This story, “I Hunt to Eat: Part 2 — The Wolves Circled,” appeared in the June 1970 issue of Outdoor Life. (You don’t need to read Part 1 to enjoy this story, though you can find it here.) This installment originally began with the following editor’s note:
In “Crane Fever” last month, Ted Updike told of his boyhood on the Saskatchewan prairie, of the hard times and privations of those early years, of hunting waterfowl with a dog and a .22, and of going into the bush as a wilderness trapper — a life he followed for 25 years. Here he resumes the story of his trapline adventures, passes along the lessons in woodcraft he learned from the Cree, and talks about the wolves, bears, and moose he encountered.
I was traveling down White Gull Creek, back in the bush 40 miles north of the Saskatchewan River, in the winter of 1926. My dogs were going at a good clip when all of a sudden they slowed to a walk, their heads and tails hanging. I urged them on, having no idea what was bothering them.
It was snowing hard, and a few hundred yards farther on I came to fresh wolf tracks. The wolves circled us, crossing our trail repeatedly, while we traveled half a mile, but I did not catch so much as a glimpse of them. Not until the pack went on about whatever blood-hungry business it had in mind did the dogs perk up again and hit the trail with any enthusiasm.
I have known trappers, followed by wolves that way, to tie their dog team and scurry back on their own track a couple of hundred yards in the hope of getting a shot as the wolves circled around. But I’ve never known the trick to pay off. Usually, with the man away from his toboggan, the wolves shorten their circle, moving in closer to the dogs and crossing the trail out of the man’s sight.
I never tried that trick. I always figured there was a chance the pack might actually attack the dogs and kill two or three before I could get back.
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In my 25 years as a bush trapper I caught only a few wolves — mainly because wolf traps were too heavy to pack and the skins didn’t bring enough to make the labor worthwhile. It takes a No. 4½ Newhouse trap to hold a full-grown wolf (I’ve had dozens of wolves pull out of smaller traps). The jaw spread of a 4½ is more than eight inches, and the trap weighs around five pounds. That same weight in coyote, lynx, and fox traps will take a far more valuable harvest of pelts.
But though I haven’t killed many wolves, I’ve had enough to do with them that I think I know what to expect when they come around.
I hate the whole wolf tribe for what they do to deer and moose and caribou. A pack once pulled down a deer almost at my door — so close that I could hear them in the brush if I stepped outside. They left only a gnawed leg bone or two for me to find in the morning.
But I’ve never been afraid of wolves. They have given plenty of people a bad fright, but I don’t know of a single authentic case of wolf attack on a human anywhere on this continent. That’s more than can be said for black bears and cougars.
I have read quite a few times of how a man, followed by wolves, climbed a tree and spent a wretched night there. He might better have slept on the ground and been comfortable. I’m sure he’d have been just as safe.
I’ve never had wolves follow me to camp, and I know of no trapper who has. But it’s common in wolf country for a pack to circle a man and his dog team and follow along for a mile or two — as that band did to me on White Gull Creek — almost never showing themselves but never far off. If you see them at all it’s no more than a flash in the brush.
Many times I have walked away from camp in the morning and found where 10 or a dozen wolves had circled me the previous night and gone their way without alerting me.
While I was taking a nap in a tent on a moose hunt a few years ago, however, two wolves trotted past in broad daylight. They were so close — only a few feet from my head — that their footsteps awakened me. They were gone before I could get outside with a gun, but I found their tracks right beside the tent. They certainly knew I was there. I’ve also had a pack come roaring around one of my camps, keeping off in the brush 100 yards or so and howling as if they meant to devour the little low-roofed cabin and everything in it.
The wolf howl is as savage and lonely a sound as ever fell on human ears (the howl of a Husky sled dog is almost identical). And in the stillness of a winter night, to a man all alone beside a little fire in a cabin far back in the bush, it’s blood-chilling as well, even though he has no fear of wolves and even enjoys their wild music.
My dogs never shared my calmness over such times. They’d cringe and tuck their tails between their legs and make not a sound, not even an answering growl. They were scared to death of their wild cousins.
The dogs had good reason for that fear. Wolves will attack dogs anytime they get the chance and are almost sure to kill.
Related: What Do Wolves Eat?
There is a persistent belief, nurtured in many a piece of fiction, that north country trappers and Cree who want a dog-wolf cross for a sled animal take a female dog that’s in heat and tie her out in the woods to give wild wolves a chance to breed her. I have known of cases in which that was tried, but it always resulted in the death of the bitch. The only dog-wolf crosses that I know about came from breeding a dog to a captive wolf that had been raised from a pup and driven with the dog team and was well acquainted with the dog. Such hybrids make excellent sled animals. Those I have seen looked like wolves but were larger than an average wolf and had unusual endurance.
Wolf-dogs are quarrelsome, but not a great deal more so than normal sled dogs. Dogs that are on a meat diet and working in harness become short-tempered and savage with one another, and it’s not unusual for them to get cross with their driver as well. They are not pets.
A wolf pack howling around my cabin would fall silent for maybe 15 minutes, then strike up again. They’d keep at it for as long as two hours. The dogs always let me know when the pack finally drifted away. I sometimes thought that the wolves’ diabolical howling was a game they played deliberately to scare their oldest enemy, man.
Ches Rea and I trapped as partners for three years, starting in 1922. He had a homestead about two miles from mine. Born in Ontario, he had lost his mother when he was 12, and his father had moved to Manitoba a year or two later. Ches enlisted in the Canadian Army when World War I broke out, and he spent the last year of the war in hospitals, recovering from shrapnel wounds in his legs and a foot.
By the time I moved to my homestead and got acquainted with Ches, in 1921, he had become a first-rate coyote trapper. In the fall of 1922, when I went into the bush for the first time, we teamed up.
I had some of my liveliest experiences during the winters I trapped with Ches, including one that was as hairy as any I can remember and another that was among the funniest (but not at the time).
Ches and I were driving our dog teams up the Torch River one morning on a good toboggan trail that we had made earlier. Half a mile from camp a fresh coyote track crossed the ice and went up the bank, following an old beaver slide.
It looked like a good place to pick up a coyote pelt with a snare (snares were later outlawed in Saskatchewan 1, so I stopped my team and started ashore. The Torch was slow-currented there, and the ice was about a foot thick. But the water had gone down, leaving an unsupported shelf of thin ice along the bank, and snow had drifted over the shelf, hiding it.
I was almost to shore when I felt the ice break under my snowshoes. I jumped aside like a cat escaping a hot stove. A chunk of ice four or five feet square dropped quietly into the river, and the current swept it away. I stood there, looking down at the black water and remembering the time I had seen a moose track end at the top of a river bank, with that same kind of hole below and no track leading away.
Another time on the Torch, a moose crossed the river in plain sight 200 yards ahead of Ches and me. I was driving in the lead, with my .303 Ross in a case tied on top of the load on my toboggan, its butt sticking out so I could pull it quickly if I saw game.
I was almost to shore when I felt the ice break under my snowshoes. I jumped aside like a cat escaping a hot stove.
I was standing on the toboggan’s tail board when I saw the moose. I leaned forward and reached for the rifle, but in that instant the dogs lunged ahead, jerk ing the sled out from under me and dumping me flat on my back in a foot of snow. I rolled over, but before I could get to my feet I felt dogs running pell-mell the whole length of me.
Ches had pulled his rifle and stepped off his toboggan before his team saw the moose, and when they saw it they bolted after it just as mine had. I grabbed for a trace to stop them, but I was too slow, and the toboggan whacked me in the ribs.
We always rigged what we called a bull rope on the front end of our toboggans. It was a long, trailing line that we could use in steering the sled on crooked bush trails, holding it back on steep downgrades, and keeping our balance when riding on the tail board. Now I managed to catch the bull rope as it snaked past. The dogs dragged me a few yards, and then I scrambled to my feet, made it back onto the sled, and got things under control.
By then my dogs were hung up in brush into which they had chased the moose, and the bull was out of sight. Ches hadn’t been able to shoot, because the dogs and I were in his line of fire, and my rifle was still on my toboggan. We needed meat, but we got none from that bull.
At the end of our three years together Ches sold his rifle, dog team, and trap ping equipment. He moved to Regina and started firing on the railroad, where the pay was better than on the trapline. My next partner was Joe Johnson, as fine a man as I ever wintered with, but after a couple of seasons fur became so scarce that he decided to quit. I bought his dogs and harness, all the traps, and his share of the cabins and the trails that had been cut. Later on, Joe bought his interest back, and we trapped together again.
One of the first things I had to learn as a wilderness trapper was how to find my way around in the bush. The man who couldn’t master that skill had to stay close to the settlements or he could expect a short life.
In the country I trapped from 1922 to 1947, if I had left a trail or walked away from camp in the wrong direction, I’d have had no chance at all of getting out. I could have walked 1,000 miles without any hope of rescue unless I happened to stumble across Natives. I couldn’t afford a mistake.
I have never been lost, even for an hour. To begin with, I suppose I am blessed with a natural sense of direction. I always knew where I was going and how to get there. In the second place, I started cautiously and learned from good woodsmen as well as from experience. On long trips, I went prepared. The wilderness is not unkind to those who understand it and take sensible precautions.
Some of my best teachers were the Cree who I met and traveled with. One of the first lessons an old Cree taught me is something every beginner should know:
When traveling (but not when hunting), break a twig on a low branch of a tree every 30 to 50 feet. You can do it as you walk, without losing a step, and it’s easier and quicker than blazing with an ax. If you’re packing, this trick leaves both hands free and you have no need even to carry an ax outside your pack. If you need to retrace your steps, you can’t miss your backtrack — provided you have broken enough twigs.
Another Cree taught me this trick: he would cut a bundle of small spruce trees and tie them onto his toboggan before starting across a lake that was more than a mile wide. Every 200 yards or so he would stop, chop a small hole in the ice, set a tree in the hole, and pack snow around it to freeze. When he came back to that lake, even at night or in a snowstorm, it was easy to keep to the trail.
I was standing on the toboggan’s tail board when I saw the moose. I leaned forward and reached for the rifle, but in that instant the dogs lunged ahead, jerk ing the sled out from under me and dumping me flat on my back in a foot of snow.
Incidentally, a good lead dog has an almost unerring sense of direction. Take him over a trail once, and he will follow it again after as long as two years. And when crossing a frozen lake, he will go straight to the place where the trail leaves the ice, even though the shoreline may be featureless muskeg without trees or other landmarks.
The essential requirement for avoiding trouble in strange country is to know your starting point-lake, creek, trail, or whatever-and then to keep track of the direction in which you travel. As you walk, look for landmarks hills, unusual trees, anything else you can identify. And if you expect to come back by the same route, don’t forget to take a look behind you every now and then; that’s what you’ll be seeing on the way out.
In my day there were no reliable maps of the country I trapped, and no maps at all of much of it. We had to pick the stream or lake we wanted to reach and then find our way to it. But today there are good maps of almost any area a hunter or fisherman wants to go into, and I urge that a good map and a com pass be carried in strange country.
I always carried a compass, but I didn’t often need to use it. There are signs in the bush that are almost as reliable if you know how to read them. For one, there is the old rule of moss on the north side of trees. It’s one of the best direction indicators, but many greenhorns do not know how to interpret the sign. Here’s how:
Find a tree, dead or alive, by itself in muskeg or on an open ridge. Walk around it, and study the trunk at eye level. If the tree is small and isolated, its north side may be entirely covered with pale green moss. In any case, there are sure to be at least a few flecks of moss or lichen, gray or gray-green, on that side. The south side of the trunk will have none.
In heavy timber, lichen often grows all around the trunks of trees from ground level to a height of six inches or so. But on the north side it will creep up 18 inches or two feet.
On aspen trees (we call them poplars) I bark is lighter in color on the south side of the trunk, from exposure to the sun. And trees of any kind that grow in the open are likely to have heavier limbs on the south side for the same reason. Even grass can tell you which way to travel. I recall an overcast day when I was crossing a big muskeg with two companions. We were heading for a lake son1e distance away. There was no trail, darkness was only an hour or two off, and I could sense that my partners were uneasy.
“How are you so sure which way we’re going?” one of them asked.
“Right now I’m traveling by the grass,” I told him.
“Look, I don’t think this is any time for joking,” he grumbled.
“I’m not joking,” I assured him. “Come over here.”
I pointed to the short dry grass, flattened by snow. “See anything peculiar?”
“Just dead grass.”
“It’s dead grass,” I agreed, “but it’s all lying one way, and it points south.”
Next I led him to a small tamarack 100 yards away and showed him hairy moss on one side of the trunk. Finally I pulled out my compass, which he didn’t know I had along. It proved what I had said about the grass.
In muskeg, where the grass is short and has protection fron1 the wind, it leans toward the sun as it grows. When snow comes the grass is flattened in that same direction, 75 percent of it pointing south as reliably as the com pass needle swings north.
Slough or meadow grass, exposed to the wind, is another matter. In our country the prevailing winds are from the northwest. They lean such grass to the southeast, and in winter it lies that way.
Speaking of the Cree and the things they taught me, those I met back in the remote bush, away from the white man’s vices and other influences, were good trappers and hunters, hard working and honest, with an upright code of behavior. They had dignity and reserve, and often it was necessary for a white man to prove himself in their eyes before they would accept him.
I was sitting at breakfast in my cabin one winter morning when I heard a light crunching inthe snow outside. I opened the door, and a tall old Cree was standing there.
”Come in,” I invited.
He smiled but neither answered nor moved. I repeated the invitation and got the same result.
My trapping partner Joe Johnson spoke Cree fluently, and I had learned a little of it from him. I tried the man’s own language now.
“Come in,” I urged. “We eat.”
He entered the cabin and sat down, saying nothing. I served him oatmeal and flapjacks, speaking a few words of Cree now and then. When we finished eating he took out a small sugar sack. unrolled it, and laid a piece of pemmican on the table. He broke off a chunk for me and another for himself. I munched mine with relish, and when it was gone my guest spoke for the first time — in English. It was English about as plain as mine. But he wouldn’t use it until the white man had proven his friendship by sharing Cree food as well as his own.
The old fellow explained that he had come to trade a pair of moccasins for some .38/55 shells. I didn’t have any. But I did have something that I was sure he wanted, a fresh caribou skin. When I showed it to him he stroked it. grinned, and said, “Good to sleep on.”
“I give you,” I offered.
He shook his head. “No give. Trade. You give skin, one small trap. I give moccasins.”
And that’s how the deal was closed.
On one score my Cree friends and I did not agree. They were as afraid of wolves as I was unafraid. I never knew a Cree who took wolves lightly.
Bears (always black bears, for I was not in grizzly country) gave me far more trouble than wolves ever did. I didn’t have as much to do with bears as you might expect, considering all the years I spent on a wilderness trapline. That’s mainly because they were in winter quarters by the time I went into the bush. But the bear dealings I did have were more than enough.
There was, for example, the bear that fell through the roof of my cabin in the Narrow Hills country north of White Gull Creek.
I was trapping with Elwood Fraser then. A bear will often climb onto the roof of a cabin and do considerable dam age, so when Elwood and I built that cabin in the fall of 1941, we left an over hang at the eaves wide enough to keep a bear off the roof-or so we thought. But sometime in the summer of 1944, one bear made it.
By that time a truck trail ran within half a mile of the cabin. I drove there with a load of supplies in the early fall, getting ready for the trapping season, and started to pack the stuff in.
As I approached the cabin on the first trip, I saw that the roof poles between the stovepipe hole and ridge Jog were broken in, and I knew what had happened. A bear had paid a visit, and he had to be a big bear to break through.
When Elwood and I had built the cabin we had deliberately made the window openings too narrow for a bear to get through. And before leaving in the spring, I had wired a five-inch-thick pole across the heavy door, so there was no easy way for this black bear to get out. He must have gone completely berserk when he found himself trapped inside.
Unless you have seen the interior of a cabin that has been worked over by a bear, it’s hard to realize what such a place looks like. Even my mousetraps had been chewed and a box of .22 ammunition crushed. Some of the shells had been flattened.
Finally the bear had started working on the door. He wasn’t content to smash his way through it, for after he got out he chewed it to kindling wood and left it scattered over a 30-foot area.
That black bear never came back, and I was never bothered by bears at that cabin again.
Harry Gade, a friend of mine and fellow trapper, had better luck keeping bears out. His cabin was a few miles south of the one the bear wrecked for for me, closer to the fringe of settlement. and I occasionally dropped in for a chat. I went by one day early in the trap ping season. Harry was out on his line, so I didn’t stop. But I noticed that the end of the cabin near the door had been raked with claws and was plastered with dried blood. The next time I called, Harry told me what had happened.
He had driven sharpened spikes through the pole and nailed the pole across the door to discourage bears. Apparently one had tried to get in, raked a paw on the spikes, and turned on the pole in anger. Mauling it, he had mangled the paw badly and then tried to get revenge on the cabin logs, leaving blood all over the place. Harry figured out the whole story after he shot the bear nearby the following day.
Bears look for trouble, and they were never welcome around a trapper’s camp. At some of my cabins I avoided bear problems by leaving nothing inside that would interest them and by leaving the door wide open when I was not there. Bears could walk in and out as they liked, and they did no damage. (A skunk that dug under one of our cabins came and went at will too. We didn’t molest him, and he gave us the same courtesy.) Of course, an open-door cabin made necessary a bear-proof cache for grub. Such a cache had to have a floor of heavy poles, walls of logs notched and wired together, and a sturdy wired down roof. It was extra work, but it was worth it. But now and then a bear caught me unprepared.
Then I got within sight of the cabin. The door lay ripped from its hinges, and so far as I could tell the spikes hadn’t even been a handicap.
Back in 1943 I finished putting a new roof on a cabin, packed in my supplies, and nailed the door shut with heavy spikes. I left, expecting to be back in a few days and certain that the place was too much for any bear.
But when I returned I found bear tracks in the mud of a beaver dam near the cabin, and my confidence started to ooze away. Then I saw leftover tar paper from the new roof strung out among the trees. I had left that paper inside, and I knew things had gone wrong. I came upon flour scattered along my trail and found the empty flour sack.
Then I got within sight of the cabin. The door lay ripped from its hinges, and so far as I could tell the spikes hadn’t even been a handicap.
Inside, everything was a shambles. I had left my grub on a wide shelf hanging from the roof by wires so that mice could not get at it. Dried fruit, sugar, oatmeal, and anything the bear could get out of cans had been eaten. All the other cans were crushed or tooth-punctured. The bear — maybe fascinated by flying soot or maybe out of pure cussedness — had taken a fiendish delight in batting lengths of stovepipe around.
I put the door back in place and killed the black when he paid a return visit. It was a rule of mine always to make camp a short distance back from the shore of a lake or river, never right beside the water. Bears follow the shore, and more than one camper has had trouble with them simply because he put up his tent where they travel.
My wife Julia and I were married in 1933. I took her and my two-year-old stepson Ralph Meyers home to a brand-new log house on the homestead. Julia stayed there and looked after the place, and she even did a fair amount of trapping on her own each winter while I was in the north. In the summer we were farmers.
At the end of the 1946-47 season I finally resigned myself to the fact that trapping was not a life for a man with a wife and two boys. Our son Merv was 10 by then. I did not go north again. In 1968 Julia and I turned the farm over to Merv and his wife Lynn and moved into the town of Love. But we are still well situated for the things I like to do. Love, about 80 miles east of Prince Albert, is on the fringe of settle ment, with farms giving way to roadless bush 12 miles north of town. From there north, except for the Hanson Lake road that circles northeast from Smeaton to Flin Flon, there is no high way, railroad, or clearing. I do some trapping each winter, and I still look forward to the fall moose season as keenly as I ever did.
Looking back over those trapline years of mine, I have nothing but good memories. It was a fine life for a man who liked the bush as I did, although I’ll admit that the winters were long for my wife and family.
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I never made big money. Some years were much better than others. I sold good lynx pelts for as much as $60 and as little as $25. Prime red fox brought me a top prize of $48, a low of $3. The best blanket-size beaver I ever caught fetched $55, but I sold good beaver for $3. Top coyote skins ranged from $1.50 to $11.
Over the years, $500 a winter was a good average income. But back in the 30’s, when wheat sold for 20¢ a bushel and eggs for 5¢ a dozen in our part of Canada, a trapper fared at least as well as anybody else.
Trapping was never a way to get rich, certainly not in my lifetime. But I recall the nights by myself in the cabins with a fire of dry jackpine popping in the stove, the smell of coffee and bacon in the mornings, fresh moose tracks across the trail, the sight of dogs pulling a loaded toboggan down a frozen lake. I remember the stillness and the solitude and the peacefulness of it all, and I know I’d never have traded those trapping years for all the money in the world.
In OUTDOOR Life next month I’ll describe the adventures I have had and the lessons I’ve learned in a lifetime of hunting moose and caribou.
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