Grey Owl (Archibald Stansfeld Belaney) - The Collected Works of Grey Owl

Only those who, relying on no compass, spend long years of wandering in the unmarked wastes of a wild country, acquire the knack, or rather the science, of travelling by the blind signs of the wilderness. Ordinary woodsmen of the lumber-jack type, whose work seldom calls them off a logging road, are as easily lost as a townsman. Timber cruisers, engineers and surveyors are all compass men. Their type of work makes necessary the continuous use of this instrument, and they do little travelling without it.

It is only amongst men of the trapper or prospector type that we find developed that instinctive sense of direction, which is a priceless gift to those who possess it.

Travelling in an unpeopled wilderness calls for an intense concentration on the trail behind, a due regard for the country ahead and a memory that recalls every turn made, and that can recognize a ridge, gulley, or stream crossed previously and at another place. Swinging off the route to avoid swamps, and other deviations must be accomplished without losing sight of the one general direction, meanwhile the trail unrolls behind like a ball of yarn, one end of which is at the camp and the other in your hand.

If the sun is out it is an infallible guide, provided proper allowance is made for its movement. In returning by the same route no attempt is made to cover the same ground, unless convenient, so long as creeks, ridges, flats and other features are recognized as they occur, and provided you remember at about what angle you traversed them. Every man has a tendency to work too much to either left or right, and knowing that, he must work against it.

The tops of pine trees on the crest of ridges point uniformly north-east; in level bush, if open to the wind, the undergrowth has a "set" to it which can sometimes be detected. The bark is thicker and the rings in the timber closer together on the north side of trees in exposed places. Do not forget that water always runs downhill; moose and deer tracks in March are mostly found on a southern exposure; the snow of the last storm is generally banked on the side of the trees opposite from the direction of the wind it came with, which you will, of course, have noted; and the general trend, or "lie" of the country in all Northern Canada is north-east and south-west. Taking an average on all this data, some pretty accurate travelling can be done.

These are some of the indications by which Indians travel, nor have they any God-given superiority over other men in this respect. Only intensive training and habits of acute observation bring them to the pitch of excellence to which they often attain. One generation out of their environment and the faculty is as dead as it is in most white men. There is as much difference between travelling by compass and picking a trail by a study of details such as were just mentioned, as there is between a problem in mathematics and a work of art.

A compass calls for progression in straight lines, over all obstacles, or if around them by offsetting so many paces and recovering that distance, the obstruction once passed; a purely mechanical process. Little advantage can be taken of the lie of the land, and a man is more or less fettered in his movements.

There are highly important operations and improvements taking place all along the frontier which would be almost impossible without this device and very accurate results are obtained by its use in mapping out the country; but for ordinary travelling purposes he is freer who uses the sun, the wind, the roll of mountains and the sweep of the earth's surface as his guides, and from them he imbibes a moiety of that sixth sense which warns of danger and miscalculation, so that a species of instinct is evolved—whereby a man may be said to feel that he is wrong—almost as infallible, and more flexible of application than any instrument can be, and to it a man may turn when all else fails. This is developed to a remarkable degree in some individuals.

Of all the snares which Nature has set to entangle the footsteps of the unwary the most effective is the perfidious short-cut. Men well tried in woodcraft succumb to its specious beguilements in the endeavour to save a few hours and corresponding miles. I firmly believe there never yet was a short-cut that did not have an impassable swamp, an unscalable mountain or an impenetrable jungle situated somewhere about its middle, causing detours, the sum of which amount to more than the length of the original trail. This is so well recognized that the mere mention of the word "short-cut" will raise a smile in any camp. Often an old trail that seems to have been well used long ago, after leading you on for miles in the hopes of arriving somewhere eventually, will degenerate into a deer path, then to a rabbit runway, and finally disappear down a hole, under a root.

After many years in the woods with the most efficient instructors at the work that a man could well have, I find that I cannot yet relax my vigilance, either of thought or eye, for very many minutes before I become involved in a series of errors that would speedily land me into the orbit of the endless circle. I find it impossible to hold any kind of connected conversation and travel to advantage. In the dark especially, if the mind slips a cog and loses one or more of the filaments of the invisible thread, it is impossible to recover them, and nothing then remains but to stop, make fire, and wait for daylight.

My first experience in this line was far from heroic. I remember well my initial trial trip with an Indian friend who had volunteered for the difficult task of transforming an indifferent plainsman into some kind of a woodsman. We sat on a high rocky knoll on which were a few burnt pines, on one of which we had hung up the packsack. All around us were other knolls with burnt stubs scattered over them. The lower ground between them was covered with a heavy second growth of small birch and poplars, willows and alders. My task was to leave the hill on which we were seated, cross a flat, and climb another, identical in appearance, even to its dead trees, distant about three hundred yards. Nothing, I considered, could well be easier, even without the sun which I had to help me.

I descended the slope and struck through the small growth at its foot, and soon found that I was entangled above, below and on all sides by a clawing, clutching mass of twisted and wiry undergrowth, through which I threshed with mighty struggles. After about twenty minutes I saw the welcome shine of bare rock, and was glad enough to get into the open again. I climbed the knoll, and there, to my astonishment, sat my friend and mentor at the foot of one of the chicos, calmly smoking, and apparently not having turned a hair in his swift trip through the jungle.

I owned myself beaten, remarking that he must have made pretty good time to have arrived at the spot ahead of me. He looked mildly surprised, and replied that he had not arrived at any place, not having as yet moved. I hardly believed him until I saw the packsack where I myself had hung it, and my humiliation was complete when I realized that I had walked right down into that flat and turned round and walked right out again.

This was my first acquaintance with the charming endless circle. It was not my last, and even to-day it sneaks alongside of me through the forest like a spinning lariat, hopefully waiting for the day when I shall place my foot within. And these days I hold that imaginary ball of twine very tightly in one hand, whilst scrutinizing the landscape ahead with a view to my proposed route, and I fight flies with the other.

My tutors have turned me out, so they consider, a finished product, and in certain circumstances I am able to contrive, devise and stand from under with the best of them; yet even to-day there are times when my failure to apply the lessons so painstakingly taught me, if known, would be the cause of much disappointment and terse but apt comment spoken through the blue smoke-haze in certain shadowy lodges, beneath the sombre spruces.