Season Without Snow

After years of living and trapping in the Far North, there finally came an opening day when the frozen tundra was barren of snow. I count on a foot or more of powder covering the trails, and all years prior, I had been able taken this most essential element of my trapline for granted.

- Tom Williams

I remember that peculiar November all too clearly. It actually started with a crazy autumn. The berry patches had been mostly empty, spruce grouse numbers way down. The moose I shot was an old bull—old and tough. Temperatures were well below freezing by the end of October, the creeks and rivers frozen solid.

Winter had come to the North, yet it had somehow forgotten to bring the snow. and this created a few problems for us.

First, we could not use the sled, which meant we had to put saddlebags on the dogs and pack everything else on our own backs. Heavy sacks of flour, oatmeal and dog food went on my back.

The 15-mile hike to the post office was a long, cold march.

During summer the boys and I had cut and stacked wood up on the mountain behind the cabin, planning to slide it down on the snow when we needed it. Instead, we were packing it down on our backs. And with intense cold but no snow to insulate the cabin walls, we were burning twice as much wood as usual.

The log walls were chinked with moss, the pole roof covered with a foot of sod. But we depended on snow to bury that cabin. Once enough snow had fallen, we would shovel it against the walls right up to the eaves making a virtual igloo.

Most of our winter wash water came from melting snow. We kept a steel barrel next to the iron stove in the cabin, and we filled it with buckets of snow from the front yard. Without the snow, we had to go down the hill to the creek for water, and because of the intense cold, the creek froze right down to the gravel bed. Within a few weeks we had taken most of the ice from the pools.