be my one contact with that other world beyond the range.
    I looked around at the wind-blasted peaks and the swirls of mist moving past them. It was hard to take my eyes away. I had been up on some of them, and I would be up there again. There was something different to see each time, and something different from each one. All those streamlets to explore and all those tracks to follow through the glare of the high basins and over the saddles. Where did they lead? What was beyond? What stories were written in the snow?
    I watched an eagle turn slowly and fall away, quick-sliding across the dark stands of spruce that marched in uneven ranks up the slopes. His piercing cry came back on the wind. I thought of the man at his desk staring down from a city window at the ant colony streets below, the man toiling beside the thudding and rumbling of machinery, the man commuting to his job the same way at the same time each morning, staring at but not seeing the poles and the wires and the dirty buildings flashing past. Perhaps each man had his moment during the day when his vision came, a vision not unlike the one before me.
    A strange possessiveness seemed to surge through me. I had no right to call this big country mine, yet I felt it was.
    I examined my heap of gear on the gravel. There were 150 pounds to be backpacked along the connecting stream and the upper shoreline to Spike’s cabin. Many times I had gone over in my mind what to take. I knew what was available in the cabin but didn’t want to use any more of Spike’s gear or suppliesthan I had to. Things were valuable out here and hard to replace. Spread before me were the essentials. I organized the array into three loads.
    I was sure I could pack two loads today, but just in case it was only one, I included in the