ODDS’N’SODS — Small pleasures of life in the bush

I was a prospector for more than 50 years, from 1934 to 1985, during which time I went through at least two dozen partners.

My favorite, however, was Gustaf Pieter Hemming, with whom I staked more than 800 claims after the Second World War.

Gus was born in 1901 in Jalfores, Sweden, a town in the province of Jampland.

In 1905, he and his parents came to Canada, settling at Oak Point, on Lake Manitoba, north of Winnipeg. The family grew to include three younger brothers and a sister, all of whom attended school in the city.

In the early 1920s, Gus became a prospector in Cobalt, Ont., and later, in 1926, he joined the gold rush to Red Lake. For several years, he worked at the Howey mine, Red Lake’s first producing gold operation, and he stayed in the area for the rest of his life.

In the winter of 1938, a new powerline was built 46 miles northeast of the generating station at Ear Falls, on the English River. The line was to supply the Uchi gold mine’s 500-ton-per-day mill.

Gus had staked some claims in that area, and he decided to return there and resample them. He took a week off from work in order to accomplish his task, and he packed several steel hand drills, dynamite, fuse caps and food supplies.

He walked south, following a powerline for 44 miles, to Ear Falls. From there, he followed the new powerline north for 46 miles until he reached his claims.

He drilled a short hole and blasted out new rock samples from his test pit.

He collected the samples and walked back toward the power station at Ear Falls. He was half-way home when he met, on the trail, an Ojibway hunter with his wife and children. The family was roasting the ribs of a moose over a cooking fire and invited Gus to try some.

Gus was only too happy to accept, and he told me sometime later that the ribs were the tastiest meal he had ever eaten.

The incident says a lot about Gus’s character, for this hard-working prospector was never too busy to stop and smell the moose meat.

— The author, a frequent contributor to this column, is a retired operating engineer in Thunder Bay, Ont.