The X Cleft Congregaton

Due to the childhood burns on the right side of his face which make him seem to be either smirking wryly or twisting in pain, Ed Demond is more sensitive to insect bites than are other born woodsmen, so during the Black Fly season he lives at the Harrisville, New York Senior Complex, but as soon as the major bloodletting in the woods is over, he moves up to Panther Creek, where he stays right through Fall, Winter, Sugaring-Off, and early trout fishing, living all that time in the semi-improved south end of his old family sugar shack which he heats with nothing but porcupine dung: petrified turds, dug from from ancient deposits on his property.

Ed hasn't developed an automatic pellet feed for the turd burner, but he stays close by to cook on top of it, constantly feeding the stove a few pellets at a time from a nail apron he keeps filled by plunging a scoop through the X slits of a round pet door on the lower wall, to a lid-roofed bin mounted on the outside of the kitchen living room bedroom.

The pellets are dry, dense, piney and inoffensive The lightest and least compacted are like pine chezzits. The best fuel quality pellets are the denser and more ambered ones he finds in the furthest recesses, often in a kind of peanut brittle matrix.




Ed likes to be known as the Porcupine Man, but for 30 years he was a systems engineer downstate; then he retired to the North Country where he still owns the the Demond family sugar-bush and the boreal forest on both sides of X Falls, where Panther Creek sluices off the Adirondack Shield through an over-sized cross-cleft in a dike of pink granite.
Of course the X Clefts are not the neat X on the landscape the name suggests. The Passages can be entered by slopes at several ends, and have jigs, jags, transverse fractures, and some recesses deeper than you can measure, due to porcupine deposits of countless winters.

The dry extremities of the Clefts are winter home to the largest denning congregation of porcupines in the Adirondacks...... not that you could ever count the porcupines in their massive sleep-heaps.
Iroquois and others before them, have traditionally come hundreds of miles to collect shed quills from the X-Clefts each Spring after the porkys have left.

Even Ed never actually boils sap with the porcupellets as fuel.
And the family had been aware of the fuel quality of the old pellets only since Ed and his brother Eli had as kids dug under one overhang for a hide out and built a camp fire which ignited the porcuduff substrate and burned down into the vein for two days, until the boys brought down a dozen runs of old cedar half hollow sluices, and ran them from just above the falls to the smoking crack and they ran the water through there for r six hours.
The wash-out from this sluicing exposed some highly compressed and ambered pellets.
Ed hauls out the old-layer guano in October, and he keeps a snowshoe trail to X Falls where cedar and hemlock roots snake down the rock face into the piney guano of centuries, and the porcupines climb in and out on them all winter long.



Ed says that porcupines are about the most civil and the best engineered of critters, and it is mostly in the quills.
The brilliance of porcupine quills (which, if you are Ed, or a porcupine, are the greatest thing since hair and feathers) is that they have these microscopic, one-way barbules on them so they not only stay in a dog's tongue, nose, or eye, after only light penetration, but will be moved deeper and through the flesh, even into the brain, with every breathing movements of the victim.
Ed points out that the same phenomenon happens on the macro scale of the whole porcupine , to get the sleep heap circulating.
This keeps the constantly created pellets moving to the bottom and keep the porkys themselves evenly heated, even though their body temperatures have dropped way low and they will sometimes seem to be slow as sand pines.

Ed says porcupines are so resinous and frost-proof from sitting up in the pines eating nothing but buds and snow, that they can, and will, stay there through a three-day blizzard, and might never come down, except for their seasonal gregarious personalities.

He says that you could put two porcupines in your freezer on a Thursday, and when you opend it up on Sunday, they would be having sex, belly to belly. Only porcupines and some humans and occasional apes do that. Says Ed.
You might not want to get him started on this.
Porcupines. he will say, are the only critter which is safer when having sex, because The only serious predator on Porcupines is the Fisher: the dark wolf- weasel of the North which dives under the porcupine in deep snow, then comes up from under to disembowel the the creature.

Ed has written a few nature note pieces for north country weeklies, and used to give occasional porcupine presentations, but without actual porcupines or depictions of sex and violence, at several elementary shools down state. He always emphasizes the dangers of messing with porcupines, and does not encourage anyone to acquire, befriend, or confine porcupines. Except for a few tire-eating incidents and small stuff, Ed has had no serious problems with the porcupines.
Just as long as he doesn't leave any salt sweat-soaked wooden handled tools outside. Or leave the doors open. Or forget to take the chicken wire cages off the jeep tires before driving out.



Ed keeps an old milk can, now half full of ambered pellets, which he has panned from pools all the way down to the Oswegatchie. In recent years he hardly fishes at all anymore, just pans for porcupine amber.
It is pretty much a one man rush. He thinks there may be an industrial use for the most mineralized specimens. Mostly he just likes to treasure them, which involves plunging in his hand, pulling out a fist- full and letting them sift back in.....
....... The sound of them is powerfully calming......sounds like tiny teeth running through a big hour glass, stars sifting through the cosmos, or the chittering, seething porcupines of the clefts.



Porcupines disperse as widely as their waddling allows during the warm months, but in November and December Ed will often see another new road-kill porcupine every trip in or out from his camp. It was as if they been actually trooping up the road to get to X Falls. Now days the only qulll collector he knew who regularly visted the X-Cleft was his his friend Littlenose Johnson who was also one of the few visitors to the cabin itself, but now days, even LittleNose got most of his quills from road-kill.

Ed was pretty sure some of those porkys must have been deliberately run over.

The thought of that really pisses Ed off. Me too. Anyone who would deliberately run over a porcupine is an Ass Hole anyway, but in the old days, even the stupidest Ass Hole knew that you do kill a porcupine unless you're starving, because if a person is lost and starving, he can still fairly easily chase down a porcupine and kill it with a stick.
He generally left the poor, prickly burgers where they lay flattened, unless it was the middle of the road. Quills are no threat to tire treads of course, but if they get started in the side of a tire, a good tail quill will gradually work its way in, just like they work their way into a dogs nose. He has plenty of souvineer quills, and a dozen flies tied with them by Littlenose Johnson, who regularly in late Fall and early spring for many years, had kept his travel trailer near Jerden Falls on the Oswegatchie, and often collected quills from road-kill .
Ed and LittleNose drank many gallons of coffee together, on more than one occasion. Each and Littlenose drank many gallons of coffee, a gallon at a time, disagreeing about the history of the new world, smoking the same black Warnakie tobacco, Ed in the corn cob pipes which he throws into the stove when they get too juicy. Little Nose in a short soap stone pipe that could also be used with a wick in the bowl, as a lamp, and fire starter. I have it now.

On his way out for Sunday Breakfast one November morning, Ed came around the tongue of granite about a mile from X falls where he had seen a road-kill on his way in, two days before.. And there beside the still dead porky: face down on the shoulder of the road, the body in blue denim and brown duck.....the red blob of a watch cap a few feet up the sand shoulder, red pick-up truck just up on the opposite side.
LittleNose's hat, LittleNose's truck. James LittleNose-Johnson who a long time ago saved my own life by pulling me drunk and unconscious, out of a snow bank.

Who killed LittleNose?
Well, I don't care to bring that person into my life, and I'm not going to chase into the past, but it suits me to camp where LittleNose did and to bring his Pipe Lamp to X Falls one more time.

First Leg to Great Bear

I plan on making it to Lake Bonaparte in my first season of Ark travel. That's going to put me within easy reach of the St. Lawrence River for the next leg of the journey to Great Bear.

But for that first Winter out, I'll stay at the lake until the first couple inches of snow stick, then pull overland and up the Oswegatchie to Ed Demond's Panther Creek property.
I'll stay though the winter there and help Ed with the sugaring. Then I'll haul off, down river before the black flies and no-see-ums get too wicked, even in the the spray of X Falls. But not before we have had a lot of time around the stove with plenty of chance to talk things over.

North West Passage

Good God Dog! I was sleeping, or whatever you want to call my suspended animations.....totally out of it for over a month, leaving Davey to spoil or neglect the chickens ....... until suddenly a light came on in my head, and I sat up out of the wood shavings.
Even through the tupperwear lid windows of the Ark, the sun was bright.
When I stood and pushed with my head and elbow to raise the roof-lid, it was heavy with snow.




Looking out I saw a snow hat on the cupola of the chicken house; the crushed-stone, rooster- dunged, and seed-hulled, drive- way forgotten under snow, snow piled up on the Sumac horns. Snow everywhere. Snow and light.

My head was dancing with fresh ideas, and when I moved, my underwear rattled with the familiar old, perfectly- formed Winter-Cherries. I was glad to see I had not lost all my old hiber-skills.
That was only yesterday. I went about my business, and now I'm eating like a horse.




And the main thing is: Hallifuginglula!......I woke up seeing my way ahead , and the way is clear as the map on this page.
Right up the Great Chain of Lakes to Great Bear.
This is the way of fur trappers and traders , war parties , and nomads, as well as migrating waterfowl, and beavers from the Pleistocene on...... and, if you hold with Little-Nose Johnson, the route taken by the first people to move onto this Sea Horse, North American Continent.




What is it?........ January something. We're already past the Solstice, with the light growing, but with more snow and colder weather to come.
Last night I saw the old moon in the new. Later today, I'm going to put on my feathered snow shoes, and go giant stepping in the woods.. Meanwhile, It's a giant satisfaction just to know for sure where I'm eventually going and the route I'm going to take when I finally pull the Ark off this flat- top, Dog's Plot hill.

Ready the Ark

I built the Ark on runners, but an Ark's eventually got to float , so I made the cabin of nothing but scrap foam board. No two by fours. To keep light I added oyster shells to the stucco mix. Davey had bought the bag of oyster shells for chicken feed. It's supposed to make strong eggs, but Davey's chickens wouldn't eat any oyster shells.

All chickens love to eat foam building products though, and this Spring, a couple of my companion chickens pecked through the stucco from inside the cabin and ate out caverns in the walls. I stuffed them with foam scraps and plastered over thicker than the first time. I want the Ark to be tight for cold weather, and I want it ready for hard traveling.

Anyway, yes, recent events have made me take a good long think, and what I think is, I think I will soon have to pull the Ark out of here and head on up the lake.

Not right away, and not on a dead-line or with a time-line or any of your line items, but when I least expect it.
I could be set off by a sudden speed-up of of global warming followed by rising water, a break down of the power grid, or just some stupid thing Davey says.

In an experimental way, I actually tried to move the Ark down back of the house a notch or two, but in the middle of the driveway I saw it wasn't working.
Too much friction on the gravel. I had to saw up a pvc drain-pipe for rollers, and use a digging bar to lever the Ark back in place for now.
I guess the Ark got a lot heavier when I stuffed so much mortar into those cavities.
Still, the runners should slide really well on snow
But the beginning of Winter wouldn't be the best time to head north.
I'm thinking at the moment that I could cut the end off the digging bar and stick it through the runers as an axle for a couple of eighteen or twenty inch wheels, two thirds of the way back. With the right balance, a couple of poles and peg legs in front, Like a donkey cart, I'll be ready to roll. Might have to add some main deck with more floatation and spread, enough space fore and aft to stand and pole the Ark, but then I would have to think about more wheels. And a Yak. Heading up North by North West.

Summer Riot

Last Summer this hill was a desert, and this Summer it's a jungle about to clamber over the chicken house.
Never mind that the moisture is only a foot deep and the dug ponds have shrunk back into the deep shale trenches. The ground cover is so thick that roosters who ranged up and down and even across the road last year, now stay within a hundred feet of the chicken house, eating volunteer crops and everything in Davey's garden. Davey has been building cages for his vegetables , but the roosters still leap up just to knock down the tomatoes.

The deer had their fawns in Davey's orchard and wouldn't even run from the dogs. The dogs are agreed not to chase anything that won't run. Before the deer wandered off to see the big woods, they deer broke off some of Davey's fruit trees to get at the growing tips, so Davey as been building caging his rees.
But there haven't been any critters recently trying to eat the chickens themselves. The coyotes have gone wandering for the summer, and the foxes and weasels, and coons must be stuffed with a mincemeat of mice and fermented fuit, sleeping back in the cover.
We have never that I know of had a problem with the Harrier hawks, which are temporarily off their range, with the owls, even when we have illuminated white chicken roosting on the open deck. No problem with the crows who share the corn beside the chickens , or the vultures which only eat the dead. The skunks, which are technically weasels, are still living with a passage into the rooster quarters, where they eat with the roosters without conflict.
For a while, the neighborhood dogs were a problem. The Roosters do know that it's their job to guard the hens and, being also wide and bright targets, have taken most of the hits from the dogs.
Now that the neighbors have taken charge of their dogs, there has been no problem with them either.

So there would be little predator problem at all, except that the sexual predators among the roosters themselves are the worst threat to the hens.

One night a month or so back, when Davey was up at Lake Bonaparte to do some fireplace repairs, the roosters broke through one of the barricaded windows that he had slapped up to keep them from the hens.
The roosters mangled one hen, killed another, and kept the rest from getting to the food and water until I showed up.

I decided right there, this rooster rescue business has gone too far. We had to get rid of the three or four roosters most inclined to rush the hens, the ones that always wanted to pile on, to pull out their feathers, bite combs, and use their spurs. Some of these buckaroos have wicked spurs; they could ride a dog .

Maybe it was a mistake not to wring a few necks right then, instead of leaving the cull to Davey. But getting and harvesting is Davey's end of the chicken business here; my job is to keep them alive.
And anyway, There is road kill fresh every day on this hill , and I occasionally take a liver or bring back a pheasant from that source, but I long ago lost my taste or guns and killing . Mostly, all those years ago, when I shot the bear in Alaska and saw him l(ike I can see him right now) running around and gushering blood, with his head flapping on only a hinge of hide. So I left the slaughter to Davey.

Granny Get Your Gun

Davey (his grandchildren call him Granny) was really irritated when I told him how the roosters broke through the door and mangled the hens.
He said he would cull a bunch of them, but he didn't do anything until a few days later when the rooster Ruby came out of the dog-wood bushes and attacked his ankle bone.
So then Davey got seriously pissed and went to the house for the Winchester .22.

The Winchester had belonged to an old trapper who had carried it to deal with undead critters in his traps and gave it as payment of a debt to Davey's grandfather. It is the little pump model which used to be common in shooting galleries because it held so many shots, though pump rifles are not so accurate. Not that shooting- gallery owners wanted accurate rifles. It was also the rifle Annie Oakley used to break clay pigeons in about the first movie footage made by Edison. Maybe she used mini shot rather than bullets in the load. Anyway, even if Davey was Annie Oakley, that rifle would not so great a weapon choice for shooting a dodging rooster in the head.
But Davey came out of the house with the little Annie Winchester, told me to take the dogs inside, and went back down after Ruby.

Ruby ( who has markings like a permanent blood-splattered bib) is one of the half dozen birds smart enough to leave the chicken house back when the coon, or whatever it was got in there twice in three nights.
Most of them stayed outside after that, but Ruby went back to the chicken house when the hens were refusing to come out in the cold. He tends to rush them at the door, he pulls out the feathers, and latches onto combs, but scaring Davey might have been the bigger mistake.

I heard six shots from the .22 , about as loud as horse chestnuts dropping on his tin roof.

Then Davey came back up the path. He said "Shit "to me as he came in to exchange the .22 for the sixteen gauge Fox shot gun.


When he was back down at the chicken house he fired six more times in maybe three minutes. Each shot, as compared to the nut dropping report of the .22, was as loud as a telephone pole as it snapping.
With the first shot, the roosters and the hens inside all squawlled, as if one of the broken telephone poles had fallen on the chicken house and set it on fire.

Afterward, Davey walked the gun back up and the chickens were still squawling and the dogs barking, so Davey went for a walk, and took the dogs, partly so they wouldn't see were I put the dead roosters, which, shot from fairly close range with antique ammunition from before it was outlawed, were full of lead pellets.
When I came down and piled the ruined roosters on the plastic sled, all the roosters were still back in the brush, except for Ruby.
Davey had missed Ruby's head with every shot except for one, which took a nick out of his upper beak so he looks still more like a bloody warrior. . He stood a few yards away and watched when I buried the dead in the path of the bamboo.
Maybe he has an understanding of mortality now. Or maybe he has an illusion about being bullet-proof.
Maybe the other roosters were impressed by Davey's immoderate demonstration of power and mortality, but the best thing I could do for this place is stick another three or four roosters in the Ark and haul out of here for a little outward bound experience, or maybe even for a foreign war. Before the rioting and the shooting starts again right here at Dog's Plot.


I dreamed that a woman in blue jeans came up the driveway carrying a hand basket with something wrapped up in it, like it was a loaf of hot bread. Maybe it was a coyote skin.
That night while Davey was sleeping like a baby and I was sitting on top of the Ark with a smoke, I saw a coyote, jump out the window of Davey's loft. It licked itself all over quick, then trotted down to the chicken house.


Right there in that dream, I pulled the Ark out the driveway and down the road on its runners.

With wheels, I actually could go down the road. I'm just looking for the right pair of wheels.