Local History

It is hard to describe this image so I'll just tell you a story instead.

This past Saturday I went back to my roots to spend some time with my sister. She still lives in the small town where we grew up, like many towns in Northern Ontario this town had it's share of characters. One such character was "Red" the trapper. Red would much rather be in the bush than in town but he had to have supplies in order to live. Apparently he would buy his canned goods etc. and have someone drive him to the end of the road. Red would then wait for the driver to leave and cache his supplies under a large tree before going about his business on his trapline. My sister and I decided we wanted to find the site of this cache, we had a good idea where the end of the road was, all we had to do was find a big tree right? Well, it was easier than I thought it would be. After reaching the end of the road we started looking, after only a few minutes we spotted a large red pine tree (below) where we began our search. Sure enough, it was the right tree! Dug into a large mound of earth he would store his goods among the roots of the tree. He was quite secretive about the location of his cache and unless one knows where to look it would be easy to walk right past it, He would store his furs there ( beaver, mink, otter, what have you) between trips to town. I would have loved to have gone inside but, is that really the right thing to do? We chose to leave it as we found it, undisturbed. Rest in peace Red, your secret is still safe.

BTW folks, as you can see the road no longer ends at this point but the tree and the cache are still standing.