DID I RUN and AM I TIRED?

In 1963, in a very remote section of western Maine, my friend and I found an old trappers cabin.   The roof was partially caved in, the window was gone and there was structural damage.   That summer we backpacked in carpentry tools and supplies and made repairs.    For a number of years afterward we used the cabin as a hunting camp.   

The cabin was one room, about sixteen by twenty-five feet.   The door to the cabin was only five and a half feet tall, so I believe the man who built it was small.  There was also a large bed, some homemade wooden toys, an old rusted cook stove and some things that makes me think he had his wife and child with him.   When we cleaned the cabin out I found a stack of old magazines, mouse eaten and water damaged, dating from 1901 to 1903 which dated the cabin, but also proved he was literate.

On the back wall was tacked a piece of birch bark with writing that said:

DID I RUN and

AM I TIRED?

During the following winters I would take off from the cabin deer hunting and be gone all day; when I returned near dark, tired and cold, I would duck down to enter through the small door and when I stood back up I was faced with the birch bark telling me ‘Did I Run and Am I Tired?

Around 1977 the winter took the cabin.   My friend and I snowshoed in to see what we could salvage.   I took the birch bark off the back wall, pressed it between pages of a log book and brought it home. 

At that time the birch bark was over 75 years old, now it is over one hundred.

  

That piece of birch bark has always hung on the wall of my den everywhere I have lived, and the older I get the more it defines me.

 

My friend, my best friend/adopted brother, died in a car crash in 1979

The memories of the times we hunted, canoed, fished, camped and got drunk together are still vivid every time I walk through the door of my den, look up and am reminded, ‘Did I Run and Am I Tired?’

DID I RUN and

AM I TIRED?

the Ol’Buzzard