Birch Trees Are My Favorite

      Just outside the front door of the Old Hardware Store in McCarthy, Alaska a young birch roots right between the road and the yard. The tree stands a few feet taller than me and embraces young bark that glows pale purple in the shadows of the summer’s late afternoon sun. Its young leaves cling to life tenuously as fall returns early to this part of the world. This tree strikes me, causes me to pause a moment, and commands me to think.  I smile, recalling that late Fall day back when November gifted below freezing temperatures and snow banks for young boys to play in. November  in Alaska reminded me of those back on Minnesota’s Iron Range when I was a boy. This particular tree outside the Old Hardware Store causes me to stop and think of those times– Birch trees are my favorite.

      A Birch was where I took my first snowshoe hare–  in the woods past a fern swamp that I had to walk through. During the summer those ferns stood a good three foot high providing ample cover for the small creatures that called those Fayal Township woods home. One time, a black bear that Uncle shot for getting into his garage picked that fern swamp to die in. I remember the hesitation Uncle carried as he went into the tall fronds to find it. The light flickered against the wood’s blackish greens as he managed a flashlight and his Savage semi-automatic 12 gauge loaded with double-ought buckshot. Dense fronds parted just above Uncle’s waist and luckily he found the old boar gut-shot and dead in the swamp’s lavish greens. His companion is now mine. That Savage and I share a present and expect a future together roaming through fields, and swamps, and woods.

      I traveled over a primitive snow machine bridge of felled Ash and arrived near a wiry grove of Tag Elders that protected the Birch from the swamp. The hare’s frozen gaze and ground that wasn’t overly trampled told me I made the snare right. The wire gripped the thin Birch trunk and held fast. Everything worked out just like he said it would.

      Uncle Loren was my outdoors’ field guide for most of my young life. He was wiry and battle scarred, hard-working, and hard-drinking– a living throwback to the 1950’s.  His ironworking days were stolen by a stroke, but that didn’t stop him from living. He adapted with self made contraptions and stubborn determination. He climbed the roof, plowed the driveway, puttered in the garage, and continued to fish out of a twelve foot Alumacraft for many years after the stroke. I saw him take headers into the snow far many more times then I care to admit. The stroke didn’t steal his mind though. He knew what sat in every rusted Folger’s coffee can on the garage shelves. We hunted the hardwoods of northern Minnesota, fished lakes created by retreating glaciers ten thousand years ago, and explored every mile of Iron Range Red dirt road. He even gave me my first lesson on snares.

      “That wire, hanging right behind the woodstove, is what ya want for those rabbits back there. Go ahead and bring it over here,” he said the morning before the day I took my first hare.

      Piano wire, one of the many treasures found in Uncle Loren’s care, hangs behind the double-barrel woodstove near the back of the garage. The stove built from two old, 55 gallon drums is coated by a decade of rust that obscures any Shell, or Mobil, or Standard label that might have been painted on them. I could see fire belching inside the steel belly, and the heat radiated through the garage providing the warmth of an early May day. The wire felt supple yet unforgiving to my touch and surprised me with the warmth it gathered from the stove. Uncle took the roll of wire from me, grabbed an old, oiled-up sidecutter from his bench and stripped off a thirty inch piece.

      “Find a small, sturdy tree close enough to a rabbit trail for this to reach right over the tracks and tie it off,” Uncle Loren said while twisting a small loop at one end of the wire and running the wire back through it to fashion a seven inch loop, “make sure the loop is about four inches off the ground.”

      I worked in the garage all day putting tools away and making a dozen snare sets for the sprawling rabbit trails crisscrossing the woods behind Aunt and Uncle’s house in Fayal Township. Uncle was there the whole time, changing out oil on the riding mower, sharpening its blades, and preparing it for winter put-up. The lingering smell of burning Birch dried since last Fall roamed through the garage and the warmth kept us in our short sleeve shirts. Dry firewood is a drafty garage’s best friend. The Birch would go full circle the next day. It became the living stake that held my snare.  Birch trees are my favorite.