Ornithologists and Explorations: 1901– 1903

• Main Author: Lorbiecki, Marybeth
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2016
• Subjects: Arctic; Canada; Hudson; Hudson Bay; Mile Island; Six Mile Island
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199965038.003.0007

Aldo and his family moved back into the Big House the spring after his grandparents’ deaths. Late in the summer, when the ragweed bloomed, Clara’s hay fever hit with its annual vengeance. To comfort her, the Leopolds retreated to the northwoods resort they visited each summer. The resort of Les Cheneaux embraced the outer edges of Marquette Island in Lake Huron. The island had not been logged recently, and a mix of tall pine, cedar, maple, fir, aspen, birch, and hemlock bristled over the land like fur. No roads and few trails cut through the woods. The Leopold cottage overlooked a mile-wide bay, where the sunsets were “indescribably beautiful.” Each day, a launch delivered groceries from the villages of Hessel and Cedarville on the Michigan coast. The island enticed the young adventurer—here, he could fish, hunt, swim, sail, camp, and play Daniel Boone. While the rest of the family golfed or socialized with other wealthy guests from the lakeless midwestern prairies, Aldo explored every pine thicket, rocky rivulet, and turn of beach on the six-mile island, blazing trails and making intricate maps. Once he shot a “sachet kitten” near the clubhouse and carved this message on the boardwalk: “Aldo Leopold killed a skunk here on August 20, 1901.” (When the boardwalk was finally torn down, the resort owners saved the board.) The “boys” in the family often packed up their canvas tents for week-long camp-outs by the lake. They would try to live off what they caught and picked. Aldo became a master at frying sourdough biscuits, cooking a wild stew over a smoking campfire, and using a Dutch oven. North was Aldo’s magical horizon. Frederic wrote: “In our young minds, we imagined that we were at the jumping-off place where to the north an endless wilderness extended to Hudson Bay and the arctic.” Aldo planned to someday paddle into the untouched lands of Canada, and he begged his father for a canoe. His father thought a rowboat suited them all just fine.