Freeze-up can mean more than teeth-chattering cold

Freeze-up means different things to different people and in the north, especially near the Laurentian Divide. There, it means simply that now you can get a snow cat on the lake, and probably pull an ice house behind it using the tow bar Uncle Heino made from the haybine broken down and left in the field by the tamarac swamp in the 1970s.

Where I worked a long time ago, it meant the equipment wouldn’t start, or at least it wasn’t worth messing with.

Just leave it there until break-up.

There are times however when contracts prevented common sense, and that meant pits had to be shot, rock hauled and the steel seats of D-8 cats were warmed at least until breakdowns became intolerable.

A boss I had once decided enough was enough when he lit his backside on fire trying to warm it by a burn barrel after spending part of a morning rebuilding a truck transmission out of doors, in a gravel pit, in the falling snow.

We rolled him around in the snow to extinguish the flames but the fire ate up the part of his coveralls that were needed to keep hypothermia away, so we all went home until spring.

The bay we traversed to get out of camp was a wintering ground for gray whales and they were hard to see in the blistering, freezing rain.

Because the windshield was iced over, we navigated by an early model GPS anticipating that Moby Dick may lurk on the other side of each wave we traversed.

A few whales porpoised, but not near enough to capsize the crew boat.

Good times.

It’s a saying people use when they have forgotten how churlish things get in the cold.

A North Idaho man I know hunted mule deer only after the roads closed and the high country was inaccessible to anyone without a snowmobile, or good webs and big lungs. He went up to mountains with familiar names because they are nearby and he glassed sometimes for days or longer until he found a deer he wanted to kill, and than he really got moving. Winter is hard on many things, and the lack of light makes outdoor endeavors taxing. That he was successful much of the time speaks to his will and passion for blacktails.

A logging truck driver in St. Maries who bought his rifles custom-made in Spokane spent winters trapping so far away from landlines and blacktop that he had difficulty explaining it to laymen like me.

The biggest deer, elk and moose, he said, spent winters in the high country.

The first wolf he saw up there he thought was a dog and he glassed the surroundings for its owner.

After that he said the big game animals disappeared from those wind-blown elevations because wolves walked on snow while ungulates had to plow through it.

“It was a killing ground,” he said.

When his father asked him to leave a map to mark his whereabouts in case of an accident, the man said, “Dad, if anything happens to me out there between Clarkia and Montana you’ll never find me anyways, so what does it matter?”

Sometimes when I’m standing in my driveway in my stocking feet in the morning holding the newspaper, I wonder what it was like up there, but I do not spend a lot of time tarrying because the pads of my feet are chilly now that the frost is here. The asphalt is cold and white in the morning, and grass blades in the yard are icy little sabers. It’s apparent that the days of comfortably hunting in running shoes are over.

Teeth-chattering weather has arrived, and that too means different things for different people.

It means the woods are quieter, because who packs a heater to a deer stand?

The cold brings opportunity. A few hunters will take advantage of it.