I married into a cabin in Northwestern Ontario. It's a 24-hour drive from home.
It takes 18 hours to get to Thunder Bay, where you make a slight left, then another four or five hours to Dryden. Keep going another 30 minutes or so to a little junction on the highway called Eagle River, turn off the highway and drive another 20 minutes into the bush. That's where my in-laws' cabin is, and it's where I spend most of my summers.
My mother-in-law is from the area. She still has lots of friends and family up there. About 30 years ago my father-in-law built them a cabin, a beautiful, rustic, raw space. They framed it with the trees he fell to clear the land. It's the most real place I know. No running water, no electricity. We swim and fish during the day and play Scrabble and read magazines by candlelight into the evening.
When I am up there I get a lot of work telling stories. All the small towns and communities up north have incredible summer festivals and events.
I usually have my talking stick with me, a long and crooked piece of carved hardwood. It's the tool of the storyteller - it makes us look more legitimate somehow. All sorts of cultures use this sort of thing. Whoever has the object has the right to talk. Whoever doesn't has the right to listen.
Because I get so much work up north I was thinking it would be cool to have something from the area as my talking stick - maybe the antler of a moose or the bone of a bear. I mentioned this one night around the Scrabble table and my brother-in-law said, "I think I know where there's a moose graveyard."
My brother-in-law is the kind of guy who carries a pocket knife and knows all sorts of knots. He's the only guy I know who could get away with saying, "I think I know where there's a moose graveyard."
I'm all about experience so I said, "Perfect! Let's go."
Early the next morning we drove 30 minutes deeper into the bush, farther than I thought a car could - or should - go. Finally we stopped. I was just about to get out when he said, "Wait a minute, I want to see if there are any bears wondering what we are up to."
All of sudden I thought this was the stupidest thing I had ever done. I couldn't believe I had let him talk me into it. We waited 30 seconds. I didn't breathe.
"Okay," he said. "We're good to go."
I've spent springs and summers in Haliburton and Muskoka but I had never experienced bugs like this: Every time you rubbed your ear or eye you were killing 10, 12, 15 of them. It was horrific.
So I was struggling through the bush, wondering why I bother with stuff like this, when my brother-in-law stopped and spread his arms like a ringmaster. "Ta-dah!"
In front of him in a clearing were the skeletons of half a dozen moose. It was incredible. It was beautiful. Certainly not in the typical sense, but beautiful just the same. To see the framework of these beasts in the wild was breathtaking.
They weren't all intact. Some were heads and spines, some were spines and legs, but moose skeletons nonetheless.
As the city relative I don't always make sense of everything up north, so I asked him why they were there. He explained that hunters drag the moose here, clean them and leave the remains for the wolves.
I started to panic. In my mind there was a wolf behind every tree, licking its lips just waiting to attack.
We found the bone I wanted. We wrestled it loose and brought it back to the cabin.
I sat down on a stump on the front lawn and started cleaning it - scrubbing and scraping, huffing and puffing. Then my brother-in-law sauntered by. He had his rod and reel and was on his way to the lake. Over his shoulder he said, "If you really want that thing clean the best thing to do is just leave it there and let the little critters get at it and lick it clean."
That's perfect, I thought. "How long will it take?"
He stopped, put down his fishing rod and turned. "Probably two or three months."
"Two or three months! I don't have two or three months! I have to leave next week and get back to work."
"I'm not telling you what you have to do. I'm just telling you the best way to do it." Then he picked up his fishing rod and kept walking down to the lake.
He's so patient. It bugs me because I am the most impatient guy I know. When I get up north I go into a panic looking for national newspapers, Internet access and drive-through coffee. But his advice has yet to lead me astray. So I put the bone down on the grass and followed him to the lake. One week later we packed up our kids and our car and headed home.
The following summer, when we arrived at the cabin, there on the ground beside the stump was the moose bone, clean and shiny and pearly white.
Now when I travel to festivals and events in the north to tell stories I do so with the thigh bone of a moose.
There are at least three good morals to this story. But the one I like best is this: If you want something, I mean really want something, you need to find someone you can trust and follow them - regardless of what it looks like, sounds like or smells like and regardless of what anyone else says or thinks.
If you're lucky, you'll find a way to enjoy the journey.
Brad Woods lives in Guelph, Ont.