The Most Frequently Asked Question

So, who and or what were my biological parents?
Where and how did I live until the Warren's dog dragged me in? Was I a child of some unspeakable conjunction, kept in a root cellar until I howled, and was then put out in the woods to die or to be raised by wolves or dwarfs?
As I said here a while back, Daddy Ernie tried to trace me to my source before moving the family to Ithaca, but the original question was never settled, and to tell the truth, it matters more to other people than it does to me.
I might as well have been born the day I showed up in the Warren's garden.
I remember that day mostly from having been told about it so many times, and I have no memory at all from Pre Warren time.
And no, although I have lived with beavers, I can't even imagine that beavers raised me, because not only would beavers have no inclination to adopt a human child bigger than themselves, I would have starved on their diet of assorted wood products.
And it wasn't wolves like most of the feral children in the books Alan Pike brought me on that subject when I was living in the library attic. It's all pure folk lore if you ask me. Wolves anywhere are too smart and wary of getting involved with humans. It would be impossible in my case anyway, since during my youth, we had neither wolves, nor even coywolves in this part of the country.

Bears would be far more likely to try such a thing.
Bears often lose their wariness, because of gluttony due to nut crop failures in their normal range and their need to put on weight for the winter....... besides which they have a tendency toward sentimentality and inappropriate attachments a lot like you find in people, but not in wolves.
Now I'm not saying that I was raised by bears or that it is even likely, ..... but when I was twenty something.....a man in years, but still small as I happen to be, and living in the wild again, I was actually kidnapped by a bear.

At the time, I was still living in that first converted beaver lodge back on the Fort Drum reservation.
As I inherited it, the lodge stood there in the meadow which had been a pond bottom, and where Herb, Davey, and I had found the artillery dud some years before. The old entrance door was now in the open air. Beavers need the entrance underwater to keep out Fishers and Bobcats and Coons that would eat them or the kits, but I felt safe because those smaller predators would stay out when my human scent was in the place, and a bear wouldn't fit through the beaver- sized entrance. I didn't even bother to block it off, except in cold weather.

The year after I dug the floor down for more headroom and sawed a small window with a saber saw, I made a larger hole in the very top of the lodge so I could have a fire inside without being choked by the smoke..
Cutting the holes was a hell of a job .
You might picture a beaver lodge as a hollow shell of sticks, but the lodge wall is thicker than the air space it contains. This is partly because beaver engineering is rough and approximate, but it is also appropriate for their needs. A lodge that is thin and elegant like a Fuller dome, would be vulnerable to anything that wanted to break in. As they are, so thick and interlaced, dynamite or chain saws are generally required.
Sometimes young fool bears will try to tear into beaver lodges, but they always give up and go find something less troublesome , like a bee tree, to raid. That is unless the bear is a big, berieved mother and the lodge has already been opened at the top like a coconut for a straw.
It was late Summer and I had only had an occasional cooking fire there. No fire at all that day.
All summer long, I had been sleeping there rolled up in a sheet of plastic , just as I do when out in the open, whatever the weather. A sheet of plastic is all I really need for a tent, and even in mild or dry weather, it serves to keep off the mosquitoes and black flies, which of course were coming into the lodge through the smoke hole. Bugs don't like me all that much, but I don't like the bugs much either.


I was woken up by a stink so awful it seemed to have come right through my plastic wrap. I heard a snuffling at entrance, and knew by the deep throatiness that it was a bear After a few minutes, the bear gave up at the beaver door and, then must have got my scent from the smoke hole. To tell you truth, I don't see how it could smell anything other than itself . Bears generally smell like their food, or like something they have been rolling in.... garbage bears smell like garbage, grass bears like clover. This bear had been rolling in something that made it smell like a dead bear. The funk poured down on me from the smoke hole.
And then, with a big thump , a puff of ash, and a blast of bad air , she landed in the fire pit.
I didn't have time to unroll from the plastic and scat out of there, but just lay like a bear burrito in my plastic wrap.
She stuck her head right in the end of the tube and snuffed up a big whiff of my air, and then she rolled me over a few times.
Like a hot dog on a grill, I thought.
After a few minutes of this, she sat back and coughed a few times, then pushed me to the exit and stuffed me halfway through the hole. I tried to wiggle the rest of the way out, but tubed up.....I couldn't get anywhere..
She went back up and out, came down and got a hold of the loose plastic with her teeth and pulled me the rest of the way through. I shrank back in the tube as far as i could. Through the two or three layers of plastic, and in the dark, I couldn't see much of anything as I was dragged across the meadow and up over a saddle , thinking as I slid along ....... bumping over rocks and lumps.......that a plastic tube like mine would be a good device for pulling a dead body out of the woods. Anyway, she seemed to be taking care, so as not to bruise the meal I thought, and it didn't t hurt me a lot more than it would hurt a dead person.
Bears don't usually take their food home, but just gorge on the kill and then lay around in the bush nearby until hunger returns, so I was thinking, as I bumped along, that maybe she was taking me home to feed to her cub or cubs.

After what seemed like an hour, but was probably ten minutes and maybe half a mile, she stopped a moment, then she gave me a couple extra tugs and it got darker, as she drew me into her lair......just a blow down brush pile, as I would see later. .
She lay there panting for a few minutes, and then went back out, I held my own breath and heard no other breathing in there with me. Though the scent was still stong.
So she had no cubs, or maybe she had one and lost it. Maybe it was the dead cub she had been rolling in. This was not an normal bear. This was a deranged bear. Maybe she had gone back out to hunt up some grubs for me. I imagined the years ahead of me as slave child.
As soon as she had been gone five minutes I wormed out of the plastic, rolled it up, and took off with it heading for the dawning light in the direction of Lake Bonaparte.

This brought me back to my lodge within a few minutes.
The bear would be able to find me there again even more easily than the first time, if she wanted to insist, and I thought she might not be so gentle the second time, so I picked up the few things I had at the lodge, then went to the Bonaparte shore and swam the channel to Round Island. I set up camp on the East point where . I figured I would wait there a couple of days to give her a chance to return to the lodge if she was going to, and not find me there.
In bear country I usually hang my food in a net hammock strung between trees I keep for that, but this time, Just in case she was a very determined bear, I wrapped my food , boots and the few clothes I wasn't wearing in the plastic on the ground , then strung the hammock high up the fork of a birch to sleep in.
And sure enough, she showed up again that night. And she was either more fooled than I had wanted her to be, or else she had a hankering for a pair of boots and some potatoes, because she dragged off the tube with my stuff in it.
Any how, the bear now had all my camp stuff, so I didn't see any choice but to hitch down to Ithaca for the winter, where I had my city legs and other stuff stowed in the mausoleum.

My next lodge would be out of the range of that bear, and on the side of the lake with a quicker access to roads out. I never will forget that mother bear though. Not just the smell. Actually, it makes me a little sad to think about her. I have never felt so wanted before or after.
But as for my actual upbringing, it was by the Warrens mostly, and I have nothing to complain about there, except for their eagerness at the beginning to get rid of me, and their general tendency to forget me.
So how so you forget your own child or brother, blood kin or not? That's the question I myself ask most frequently, even though I know the answer.
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Our Little Secret

I know it seems like I jump around quite a bit here, a lot like a weasel who is all war dance and no attack. O.K., alright, I admit it.
Early on in this blog, I went to writing about Aunt Sammy and got as far as telling how I left her place in Florida to return to the North, but I never got to the end of that trip; and there are somethings....something in particular........ I left out, and might better have said at the beginning, except that it is pretty damn personal and private. It makes me a little uncomfortable to speak of it even after all these years, but I am not exactly speaking to anyone as I sit here in or on my ark, and I promise to get to the matter in this entry. Please pardon my hops, dodges, and digressions; they must be in my nature.

My hen Miss Kitty always stayed quiet when she was in the guitar case, and I was wasted after weeks of digressive hitch-hiking out West, so after we finally got on the bus east, we both slept most of the way from Iowa to the Adirondacks.
I couldn't have told you whether it took a day or a week.
As a matter of fact I couldn't even have said what month it was. I had never been to Lake Bonaparte except in the summer, so, like a three year old, I more or less believed that it was always summer at lake Bonaparte. After all, it was always summer in Florida.
So it was another rude awakening when the bus driver put me off in Harrisville where frost- crabbed maple leaves scuttled down the street and sailed down the Oswegatchie River.

I walked all five miles to the lake and not a single car passed me going in either direction. Hardly anybody actually lived year round at lake Bonaparte in those days, the Summer people had gone home, and the hunters weren't yet in the woods.

The swim raft had been pulled up onto the neck of beach that connects the Loon Island to the mainland, and I found that the boats were hoisted in the boat house.
In summer the canoe would have been pulled up on shore by the dock, and I had intended to paddle across to Priest's Marina where Doc and Lillian parked their trailer, but the canoe was not there. It would be on saw horses up at the main camp. I supposed I could drag it down the path easily enough, though it would be hard to get it back up.
As I headed up the path , two grouse exploded out of the leaves right in front of the little log sleeping cabin half way to the big camp.

I stopped where the grouse had flushed, and I stared in the cabin window.
I remembered standiing in that same spot some eight years before when I saw Aunt Sammy wave and then motion me toward the door on the lake side of the cabin.
I had hardly thought of her since leaving Florida. That was not because I had been unattached to her. In fact, I had left Rooster Hammock because of the soft prison which my attachment to her had become.
And here I was back where it had started. The thing I had left behind. The thing I have never mentioned to anyone. Our innocent secret. This bush I am weaseling around.

O.K. then.
I had been snorkeling off the boathouse and was headed up the path for lunch. I was probably still wearing my swim fins, as usual, though I don't remember that detail.
I never made it up to camp for lunch that day, nor would I be missed: often enough I got my lunch from the lake bottom. Clams, cattail hearts, and crayfish tails, and stuff I had taken from the kitchen and squriled away in the boat house.
Maybe my lips were blue like Sammy said, as she opened the screen door and let me in. Probabally not. She always thought I was cold.
She toweled me off, calling me her poor little fish.
Then, all of a sudden, she held me to her, and I could feel her sobbing.
She lert up a little and said she was sorry and she asked if I was alright. I said it I was alright and patted her head, but obviously she was not quite alright herself.
It took a while with me patting her hair for the tears to stop, and then she asked if I remembered.
Remember what?
Remember your mother, she said.

It was very long ago. Many years she said , that I lived inside her, long after she had known my father. Many months and years even, I lived and swam like a tiny fish in her, until finally I found the heart of her, settled there, and began to grow.
I grew in her for many years while she never knew it. Until one day as she took a bath, out of her swam this small boy fish . She got out of the tub and held this thing that would be me until she was sure I was dead, but still she couldn't let me go, so she put me in a cake box and put the box in the refrigerator.

Everyday she took the cake box out of the refrigerator and opened it to look at this cold hard thing that would be me, until one day it seemed like I moved. She could hardly believe I had moved or that I lived, but she held me to her again, as she was holding me now, held me until I squirmed and squeaked like a mouse and her milk began to flow, she said, and as she told me, I could feel that her blouse was wet, and I could smell her milk.
Then and there and back when I was little more than a fish, she fed me from one breast and then the other, and though I almost remembered, even then I didn't really believe her story. Yet I'm sure she did believe it herself, and I can't deny the miracle of her milk.
There you have it. I spilt the milk.

I have never told anyone about this because I have no complaint to make, and while Aunt Sammy lived, it was our secret, but now Sammy is long gone and I myself have grown old and shameless.

Our secret sessions continued that summer and each summer and then steadily for the year I lived with her after wandering away from the Warrens so often.
I neither believed nor disbelieved what she told me; her breasts were the facts. She was as much my mother as any woman could ever be. One thing for sure is that without Aunt Sammy feeding me, I would not have survived as indepedantly on mostly foraged food, as the Warrens and others believed I did.

But on my return that fall day, the cabin was empty and I was truly on my own, in a place Summer had left.
An East wind had come up, with a white chop that would make it hard for me to get across the open water to Priest's Marina, but I finally realized that Doc and Lillian would be gone for the season down to St. Petersburg.
What I didn't know at that time was that even that summer, due to a falling out between Doc and the Priests which I never understood and which probably also involved Aunt Sammy and her taking me to Florida , they had not parked their trailer at Priest's that season, but rather on the other side of the bay at the new Marina.
Right then, I was hungry as a weasel, and Miss Kitty would be too.
I went on up the path, got the hidden key and let myself into camp,
The fridge was unplugged and propped open, the towel drawers inverted so the mice wouldn't nest in them, and all the canned goods removed from the shelves. There was only sugar and rice in jars.
I made a fire in the wood stove and put some rice on with spring water from the jerry can.
I dug some worms for Miss Kitty and then went to the boat house and scooped a can of bats from behind the cork floats in the boat house where they huddle in cold weather. I would have prefered frogs with my rice, but they were down in the mud in that season. I don't eat bats anymore at all, and not many frogs either. I have become too soft hearted.
I slept on the floor in front of the fire place with Miss Kitty roosting on the mantle beside the stuffed owl, and the next morning, I walked out to the highway, headed downstate to Ithaca, the breast of the Finger Lakes.