“The boots that I had been wearing all this time started to fall apart at the seams. I had them all wrapped up in duct tape. They looked pretty comical, and worse than that, they leaked. I had to wear plastic bags between my inner and outer socks to keep my feet from getting soaked.
“I crossed the Bitterroots the last week of November. I’ll tell you, at seven thousand feet of elevation, it was plenty cold that time of year. I got close to Darby, which is seventy miles south of Missoula, when the winter really set in, in early December. It was frustrating being so close to home, but unable to go any farther. ‘So close and yet so far.’ The snow was really starting to pile up. I knew that I had to find some decent shelter or I was going to end up a human popsicle for some bear.
“Out of desperation, I broke into an unoccupied hunting cabin in the Bitterroot National Forest that was off the beaten track. It was a small seasonal cabin without much insulation, but it served my purposes well enough. It had a good supply of firewood under the porch. There was a Franklin stove, bedding, a big year-round spring for water, a couple of good axes, and a bucksaw. There were some canned goods there too. It took a monumental force of will, but I didn’t use anything I found there in the cabin except a bit of salt, soap, and some medical supplies to keep me regular. Those cans of soup, chili, and vegetables were practically singing to me like the sirens of lore. But I resisted the urge. It was bad enough that I was an uninvited lodger, but I wasn’t going to stoop so low as to steal another man’s food.
“Between snowstorms I gathered as much firewood as I could, and I knocked down two fat does. There was a set of gambrels, two meat saws, and several gutbuckets there at the cabin. I used a pulley and ropes to hang up the skinned-out deer-quarters way up in the fir trees near the house to keep them away from bears. Luckily I didn’t have any bear problems that winter. The meat froze so hard that I had to use an ax to cut it. I left the deer hanging outside and just took each quarter down on an as-needed basis. I used everything from those deer: the brains, the meat, the fat, the heart, and liver. I even sawed the bones open for the marrow.” He added with a snort, “It’s an acquired taste.”
“I spent most of the winter in my sleeping bag—just hibernating like a bear. It’s a real warm bag—a Wiggy’s Ultima Thule. They make ’em in Colorado. With the heavy bag, I only had to burn a low fire to take the chill off the cabin. I used bedsheets from the cabin as bag liners to protect the sleeping bag from sweat and grime. I piled up another sleeping bag and some blankets from the cabin on top for extra warmth. Tending the fire, cooking one meal a day, and reading is about all that I did for three months. Oh yeah, I also stitched together three pairs of deer hide moccasins. The first pair turned out pretty crummy, but the other two pairs fit me fairly well.
“I didn’t want to burn any of the candles or kerosene there, for two reasons. First, they didn’t belong to me. Second, burning lights might attract unwelcome attention. I didn’t hear any evidence of anyone living in the area except for a chain saw way off in the distance a few times, and a couple of shots, even further off. I wasn’t taking any chances. I adjusted my sleeping hours to match the sun cycle, so I did all of my reading and cooking during daylight. During the shortest days of the year, I must have been sleeping fourteen hours a day.
“By about when I estimated it was the middle of February, I was sick and tired of venison and had a bad case of cabin fever. I shot two more deer—both yearlings—in the late winter. I never want to spend a winter by myself like that again. Thankfully, there was a Bible there in the cabin, so I kept sanity by digging into God’s word. It was a Catholic Douay-Rheims version, so I got a chance to read the apocryphal books for the first time. I’m a Methodist and I don’t consider those apocryphal books to be the inspired word of God, but they were fascinating, nonetheless. Aside from the Bible, there was not a full winter’s worth of reading material in the cabin. There were a few hunting and fishing books, and about thirty magazines. I read them all cover to cover—some of them several times.
“The snow got three feet deep. When it got close to the spring solstice, the snow started receding, and finally it stopped sticking. Since I had burned up the two cords of wood that were stored there at the cabin, I felt it was my responsibility to replace it. I spent most of the mud season cutting down small tamaracks, cutting the wood to stove length, hauling it back to the cabin in a wheelbarrow, splitting it in halves, and stacking it. Without a chain saw it was exhausting work, but it was good to get my muscles back in shape. I wore out a pair of work gloves in the process. I piled the wood box inside right up to the ceiling, and I left more wood under the cabin than I had found originally, so I figured that I was square with whoever owned the cabin.
“Once I got the firewood in, I started spring cleaning. Before I left, I felt honor bound to clean the cabin. I started out by cleaning the chimney, which had so much creosote in it; it was a wonder that I didn’t have a chimney fire that winter. I swept and scrubbed the floors, washed all the towels and bed linens, and hauled out the buckets of ashes and creosote. All in all, the place looked much better than when I found it. Finally, I washed all my clothes, washed my sleeping bag, gave my web gear a good brushing, trimmed my beard, and gave myself a long hot bath. It was the first bath that I’d had in months. It felt reeeeally good.
“Before I left, I wrote a long and apologetic thank you letter to the cabin owner and left it on the kitchen table, along with two dollars in the old 90 percent silver coins and all the rest of my paper currency—not that it was worth much. I also left behind two of the four deer hides that I had brain tanned. I rolled them up together around a five-foot length of pine sapling. I hung it from two pieces of wire in the center of the cabin so the mice and rats wouldn’t get to the hides.
“I got an early start, not long after the snow stopped sticking. I really wanted to get home to my folks’ place. I covered the distance to Missoula in just over a week, up through Hamilton and Stevensville. Most of the towns going up the valley looked downright fortified. In most of the towns they had huge abatis roadblocks made out of big logs on all the roads leading in.
“I took a few risks in covering those last seventy miles. For example, I traveled some in daylight, which I don’t normally do, near population. I guess I was rushing a bit, but again, I couldn’t wait to get home.
“Past Stevensville, which was fortified, things were pretty well wiped out. Florence and Lolo were burned completely down. There wasn’t a soul around. From a distance, I could see that more than half of the houses and nearly all the stores in Missoula were burned down. My parents lived on the outskirts of the east side. Not knowing who controlled the town, I came into town from the east in the middle of the night. When I saw the ruins of my folks’ house, my heart just sank. All that was left standing was the chimney. The garage was still intact, so I spent the rest of the night in it. I just cried and cried. There was just one neighbor living down the block, named Mack. He was an old widower. Everyone else was either dead, moved out, or burned out.
“When I left for college last fall, Mack probably weighed two-hundred-and-forty pounds. This spring, he weighed maybe one-hundred-and-sixty pounds. I didn’t hardly recognize him at first. He was practically skin and bones. Mack told me about what’d happened. The brigands came through in a convoy of more than sixty pickups, Suburbans, Hummers, and Blazers, stripping all the food and fuel they could find. They stayed several weeks, raping, getting drunk, and burning a few more houses just to be mean. Anyone who resisted them in the least was shot or burned out.