March 15, 1932

Sigurd refers to an abandoned trapper's cabin near Grassy Lake that he has adopted as a personal retreat.

The cabin is about finished. It has been a great pleasure getting it in shape. This afternoon after snowshoeing out here, I found some long boards from an abandones stable and started building a bunk. It has taken me most of the afternoon but now it is also done and covered with a great mattress of balsam boughs filling the cabin with a wonderful aroma. A good bunk is absolutely essential to any cabin. Next to the table it is the most important. A bunk should first of all be full length perfectly level and smooth and solid. The place did not seem quite homelike before but now I have only to look around me to assure myself that I am comfortable. Now all I have to do is fix the south window, do a little more chinking and then I will be through

The cabin isn't much to look at but it will answer the purpose. At least it is clean, much cleaner than most woods cabins and above all is isolated. Here I can come to think and work and dream. From my east window where I am writing, I look out upon a dense growth of balsam and white spruce. The balsams this morning are loaded with dense masses of fluffy snow. Touch one of these heavy laden branches and you will be showered with it. I know because I have just returned from my woodpile against one of them and was amply repaid for my indiscretion. My south window looks out upon a small clearing, smooth and white and unbroken except by a tuft of grass near its edge. The clearing is bounded by a fringe of hazel and willow banked against a skyline of pointed spruce tops and tamarack. I do not need any pictures, my two windows are enough. The best part of it is that my pictures vary from day to day. Now they are part of a snow scene, tomorrow if the sun keeps shining the snow will be gone and the trees bare once more. Toward spring when the willows and aspen begin to bud out the dark somber green of the spruces will be enlived with a lighted shade more befitting the season. Then too I shall be able to open my door to the west and then I shall have the most gorgeous scene of all, a view across a mile of wilderness valley with enough of a riot of color to satisfy the most particular connoseure. These are my windows. With them to look at you cannot blame me if I am content as far as decorations are concerned. If I become weary with the pictures I have I have only to step outside the door for change. What a picture I had last night as I stepped out for a last look at the sky before rolling in. Stars millions of them hanging close to the earth and so bright that you could almost feel their brightness and how blue black the heavens were. In town you do not get the effect of space that you do in the woods. For one thing if a man stopped and looked at the sky, people would think that something was wrong with him, gather around perhaps and ask him what he is looking at. In the woods it is the natural thing to do, to look up at the sky. There the view is unlimited, no houses or buildings to hem one in, nothing to obstruct and shut one in. The same applies to the weather. In town weather is much one and the same thing. If it is cold, we only notice it when we are going or coming from work. If there is a brilliant sunset we see it through a maze of smoke. Most of us cannot tell when the moon is full or on the wante and if we see a faint sickle of a new moon we mistake it for a reflection of a street light. Ask any woodsman about the moon and he will tell you at once. Ask any man in town and he knows nothing.

Who then are my friends and why am I not lonesome. This morning I found the tracks of a skunk leading from out of the clearing right up to my doorway. He had walked around the cabin three or four times and then had decided that as long as there was nothing doing he might as well go back to sleep for a while. I trailed him back right across the clearing to the little tuft of grass in its center. He had stopped there to investigate the mouse tracks that radiated out from it. Here was a family of meadow mice (Pennsylvanicus microtus) but all safely down in their burrows deep under the frozen crust. At the edge of the clearing the tracks ran into a little gulley and then into a burrow under a log. I marked it carefully. We would become better acquainted as time went on. I had also been visited by a weasel, the long tailed variety. He had included my domain in his ranging....

The man who has not travelled alone has missed one of the greatest sources of joy that can come to the lover of the wilderness. Alone his perceptions are quickened. He has no one to look out for his welfare but himself. This realization gives him a sense of new adventure. One gets the sensation of travelling alone in a big uninhabited world, much the sensation alone on the deck of a sailing vessel at night, alone with the ship and the stars sailing a sea without any end. I get much the same sensation snowshoeing down a frozen lake at night. Nothing to guide you but a star or two, the shore too far off to be seen, all alone with the sky and yourself. If a man has reached the stage where he believes the age of adventure is gone, let him try this. Then if he is in the wilderness he for once knows that he is alone. A sense of immensity and the greatness of space envelopes him.