Free The Moose Jaw by Mike Delany Page B

on a thin ground pad directly on the gravel for a week, so my first night up off the ground, in a bed, with a foam mattress, was a pleasure beyond description.  Nevertheless, the usefulness of a flat working surface, even one still sticky with sap, cannot be overemphasized.  Sitting on logs and stumps, and trying to prepare and eat your meals on the lid of a cooler is fine when you’re camping, but a real table, and a chair, quickly turns a tent into a comfortable home.  When I had everything arranged inside, I was pleased see there would still be enough room for Haywood’s collapsible camp bed, if he remembered to bring it in on his next visit.
    The only thing I lacked was running water.   As I worked on the furnishings, I gave this issue a good bit of thought.  Jake Larkin, the old trapper who had chosen this site, knew exactly what he was doing.  Would he have brought all his water up from the creek by the bucketful?  I doubted it.  I found it hard to believe he would have been so assiduous with regard to all other aspects of his cabin location, and overlook a primary consideration like water availability.  So, the day after I finished building the bed, I decided to do a little snooping around, and within an hour, I discovered his spring.  It came as no great surprise.  My faith in old Jake proved to be well founded.  I’d started by poking and probing around the perimeter of the old cabin, and unearthed a section of rusty pipe along the back wall.  It appeared to be pointed upslope, toward the tree line.  That made sense, as gravity was the only way to move water out here.  So I followed the pipe to see where it led.  It was covered with leaf mold and years of debris, and there were stretches where it was missing altogether, but there was enough exposed here and there to keep me on track.  When I finally followed it out, it led me to a partially developed spring on a bit of high ground just inside the spruce stand.  There was water seeping out of the ground there, but it quickly joined a small swale that drained into the creek, so it was almost impossible to see that it was, indeed, a spring.  With a bit of work, it was clear that I could dig out a catch basin and shore up the walls with stone and have a gravity fed water supply down to the cabin.  My faith in the old trapper had been justified.
     I hung my hat on a bush next to the spring and paced off the distance back down to the chimney.  It was a hundred and eight paces – just over a hundred yards.  I didn’t have a hand level but I judged, using my hat for a reference, the spring to be about twenty feet above the floor of the cabin.  Not enough to develop much of a head of pressure, but definitely enough to deliver a steady flow.  I’d have to ask Haywood to bring in three rolls of one-inch plastic pipe.  By the time I had a cabin, the cabin would have running water.  What else could a man want?
     
    Once I had the tent well outfitted I began spending half of each day up at the burn, felling, dragging and floating logs out to the creek.  I found I could manage about four each morning.  Even with a few days off, at the end of three weeks, I had stockpiled over fifty logs, of varying lengths, on the bank awaiting their float trip down to the cabin site.  At midday, when I’d break for lunch, I’d leave the chainsaw there at the burn and float a log down the creek on my way back to camp.  In all that time, I never encountered one bear in the two-mile stretch of river between my camp and the burn.  I never even saw a track.  I found this to be very strange, but I was grateful, nonetheless; it made my logging a lot less stressful.  And, by the time Haywood was due to return, I had moved eighteen logs down to the cabin site.    
    I spent my afternoons getting acquainted with my new surroundings.  Sometimes I’d take the canoe and scout downstream a few miles, occasionally seeing a moose or bear along the banks.  I never