A Grouse Hunter’s Almanac: The Other Kind of Hunting

Nine Mile Stump

154 Nine Mile Stump There’s a place in a section of the Marathon County forest where a graveyard of blackened stumps rises volcanically out of the soil: ancient, massive, charred, and rotting. These stumps in the Nine Mile section are all that’s left of the virgin white pine that just 150 years ago towered above northern Wisconsin, so I come here and pay respect to what once was. I pull on rubber boots to get back to the stumps because they’re beyond a tag alder swamp and across a creek, a humid blackfly- and mosquito-infested place in summer. One stump in particular stands out in this bottomland, and at least once a year I hike back in to see how it’s weathered the year. I try to go during the woodcock flight, for on the way there and back I may see a bird or two or perhaps a grouse. I hope for a point from the dog, a fleeting shot, and just maybe a bundle of feathers in my game bag. Ironically, in the white pine days before the first big cutting, few, if any, grouse or woodcock would have lived here because they don’t do well in virgin timber; they thrive in second-growth aspen, and continued clear-cutting ensures that popple will flourish in this 155 corner of the county forest. On the other hand, looking at the stumps I sense a great loss and can’t help but wonder what it would have felt like to stand among these great trees. While among these stumps, I sometimes dream of that virgin forest , the sights, smells, and sounds in those old woods. And what did the men who crosscut these stately trees think as they sawed through three or four feet of living wood and a two-hundred-foot white pine crashed to the forest floor with a resounding thump, a noise felt more through the soles of the boots than heard, taking with it several smaller trees, bouncing back up again, and finally settling back to earth, limbs aquiver, leaving a gaping hole in the sky. What crossed their minds? Power? Progress? Pay? The thought of several thousand board feet of lumber created with one back-wrenching cut? Maybe they were amazed, cutting upward of half a million board feet on an average forty-acre tract. Who knows what each thought while lugging a heavy saw at the end of a short winter day, looking back over their shoulders at a field of fresh, yellow stumps weeping sap, the signature of their labor? Most likely they were just doing their job. Who can blame these hardworking Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians , men who knew wood and felt at home in the north woods? Certainly not me since I enjoy building with wood, my cabin frame employing several massive posts and beams. Besides, these men were only trying to survive in the so-called New World, a place they may have thought their labor would build and improve. My favorite stump in this Nine Mile cutting is over forty-three inches in diameter—I measured it once with a tape—and is molding quietly in a small clearing. It’s as though the live trees have respectfully Nine Mile Stump 156 given the old stump some room. Who knows how tall the tree once stood above the nearby marsh? The middle has rotted away; only the ragged and moldy sides of the stump remain. These remains one day will collapse and fold back into the rich, moist soil, feeding other trees to come. The blackened skeleton reveals the foundation of a giant, however. Forest fires ravaged northern Wisconsin in the 1930s and burned these stumps, preserving them in a charcoal-like state. While backcountry skiing, I first came across the forty-three-inch stump, easily picking up the black against the surrounding fresh white snow. Feeling as though I’d stumbled across an obscure grave marker, I looked up into the winter sky and tried to imagine the height of this once majestic tree, how it would look compared to the second-growth popple thriving there now. These stumps punctuate the north woods—they’re there if we have the eyes to see their unassuming forms. The stumps, almost exclusively white pine, stand out best when the leaves are off the trees and a bit of snow covers the...