When Ken died in February 2021, we had an outpouring of messages from readers, with many telling us how much his columns meant to them. In light of that, we thought we would go back through our files and re-publish some of them. Ken would be flattered by the kind words readers expressed. We miss him as a friend and as a storyteller.

I’ve written several stories about my adventures growing up on a northern trap line. For the past few years I’ve been communicating with a couple of gentlemen who also grew up on a trap line. In fact, they still hunt and trap in Northern Saskatchewan. The difference is they move to a town for the summer, whereas I spent my summers in the log cabin my mom and dad built. It wasn’t much of a cabin, with only one giant room for bedding, cooking and a table and chairs for a kitchen area. There was a wood-burning stove which was always a nice way to wake up during winter. In the summer, my dad would get up early to make his morning tea. Then l could hear my mother getting up and the first thing she would do was turn on a small transistor radio. This, however, had to be limited because the batteries had to be saved for news and weather reports. My love of music started with that small radio because my mom and I would dance, especially when Johnny Cash would come on.

Summer was my favourite time of the year. I was barely eight years old and had no knowledge of a world outside our trap line. My dogs and I explored the forest and swam in the lake where our cabin stood. I not only swam the lake, I also fished off its banks. I didn’t have a regular fishing rod and didn’t even know they existed. I would pull an old Tom Sawyer with a stick, line and a hook. Once I left the hook dragging while I jumped into the lake to take a quick dip. I was doing the dog paddle when I saw my stick being pulled into the water. I had a fish on the line and the stick was floating on top of the water. It took me a while, but I was finally able to grab the stick to land a nice rainbow trout. I took the fish home where my mom filleted it and prepared it for supper. It felt good to be a provider for our evening meal.

My dad would take me on his hunting trips. Hunting was not a sport or for a trophy; it was a matter of survival. Along with the cabin, my dad had established two camping sites on the trap line. Sometimes we would have to stay in the deep woods for several days. At night it was sometimes scary because there were wolves and grizzly bears that sometimes stalked our camp site. It felt good knowing my dad was sitting outside by the fire with a rifle close by. Besides, my dog Buster would come and lie beside me and in order to get to me, the killer animals would have to go through Buster and he had no fear of any animal. The weather ruled the forest and it also ruled our lives. Everything was dependent on the weather. Sometimes there would be storms that kept us in our camp sites for days at a time. There was no hunting, no fishing, nothing but sitting in a canvas tent and playing cards with my dad. But when the weather co-operated, we would hunt. Our target was a moose, which would provide meat for the entire winter. Today my dad is in long-term care and at times, he doesn’t know who I am. But in his prime, he was widely known as one of the best hunters around. I don’t recall a time when we didn’t return to the log cabin with meat. When we had a moose, my mom would show me how to slice the meat into thin pieces and we would hang the meat on racks in the smoke house. We called this pon-sa-won. Basically it was jerky made Cree style. Sometimes my parents would grind the smoked meat into tiny pieces along with berries and cooked moose fat.

This is known in the English language as pemmican. A handful of this would keep a person alive for over a month. We would take a bag full along on our hunting trips. Ironically, today I am a vegetarian. It’s not because I don’t want to eat meat; it’s because I can’t. I developed an intestinal illness where I can only eat soft food like fruit and berries. This is the result of a past lifestyle where I burnt out my stomach from the abuse of alcohol and hard drugs. This, however, doesn’t prevent me from going on hunting trips. Every autumn, members of my family gather in an area of the forest to establish a camp. This is the same camp we have been going to for almost 50 years. I generally stay at the camp while the younger generation hunts. When night comes, I crawl into my modern tent and listen to the wind and the howls of a wolf. It’s just like life in our log cabin by a lake.

-Ken Noskye