Issues → July/August 2007 → Interact → 10 Things to Do →

Classic: An Allagash Love Story

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(page 4 of 6)

"A new warden came in here," she says, "and saw my deer hanging next to Nuge's." 'One of these yours?' he asked me. I said yes, but I could tell he didn't believe me. 'What did you use?' he asked. I said I used my .38-.40. And if he wanted to, he could take his wristwatch off and set it on the post over there and see if maybe I could hit it. He reddened right up and never bothered me again."

Nuge taught her to fly-fish from a canoe, holding a fish pail over his head as protection from her first wild backcasts, and later how to fashion flies from the feathers of wild birds and the hair of deer. She tied her flies on winter evenings, and later they were sold in the biggest sports stores in Maine.

He made her knitting needles from telephone wire and copper found at an abandoned logging camp, and Patty readied for winter, unraveling sweaters, using the yarn to knit stockings and mittens. Nuge's uncle taught her a secret family pattern, and she'd spend hours knitting "Patty caps" that she would line up every fall to sell to hunters. "There are hundreds of my Patty caps in these woods," she says.

In November they had their first paying guests -- hunters drawn by Nuge's reputation as a deer guide. They paid $10 a day per man for Patty's cooking and the privilege of sleeping on a bare cabin floor with their coats for bedding. The business was finally started, but the Main Forestry Service, which administered the land, wanted them out.

"We asked for a lease," Patty says with a trace of anger lingering through time, "but they just wanted to drive us out. They tried to stop us from cutting timber, but we went right on cutting what we needed for the camps. They didn't know what to make of us. They figured we had some big money man backing us, what with Nuge having guided and knowing so many rich folks.

"A telephone line ran through the woods back then, and after awhile Nuge got us a phone and hooked us in. At least we could talk to the dam keepers, and it was company. The forestry service kept coming down and cutting us off. And Nuge, he'd just wait a few minutes for them to leave. Then he'd hook right back on. After eight years I guess they thought we were here to stay. They gave us a lease, $10 a year. I told Nuge we'd have them eating out of our hands, and before long all the state officials and the governor were having big to-do's at Nugent's Camps!"

When winter came Patty sewed parkas from the tent fly off the raft, fished through the ice, and wore double sets of long underwear when she did the wash. At Christmas the dam keeper at Lock Dam, seven miles distant, and at Telos, 12 miles, came for dinner along with Dave Hannah, and Patty served stuffed partridge and deer hearts. Now and again they'd snowshoe to Chesuncook Village, 17 miles away, to pick up mail. Nuge made tables and beds and carved sinks for the camps, and they survived, barely, on small loans from Patty's father...

By 1938 they finished building the camps, including the cabin where Patty lives today. And luck -- or fate -- dealt them a curious break. For it was then that Dave Hannah died and Nuge was freed from his promise and could finally trap the country.

"Nuge started me on weasel," she says. "They weren't bringing too much then. He figured if I cut the skin we wouldn't have lost too much. Then we went to bobcat and fox, and when I mastered those, to beaver. Skinned them right in this room by kerosene lantern and I never cut them."