Chapter 19 The Kielczewski family trap line was 16-miles long and 12-miles wide, covering 192 square miles, the size was the reason that they needed multiple cabins. They took 900 beaver a season from six area lakes; they all had populations of muskrat houses.
The Kielczewski’s Pipe Lake cabin was at the headwaters of the Pipestone River;there were signs that a big bear had been there. Floyd had left a tar pail on the roof that he had been using to patch it and found that the bear had knocked it off, he got up on the roof to see if there were any damages. There was no damage, but he noticed that the bear had only stood on its hind legs and put paw marks on it. He thought he had to be above 7-feet tall, and he reckoned that it was about 8- or 9-feet long from the tip of his nose to the tail. Brother Frank summed it up by saying “that’s a big bear” and he is going to ruin the cabin if we leave him.
It was the twelfth of May, it was warm out, the grass was green, and folks had already been mowing it when36 inches of snow fell on the banks of the Pipestone River. Floyd left home at 7 a.m. in a canoe on its maiden voyage up to their Marsh Lake Cabin 14 miles away to meet his brother Frank. On the way he checked traps and picked up 18 beaver and at least 40 muskrats. He skinned nine of the beaver on the riverbank. He testified that it took him about nine minutes to skin a medium sized beaver and about 15 minutes for a large one.
Floyd and brother Frank were out 16 days counting beaver houses for the government and at night they would use a three-gallon galvanized steel water pail with some hay and kindling in it to create a smudge to keep the mosquito’s out of their cabin, leaving the door open to filter the smoke. They had a gal lon of lard outside the cabin and one night Floyd half-way woke up in the middle of night and in kind of in a daze he watched as a big bear tried to enter through the cabin doorway, he finally uttered some thing like “a bear is coming in” and the bear bolted. Frank slept through the episode and didn’t believe him and thought that Floyd had been dreaming until he went outside and saw a big bite taken out of the lard bucket.
Violet’s Floyd Chapter 15 Living in a remote area such as the Kielczwski family, a main method of transporting nearly anything was to pack it out. Floyd’s first pack sack was a burlap gunny sack that cut through his shoulders, so he had to put mitts under the straps.
Chapter 13 Floyd thought that his brother Orrah was the best under-the-ice beaver trapper he ever saw. He could make sets and seemingly knew exactly where the beaver would put its foot and could get a beaver to go right into it.
Chapter 13 The Kielczwski’s relied on dogs to travel. Floyd had “Lassie,” a border collie, and “Sandy,” an English collie, as his lead dogs and he opined that they were both really smart.
Chapter 12 One day Floyd’s dad Orrah was tending traps when he came upon a set and all he could see was the tip of a bear’s nose; the bear jumped up and Orrah instinctively shot. The bear was only stunned because the bullet ran up along the skull but didn’t penetrate it and it was then that his dad saw that it was only a cub and he had caught it in a wolf trap by the nose.
1946: According to Floyd, life wasn’t all roses during the war because they didn’t have much to eat as everything was rationed including sugar. He remembers putting lard on his bread seasoned with salt stating that fat was a commodity back then. He also recalled that later they had gotten a gallon of corn syrup and it was so extravagant that in his words “they thought they had the world by the tail,” they put it on their bread for jam.
Chapter 10 Floyd was a tad nervous about checking his traps near the river where he had seen the big bear tracks so his dad offered to check them. Floyd’s advice to his dad was “it’s big, you better take a big gun,” he took a 30-40 Craig.