A Day on the Ridge

By Gary Collins

Among the bays, inlets, and communities of the province, author Gary Collins has earned a seat at the head of the table as Newfoundland and Labrador's favourite storyteller. Now, with six books under his belt, the “Story Man” from Hare Bay is ready to tell you a little bit about himself. The tales that make up this volume are pockets of memories taken from diary entries he recorded during the forty years he spent as a woodsman. Beginning with his childhood, Gary Collins retraces his first steps as a boy growing up in Bonavista North in the 1950s, when his father, whom he idolized, taught him the skills of an outdoorsman and how to be a leader of men. These twenty-two stories are a testimony of the hardiness of men who work amid leaf and bough, and a tribute to the call of the wild that draws these hunters, trappers, and woodcutters—family men all—back to “the ridge.” A Day on the Ridge is Gary Collins’s seventh book and his first purely autobiographical work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flanker Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781771170413

Gary Collins

Gary Collins was born in Hare Bay, Bonavista North. He spent fifty years in the logging and sawmilling business with his father, Theophilus, and son, Clint. Gary was once Newfoundland’s youngest fisheries guardian. He managed log drives down spring rivers for years, spent seven seasons driving tractor-trailers over ice roads and the Beaufort Sea of Canada’s Western Arctic, and has been involved in the crab, lobster, and cod commercial fisheries. In 2016, he joined the Canadian Rangers. Gary has written fifteen books, including the children’s illustrated book What Colour is the Ocean?, which he co-wrote with his granddaughter, Maggie Rose Parsons. That book won an Atlantic Book Award: The Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration. His book Mattie Mitchell: Newfoundland’s Greatest Frontiersman has been adapted for film. Gary’s first novel, The Last Beothuk, won the inaugural NL Reads literary competition, administered by the CBC, and was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Gary Collins is Newfoundland and Labrador’s favourite storyteller, and today he is known all over the province as the Story Man. He lives in Hare Bay with his wife, the former Rose Gill. They have three children and seven grandchildren.

Book preview

Praise for Gary Collins

Cabot Island

Collins’ focus on an ordinary event taking place under extraordinary circumstances sheds a tender, respectful light on how strength of character can be forged at the anguished intersection of isolation and bereavement. — Downhome

The story is intriguing . . .

— The Chronicle Herald

The Last Farewell

The writing here is at its best when the danger and beauty of the sea is subtly described. — Atlantic Books Today

"The Last Farewell tells a true story, but Collins’ vivid description and well-realized characters make it read like a novel." — The Chronicle Herald

"Read The Last Farewell not only because it is a moving historical tale of needless tragedy but also because it’s a book enriched with abundant details of Newfoundland life not so widespread anymore."— The Pilot

"[The Last Farewell:] The Loss of the Collett is informative and intriguing, and not merely for experienced sailors or Newfoundlanders." — The Northern Mariner

What Colour is the Ocean?

Delightful rhyming story.

Resource Links

Scott Keating’s illustrations are an asset to the book. The double page illustrations revealing the colour of the ocean are particularly successful in conveying the moods of the ocean and the land. — CM: Canadian Review of Materials

This tale, set by the sea in Newfoundland, is told in a simple repetitive refrain that will capture the imagination of young readers. . . . Illustrations by Scott Keating, award-winning artist and illustrator, capture the beauty of Newfoundland and the many seasons and moods of the ocean. — Atlantic Books TodaY

Soulis Joe’s Lost Mine

There is a magic in the interior of this island that few will write about or speak of to others—an endless fascination with the land. Gary Collins is entranced in the same way that the allure of rock, tree, and bog seized the indomitable Allan Keats, and before him, his ancestor, the Mi’kmaq Soulis Joe. This book gives voice not only to these men but to the great and wonderful wilderness of Newfoundland. Read it and be prepared for the wonder and love of the wild places. It will grab and hold on to you, too. — J.A. Ricketts, Author of The Badger Confession

"Soulis Joe’s Lost Mine is a number of stories in one: it’s a great mystery-adventure; it’s a fascinating look at prospecting for precious metals; and it’s a heart-warming story about the importance of family pride." — The Chronicle Herald

This tale also serves to cement Collins’ status as one of the region’s better storytellers; he has a journalist’s eye for detail, his writing is crisp and lean and the narrative arc runs smooth and seamless and is well-peppered with shakes of home-spun humour. — Atlantic Books Today

Where Eagles Lie Fallen

Some truly breathtaking stories of tragedy . . .

The Northeast Avalon Times

"A gripping story,

which cuts to the true heart of tragedy."

Downhome

Mattie Mitchell:

Newfoundland’s Greatest Frontiersman

[Gary Collins] weaves the various threads of the story into a marvellous yarn—all the more marvellous because it is true.

The Northeast Avalon Times

Also by Gary Collins

Cabot Island

The Last Farewell

Soulis Joe’s Lost Mine

What Colour is the Ocean?

Where Eagles Lie Fallen

Mattie Mitchell: Newfoundland’s Greatest Frontiersman

Copyright

————

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Collins, Gary, 1949-

Cataloguing information is available from the National Archives of Canada.

Also issued in print format.

ISBN 978-1-77117-040-6 (print) 978-1-77117-041- 3 (epub)

—————

© 2012 by Gary Collins

All rights reserved. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.

Printed in Canada

Cover Design: Adam Freake

Illustrated by Clint Collins

Flanker Press Ltd.

PO Box 2522, Station C

St. John’s, NL

Canada

Telephone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Toll-free: 1-866-739-4420

www.flankerpress.com

17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities; the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada; the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.

For Uncle Louis

Contents

Preface

Warm Winter Memories

A Time that Was

Enoch’s Arse

The Thrill of the Stalk

Cabin Season

Search for Spring

One Day on the Ridge

The Accident

The Fire of ’61

Bear on the Roof

Bear in the Camp

Short Hunts and Long Ones

A Taste of the Trap

The Attack

Jacklighting

The Hunters and the Hunted

The Journey Home

Windows on the Floor

Cabin Moods

In with a Bang

The Fright

Uncle Louis

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Preface

Before I began this collection of stories, I first wondered if my readers would be at all interested in my life, one that centred on the logging industry in Newfoundland. After all, most of us don’t really think the day-to-day of our lives is interesting to ourselves, let alone to anybody else. We just go about our routine, which for many of us is filled with the demands that come with raising families. Sadly, the myriad of tasks that comes with such commonplace duties will remain, for the most part, mere lines on untold pages.

Looking back, I was amazed at the clarity with which I could relive those events that were integral to shaping me into who I am today. I was aided greatly in this venture by the scribbles I had entered into a daily journal for more than forty years. For the most part they are only hastily written lines: who died in our town and when; how the weather was—including the temperatures; where I was on that particular day; what I was doing; and where I was. The scant earlier entries, though, when read years later, opened up chapters of memories for me.

For example, my entry for January 23, 1973, says, . . . 23 degrees (we were still with the Fahrenheit system then) winds southeast and mild. Enoch finished building his barn this evening and tonight I played my first game of penny-ante poker. We used matches in lieu of money. That simple record triggered what became the story Enoch’s Arse.

December 21, 1976: Setting otter traps on Powderhorn Brook I fell through thin ice and damn near drowned. Got back to the camp, dried off and went back to work. From that brief description I wrote A Taste of the Trap.

Or this one: . . . minus 39 degrees. A burning wind out of the east. Left a sleeping Tuk under a ribbon of Northern lights at 3:00 a.m. Hauling a load of water to Tarsuit. Brutally cold. At the entrance to the Mackenzie Delta I drove by the tractor-trailer that went through the ice yesterday. It is not a pretty sight. The driver escaped, though.

I wrote it in the hamlet of Tuktoyuktuk, Northwest Territories, where I worked as an ice road trucker. But that memory is not in keeping with a day on the ridge and is maybe another tale to be told on a different page.

I was able to go back, again and again, and relive the time when I wore a younger man’s boots. Upon reflection, I wish I had written with more detail in the pages of my journals.

I share these couple of examples with you, the reader, to show how a simple sentence can arouse a person’s memory. It is my hope that the few lines contained in my own pages—and the book they grew into—will inspire you to recall memories, and from there record your own recollections. You will find it wonderfully rewarding if you have lived long. If you are younger, maybe you will begin recording your own day-to-day routines. There will come a time when someone will want to read your biography.

I have also included stories from outside my journal, for example, The Attack. And stories told for years and years, such as The Journey Home, one that was frequently told to me by my late uncle Louis Collins, the greatest oral storyteller I have ever known.

I have dedicated all these writings to him, without reservation. At the end of these humble pages I have also included my eulogy to this great man, which I proudly wrote but could not read aloud on that unforgettable day of October 24, 2010. He died just a few days short of his ninetieth birthday.

In the stories that follow, I have tried to stay true to a central theme: the way of life in a rural Newfoundland logging community. The stories are about a time spent in the wonderful, sylvan places that, for the most part, still lay just beyond today’s fences.

Warm Winter Memories

We had been in the logging and sawmill business for close to thirty years and our methods of operation had changed completely. We started with horse-drawn sleds and one Caterpillar D4 tractor. In the wintertime we used the tractor for hauling logs. The power transferred from its diesel motor by way of a power takeoff, to run the sawmill in the summertime. Both the pony and slow-moving tractor have long since been replaced by fast-moving skidders and forwarders.

The way we harvested the logs had also changed. My son, Clint, drove a mechanical log harvester, which felled the trees and cut them into the desired lengths, all under the watchful eye of an in-cab computer.

The days of river log drives were also behind us, though I imagined I was still on the drive; I drove the logs to our sawmill, but now sat behind the wheel of a huge, self-loading logging truck, complete with a comfortable sleeper. Our small, family-run logging and sawmilling company was struggling to keep up with the much larger, efficient, and ultra-modern sawmills that had started up around Newfoundland. In an effort to compete, we reluctantly changed from transporting our logs by water, to the use of logging roads and all the modern equipment that went with it. Our traditional method of making a living from the forest had forever changed. For us it would not be for the better!

We had always done selective logging. It was the age-old method. The simplest thing to do was cut the larger trees and leave the smaller ones behind. We harvested only those stands of timber that contained trees suitable as saw logs and avoided the stands of smaller, pulpwood-sized trees. But the modern department of forestry had other ideas. They didn’t consider our method of harvesting as selective at all. It was called high-grading. High-grading was not allowed! Clear cutting was!

With its high-tech brain, a computer gathered all the available data on merchantable timber. From the vast information fed into it by space-roaming satellites, it dictated where the sawmillers were to cut. For a small operation dependent on a steady supply of saw logs, to be forced to cut a stand of trees that contained a sixty per cent bycatch of pulpwood—to use a fishery metaphor—hurt us more than we could say. We detested such wanton waste.

The modern operations, with computer-activated optimizers and razor-thin saws guided by red sabre-beams of light—may the Force be with them—capable of handling small logs, would survive. Sawmills too small to invest in such modern gear would not. Our company was one of the latter, but we were determined not to give up until every attempt for its survival was exhausted.

* * *

And so it was that on a cold mid-December day I found myself cruising for big timber more than an hour’s walk from the end of our logging road. If my search was successful, we would build a mile of new logging road at our own expense in order to reach the timber.

I was headed to a stand of timber I had not visited since I was a boy accompanying my father on a horse-drawn sled. Forty years after my father logged there, a forest fire had devastated the entire area. According to the modern mapping tools I used, the stand of timber I was seeking had escaped the fire. The route I was taking in was far removed from the approach my father and I had taken years earlier.

I crossed high barrens of scrub spruce and forced my way through nearly impenetrable growths of very small trees that had flourished unchecked since the fire. A man walked blind inside one of these mini-jungles. The growth of black spruce trees was dense. After forty years of unhindered growth, they seldom had diameters of more than three inches at the butt. I avoided these tangly stands whenever I could, but there was one patch I could not avoid. At the time I was carrying a packsack with a small lunch inside and nothing else. In many places I had to turn and twist and push my way through. The going was rough. I carried no compass, and I was beginning to doubt my sense of direction and my ability to escape the confining growth, when a mature forest suddenly loomed above me. Free of the tangled growth and entering the neat, orderly stand of old-growth trees, it was as if I had walked into the pleasant, dappled shadows of another world.

Some of the greatest pleasures of my lifetime in the woods came while walking alone in mature forests. They were always welcoming places of belonging, where a man could truly be alone with his own thoughts, places where I wished I could stay forever. I felt diminished in my surroundings, but never so significant. These were places where I never felt any reason to be afraid. Such were my feelings that day, as I eagerly stepped across the soft, moss-covered floor of an ancient forest.

I sat and leaned back against one of the towering, straight trees, and while eating my lunch—a cold salmon sandwich and warm water—I considered the place. My father, and his father, as well as many others, had certainly been in this same droke of woods before me. Yet there was not a mark on any stately tree or spreading bough, nor any human spoor on the carpeted forest flooring.

I spent an hour walking, thoroughly scouting out the perimeter of the big stand of timber. This was a place where I could easily walk for hours and still not tire of its beauty. Somewhat ironically, I was there with woodcutting as my motive, which would change its natural look for the foreseeable future.

Satisfied that the saw log supply here would keep us in business for a couple more years, I decided it was time to set out for the long walk home. Whenever it was possible to do so, I liked to walk out of the woods by a different route than the one taken in. It was a habit I had acquired as a young man and it always made for an interesting, but sometimes much longer, walk home.

As far as I could, I skirted the edge of the timber that was bordered by a thick wall of regenerating forest. Though I knew I would eventually have to struggle my way through the thicker growth, I held to the easy walking for as long as I could. I noticed the way ahead was headed downslope. I wended through the big timber, my feet treading ankle deep in yellow-green moss. I had to bend down slightly to look through the forest, for most of the old trees had long since shed their lower branches. It was a place where any logger would love to work. While staring through the spaces between the dark tree trunks, I noticed the mature droke, about 500 feet wide, was jutting out into the young one. I followed this finger-like growth of mature trees, which the fire of 1961 had surrounded on three sides but left untouched.

This narrow finger I was following must have been surrounded by the flames, but somehow escaped. Maybe the wind had changed. Perhaps an isolated rain squall had come dousing through the trees. It was even possible, though unlikely this far inland, that men had turned the fire away from this forested slope. I would never know why it had survived, but I was grateful that it had.

I was about halfway along this neck of timber—I could see where its point ended with a few scattered high trees still growing above the young growth—when all of a sudden the evening light fell on my face. I stopped, in total surprise. I was standing in the centre of a well-defined trail! At first I thought I was lost. To my knowledge there were no trails anywhere on this side of the long ridge.

Collecting myself, and sizing up my surroundings by the sinking sun now beaming through the clear notch in the forest, I knew I was where I was supposed to be. The trail, obviously man-made, had been cut directly through these woods long ago. Looking east along the trail, which ran corridor-straight to the edge of the droke, I thought I could see a shimmer of water. Unable to resist the temptation offered by something new, I headed toward the water, although it would take me farther away from my truck at the end of our logging road.

As I walked along the trail, I noticed many places where some woodsman had blazed the trees; the scars made by the axes had long glazed over and healed. The natural salve sweated by the trees to heal their wounds had oozed into hardened pieces. I broke off one of the sweet-smelling pieces of frankgum and popped it in my mouth. I held it there to let the juices saturate my taste buds, and when it softened, I began chewing. This strong taste of the wilderness had always pleased me.

When the patch of water broadened into full view at the end of the droke, I recognized it immediately. It was Hoss-stinger Pond, and the trail I was standing in was the old horse-hauling road my father had used for logging years ago! As a young boy I had sat on the double sleds beside my father while our horse, Jean, pulled us jingling across this same frozen pond in the winter!

I hadn’t been here since then. I sat back on a mossy bank at the edge of the small pond and my head flooded with wonderful memories of this place. Scattered all around the area were decayed, moss-covered stumps. I knew many of them had felt the sting of my father’s bucksaw and the bite of his axe. The sun pressed downward as it hurried toward its westing. I would be fumbling in the dark before I reached the landing at the logging road, for sure. But still, I lingered, as if I were reading from a well-thumbed page, and let my mind take me back to a time that was.

A Time that Was

The ponds and small steadies, just in over the high bog from our village by the sea, are frozen solid. There hasn’t been much snow. The conditions are prime for playing rough daytime hockey and young-love skating at night. All the pond ice requires is a couple of hours’ labour from a few hardy boys armed with homemade wooden rakes to provide many hours of winter fun, in pure abandon and freedom, unequalled in any roofed-over arena with artificial ice.

I can remember the same steadies completely cleared of snow, their surfaces traced and etched with countless white lines from our skates. The banks of the small pond were dotted black with boots and discarded coats of the Rocket Richard wannabes. There were nights with the full moon rising over Robert’s Hill and the cleared ice surface shadowed by slowly skating figures. Some of the couples skated together slowly, and so close no moonbeam could squeeze between them. Someone would yell across the still air, the sound sharp and clear. The chirp of a biting blade rasped and scraped, and then rumbled away as the skater sped among the lovers.

Soon the high, wooded hill on the south side of the little pond echoed with the boisterous shouts of the skaters, who began to abandon the ice. It was time to head home. With peals of youthful laughter and much pushing and shoving, they proceeded to remove their skates and reluctantly plunged their feet into cold boots that had been quietly freezing while they played. The merry, black figures laughed their way up through the wooded drung and away from the natural rink, their collective feet crunching on the packed snow trail toward lamplit windows glimmering just over the edge of the frozen white bog.

The young people still come to the pond, of course. They come down through the same tree-lined valley where we made our happy way years ago. They don’t walk now, of course, but dash across the solid pond ice aboard screaming snowmobiles, with long rooster-tails of white snow behind them, and leave great blue streaks of foul, metal breath in the still air. If they stop on the steady at all, they step from their expensive, well-lit machines, clad from foot to head in modern winter gear. Not even their mothers could identify who is under the winter disguise. They shout to be heard outside their nearly soundproof helmets, over the noise of their idling machines and the rumbling exhausts, as they dash between the glaring lights of their friends’ sleds.

The near-pond is now nothing more than a rendezvous to decide on the night’s activities. In a few moments the mummer-like figures snarl away on their engines, with the lights from the racing beasts canting and flashing their search beams up through the trees, but the riders see nothing, not even the lone walker who sits on the snowy shore, disappointed, his ice skates still slung over his back.

Winter recreation in the 1950s and ’60s was pure enjoyment for every child, as far as I can recall. Skating and ice hockey were always the preferred activities. After lugging enough junks of firewood to fill the woodbox and bringing turns of water from the well to the water gully in the porch, every evening and all day Saturday was devoted to those much-loved pursuits.

On Sundays we weren’t allowed to play hockey or even lace up our skates. However, I distinctly remember several adults having the entire frozen harbour at their disposal one still Sunday afternoon, while I and most of my buddies reluctantly trudged along to Sunday school.

And then there