Issues → July/August 2007 → Interact → 10 Things to Do →
Classic: An Allagash Love Story
(page 3 of 6)
She had no children, but three generations of children have come to the camps, crowding around her stove in the morning as she fried doughnuts, the hot oil glistening in their hands. They called her Aunt Patty, and the photos of those children, now grown up, romp across a wall. There's little room to move about, but then Patty doesn't move about too much. Callers come to her...
She takes her meals in the kitchen at a long table built by Nuge, looking out a window to the lake. Some days, looking out, she'll see a coyote chasing a deer across the ice, or, in summer, an otter arrowing its way home. Until she slipped a disc ten years ago splitting wood with Nuge, she served 40 people breakfast and dinner from this kitchen, with full lunches always packed by 6 A.M. for the hunters and fishermen. "I could really step then," she says...
Patty does not live in the past, but if asked, she will float back as light as a tumbleweed. "People are amazed at my memory," Patty says. "The come to me to find out how it was when first we came into the country." Her visitor asked, so for four days in February she opened her boxes, spilling photographs onto tables like leaves. She took out rifles and drawshaves, and a leg-hold trap that has lain beneath her bed for years, letting her words knit them together into the story of her life with Nuge. A full moon shone over Chamberlain during those nights, and a north wind tore the breath from you along the shore, but 200 yards back in the woods, out of sight of the cabins, the wind was stilled by the snow-draped trees, and you could remove the scarf from your mouth and nose and look in awe at the piercing, starry sky and think how it must have been once to be alone here with so much forest, to be in love, and to make it work.
Patty sits in her rocking chair, smoking a cigarette and fondling a small, faded photograph that she says few people have seen. The photo was taken a week or two after they landed the raft. Nuge and Patty are standing in front of their first cabin, a crude, temporary shelter covered with birch bark.
"Dear, we were rough looking, weren't we?" Patty says. "The first time the forest warden saw me I had a bandanna around my hair and a pair of Nuge's pants on. He went out and told people a band of gypsies had settled in."
They cleared the land from dawn to dark, butting timber, hauling the logs by hand on sleds made by Nuge; he cut Patty's from cedar so it would be lighter. Patty limbed the trees with her axe, shaved cedar splits with her drawknife, and kept her man fed. "I learned lots of ways to fix trout," she says. She baked beans and bread and befriended Dave Hannah, their nearest neighbor, a tall solitary trapper who lived a mile and a half up the lake.
"Dave had no use for us at all. A dam keeper had teased him that Nuge was going to take over his trapline. You should know not to tease a man who lives in the woods alone. He came in here spoiling for a fight. But Nuge said he was here to build camps, not trap. He said 'Dave, I'll never set a trap in this country as long as you're alive.' And he was our friend from then on. And Nuge never did, until Dave Hannah died and we took over the trapline. And when I ran out of white flour and didn't have any money and was making all my biscuits from buckwheat, Dave Hannah came down, and, God love him, he left me a sack of white flour. The best present I'd ever had."
Nuge taught her to shoot, well enough so she could make an empty tobacco tin cartwheel through the air, well enough so that when black bears tore through the cabins in search of food, she could shoot them clean and stay cool doing it. Every year she got her deer.
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