This story, “Night without Fire,” appeared in the July 1953 issue of Outdoor Life.
Axel Anderson got the first hint he was in trouble when he pulled his only book of matches out of his hunting-coat pocket and found them wet from melted snow. When he tried to light the first one most of the striking strip tore out of the book and came away in his hand, a crumpled scrap of sodden paper. Now he was sure of his peril. He didn’t think he was going to die or anything like that, but he knew he was in for a tough time.
It was shortly after daylight on Sunday, November 18, 1951, when Anderson left his deer camp in the roadless Rainy Lake country of northern Minnesota on the Canadian border 100 miles above Duluth. Sixty-four years old, foreman in a Minneapolis factory, he’d been hunting deer off and on for about 10 years. He had no reason to think this day would be any different from many he’d spent in the woods. There had been no warnings that the next 48 hours would subject him to an ordeal almost beyond human endurance or that he would escape death by a narrow margin. No thought crossed his mind that it would be six months before he would see his home again, or that he was starting out on two sound feet for the last time in his life.
Anderson was camped with a neighbor, Louis Shomshak, and two acquaintances, Cliff and Sonny Sonnenberg, father and son, in Shomshak’s cabin on the northeast side of Crane Lake. Anderson had hunted there once or twice before but he wasn’t too familiar with the territory. He knows now that he made one serious mistake in preparing for that trip. He didn’t carry a map of the area, nor did he consult one before leaving camp. He’s emphatic in warning other hunters never to be guilty of such an oversight.
The hunting party struck out for an unfamiliar section northeast of camp where one of them had seen deer beds and sign the day before. It had snowed in the night, a wet fall that lay heavy on brush and trees, and the sky was still heavily overcast. The going was hard. But Anderson and Sonny Sonnenberg soon found fresh deer beds. Axel picked himself a stand on a rocky ridge and had intended to stay there while his partner made a short drive. Sweaty from walking, he chilled quickly in the cold wind and moved around to get warm.
He found the track of a big deer and began to follow it through the timber. The track led north but Axel believed he was going south. When he failed to jump the deer in an hour or so he tried a stand once more, planning to wait there for his companion. But it got so cold he decided to go back to camp. Believing himself to be a mile or so due east of the cabin, he took a compass reading and headed west.
Again fresh deer tracks lured him off his course. Shortly before noon he came to Crane Lake and there he met another hunter who had crossed the frozen lake from the west. He was Wilbert Ward, then a 38-year-old chemist at the Federal Cartridge plant at Anoka, a suburb of Minneapolis, now assistant technical director of the factory.
The two stood for a while exchanging small talk about the snow, hunting conditions, and the deer sign they’d seen. Anderson mentioned he was with the Shomshak party, Ward that he was staying at King’s cabin east of Trout Lake. Then they took leave of each other, both believing they were heading for camp. One was wrong.
Although unaware of it, Anderson already was lost. He was traveling northwest along the shore of Crane Lake, and each step he took led him farther and farther away from the Shomshak cabin. At the north end of the lake he struck westward and entered a wild and rugged tract in which there are no trails, no hunting camps-nothing to help a man find his way. Ahead lay only the lake-dotted, stream-laced wilderness of Superior National Forest.
Shortly after leaving Ward, Anderson found more deer tracks. They led west, the way he wanted to go, so he followed them. They angled south, then north, then south again. It wasn’t until he gave up trailing the deer, shortly before 3 p.m., that it finally dawned on Anderson that he was lost.
He had only a hazy notion of the distance he’d covered and still believed camp lay ahead. But he decided not go on. The sun was low and the weather was turning bitter cold. Better light a fire, gather fuel while it was still daylight, and spend the night in the woods. In the morning either his companions would find him or he’d make a fresh start on his own.
After collecting an armful of dry pine, he stripped off birch bark for kindling and reached for his matchbook. It was then, when the matches failed, that· he fully realized what he was up against.
He’d left camp with the equipment a hunter usually carries: rifle, shells, compass, sheath knife, a whistle for signaling, length of rope, pocket hand warmer, and three or four chocolate bars. He showed them to me, one by one, as I sat in his living-room a year later. Then he held up a waterproof metal matchcase. “That was the thing I forgot,” he said slowly. He had overlooked it when packing his duffel for the trip.
Resigned to a night without fire, Anderson reviewed his predicament carefully. Camp couldn’t be much farther away. His best bet was to keep traveling west. He tucked the damp matchbook into the neckband of his shirt, hoping the heat of his body would dry it out, stuffed his supply of birch bark under his coat, and plodded on.
He was tired and the going was bad. In many places he had to crawl under windfalls and snow-bent evergreens. He came to a frozen stream and thankfully took to the ice, where the walking was easier, probing for thin places with a stout stick. Two or three times he left the stream to climb high ridges and look for landmarks, but he saw nothing familiar.
Then, with darkness near, the wilderness sprung a cruel trap. Anderson heard the sound of a waterfall a short distance upstream and turned toward shore to detour around it. When he was within his own length of the bank, the ice let go and plunged him belt-deep into black, bitterly cold water.
He fell forward, drenching both arms and the front of his clothing. He slipped on big boulders, fell twice more, then climbed out, soaking wet from his shoulders to his feet. Almost instantly his Marlin rifle, dunked when he went through the ice, froze so tight he could barely work its action. As he saw the water on the rifle turn to ice, Anderson began to realize how slim his chances of survival were. He didn’t know it then, but the temperature that night fell to 17 below, and by midafternoon of the next day rose to only 10 above.
In his fall through the ice Axel lost his birch-bark kindling. Without it he would never be able to make a fire even if his matches dried. He was tired, hungry, and wet. His pockets were full of water, his hand warmer wouldn’t work, his mittens were drenched and freezing, and his feet sloshed in his boots.
However, there was one thing in his favor. He was warmly dressed. He had on wool underwear, heavy wool pants, and shirt, a thick outer pair of wool socks over an inner pair of rayon, and rubber-bottomed pacs.
He stumbled to a log, sat down, and pulled off the pacs: He wrung his socks and felt soles as dry as he could, and squeezed water out of his pants. He relaced the boots loosely, hoping that circulation of air around his legs would help dry his clothing faster. His mittens, frozen stiff now, seemed worse than useless, so he hung them in a tree.
Standing there in that wild and lonely spot, Anderson weighed his desperate situation with calm reason. His one chance, he felt, lay in back-tracking over the ground he’d covered since morning. He’d try it, he decided, as soon as the moon rose.
He leaned against a tree and stomped his cold feet steadily for two or three hours. At last the moon floated up over the timber and sent down a cold, silvery beam to lead the tragic figure standing by the stream. But it was of no help to him. Anderson was too tired to go on. He knew he would never be able to retrace his steps back to camp. Despite this, he’s firm in saying that he was never confused or panicky. He knew above all he must keep moving, and that to yield even for a minute to the consuming urge to rest would be fatal.
In the forlorn hope of starting a fire he took out his knife to cut dry twigs. Fumbling to replace the knife in its sheath, he slashed through his belt. Ordinarily that would have been a wry joke. Now it meant that he must hold his pants up with one hand while he walked. He licked that problem with the length of rope he carried, but in fitting it around him he dropped both knife and sheath. When he pawed for them the snow stung his hands like live coals. Finally he gave up the sheath and dropped the knife in his pocket.
He doesn’t remember much about that long and dreadful night. All he knows is that he walked without let-up, fighting off weariness and cold.
He went back onto the ice and laid out a walking track about 300 yards long. When he covered it on his second round he found places where water had seeped up and darkened his tracks. He avoided those spots, knowing they indicated thin ice.
He doesn’t remember much about that long and dreadful night. All he knows is that he walked without let-up, fighting off weariness and cold.
Now and then he saw what he thought were birch trees on shore, but each time he went to look he found them to be the gray-white trunks of aspens. Then at last he found a birch, and near it a dead aspen with dry branches.
He peeled off some of the birch bark, cleared a spot in the snow, and built up a little pyramid of dry twigs. Now he prayed that at least one match had dried enough to strike. He drew what was left of the book out of his neckband, guarding it with cold-stiffened fingers. The first match sputtered into a tiny, feeble flame. He held it against the birch bark, the curling chips flared. and yellow flames danced up through the little teepee of sticks. At last Axel Anderson had a fire.
He crouched over it, exulting in its wonderful, unbelievable warmth. Then, straightening up to step back tor more fuel, he bumped a leaning balsam. As he did so a great clod of snow slid off its branches and fell squarely on his tiny blaze. The fire hissed for a second, then died. Again the night was cold and still.
Anderson tried desperately to get a second fire going, but it was no use. He had used the last match that would strike. When the book was empty he stumbled out on the ice and began walking his beat again. He broke through a couple of times before morning, but the water came only to his knees.
At daylight, still clinging to the belief that camp lay to the west, he trudged in that direction once more. His feet were numb now. His boots and pants crackled as he walked, and his nose was frosted even though he’d kept his face covered with a handkerchief. Unless he stumbled onto his camp, or a rescue party found him, Anderson realized that this might be his last day on earth. He knew he had no chance of surviving another night without the heat of a fire.
Back at camp Anderson’s three companions were pushing a widening search for him. Wholly by chance that mid-morning Shomshak and the senior Sonnenberg blundered into Wilbert Ward, the hunter who had met Anderson on the shore of Crane Lake the previous day. It was one of those coincidences, those baffling happenings, which so often change the courses of our lives.
Ward had had no reason to think further of his casual meeting with the stranger. But he identified the missing man by the description his friends supplied, and sensed instantly that without realizing it Anderson had been lost and was traveling in the wrong direction when they met.
Anderson’s party had been concentrating their search to the north and east of camp, where they’d seen him last. Ward set them straight.
“You won’t find him around here,” he told Sonnenberg and Shomshak. ”He’s off to the west of Crane Lake somewhere. He could be miles away by this time if he’s still alive. But there’s one sure way to find him. We can pick up his track where I left him and follow ‘ from there.”
Two other members of Ward’s hunting party had come along by that time. It was decided they’d return to camp, eat lunch, and then bring food back for Ward. But they never caught up with him. He traveled too fast.
Ward led Shomshak and Sonnenberg to the place where he’d met Anderson, then suggested that Shomshak go back to the cabin on the slim chance that the lost man might have found his way there. Ward and Sonnenberg took Anderson’s trail. Ward found a good clear imprint of Anderson’s boot, measured it carefully and noted its identifying marks. He wanted to make no mistake should they cut across the tracks of other hunters. But it proved a needless precaution. Where Anderson had gone there were no footprints but his own.
The two men took the track about an hour before noon. It led generally west, as Ward had expected. The going was bad, through thick brush and down trees. About 2 :30 p.m. they came to the place where Anderson had tried to light his first fire. By that time Sonnenberg, who had been tramping since daylight, was worn out. Ward felt he could travel faster by himself, and he knew time was running out. He urged Sonnenberg to follow their tracks back to camp and arrange to send out food, blankets, and a toboggan. It was so late in the day that Ward knew he and the lost man would have to spend the night in the woods, and he didn’t expect to find Anderson in good condition.
For the next 20 hours Wilbert Ward did exactly the right things, the coolheaded, sensible things that had to be done, which was all the more remarkable because he had little training to fit him for the job. Born in Georgia and reared in Oklahoma, he’d hunted in Minnesota only three seasons. As a youngster, however, he’d been a Boy Scout, and later a scout leader. He called now on whatever woodcraft he knew.
It was so late in the day that Ward knew he and the lost man would have to spend the night in the woods, and he didn’t expect to find Anderson in good condition.
Ward stuck doggedly to the track, finding two more places where Anderson had tried to start fires. With only an hour of daylight left, he came to the black hole where the lost man had gone through the ice. “I thought at first that was the end of the trail,” Ward admitted later. But a few yards away, on shore, he found where Anderson sat on a log to empty water from his boots. Nearby were the man’s frozen mittens, his knife sheath. and a telltale pile of unlighted twigs. Ward’s hope for a happy outcome of his mission sank as he studied the pathetic bits of evidence. The man he was tailing would be in bad shape — if alive.
Whatever slender chance of rescue remained hinged on Ward overtaking Anderson before darkness halted his search. He left the knife sheath and mittens to guide any rescuers who might follow him, stopped briefly on the ice to study the hard-beaten path where the lost man had paced all night, and then hurried on.
Axel Anderson recalls little of the events of the second day. Two planes flew high over him during the forenoon, but he realized from their flights that they weren’t searching for him. But he tried desperately to attract their attention, running back and forth on the ice and waving his arms. They droned on and disappeared.
In the afternoon he saw what looked like men walking the ridges on each side of him, but when he got close the figures turned out to be snow-bent tops of small trees swaying in the wind. Though he stoutly denies that he was panic-ridden or delirious, at times he thought he heard voices. He sucked snow to allay his thirst. He began to see ridges that looked exactly like those on which he’d started hunting. The day was harsh and cold, and he stumbled on feet that felt like stumps.
Late in the afternoon a third plane came over, this time flying low, but it vanished behind the next ridge to the west. It had landed there, he told himself. It had come down at a camp! Hope burned up in him. If he could reach the place before dark he’d get out alive. He hurried on, but before he got to the foot of the ridge he heard someone behind him call his name. He turned, and the stranger he’d met on Crane Lake ran to overtake him.
“I saw his red coat ahead of me when I rounded a bend,” Ward explained. “I fired a couple of shots but he didn’t hear them, so I ran to him.”
Ward had found the lost man seven miles from the Shomshak camp, six from the place where they had met at Crane Lake. Anderson had covered the six miles in something like 28 hours. Ward did it in about five and a half. They were in an area where, but for their chance meeting, no search would never have been made. Had they not happened to come together that Sunday forenoon, Axel Anderson’s body might have lain undiscovered for years, perhaps forever, the exact place and manner of his death an unsolved riddle.
The two men still faced a night in the woods with almost no food — Ward had only a bar and a half of candy — and a long grueling walk out. Darkness was near, and Ward moved swiftly to make the best of a bad situation. He gave Anderson the candy bar, found a sheltered spot in the lee of an overhanging rock ledge, and cleared a place for the older man to rest.
By curious coincidence, Ward was dangerously short of matches. Usually he made a point of carrying a liberal supply on his hunts, but this time he had just four.
He gathered birch bark and grass, heaped up some dry sticks, and for the second time in 36 hours Axel Anderson saw a fire born from a single match. The flames leaped through the dry wood, roared and crackled, and sent out waves of life-giving warmth
Ward rolled a log up to the fire for Anderson to sit on, dried his outer clothing, and thawed the boots that encased his frozen feet. It took time. When the first boot and heavy sock came away the thin inner sock remained solidly stuck to the foot, and after Ward had worked it free the men could see hard, clear ice between Anderson’s toes. And the entire lower part of his foot was thinly sheathed with ice.
Ward got the other boot off and rubbed the frozen feet with snow, massaging them gently with his bare hands, while Anderson did the same to his frost-bitten nose. It took an hour and a half for his feet to thaw sufficiently so that he could move his toes. Big blueblack patches under each arch and instep hinted at the damage that had been done. Ward put his own socks on Anderson until the lost man’s boots and socks dried.
Once Anderson was dry and warm Ward let him sleep, propped on the log before the fire. But Ward never slept. He collected wood and fed the fire throughout the night, awakening Anderson at intervals, rubbing his feet, and moving him around.
At daybreak he gave Anderson the remaining half bar of candy, and they decided to try moving out. The first mile was bad. Anderson’s feet were so swollen he had to take off his outer socks. Every move was painful. Ward led the way, carrying the two rifles, while Anderson clutched the back of his rescuer’s coat and shuffled along behind. Twice Ward went ahead to test thin ice and twice he broke through, but each time he took off his boots, emptied out the water, and wrung his socks dry.
At the place where Anderson had gone through the ice they found his mittens, which were frozen iron hard, and his knife sheath. An hour before noon the men came out on Crane Lake and found snow writing saying that food and blankets were on the way. They’d walked only a short distance on the open lake when a small plane circled and landed beside them.
Bad luck had dogged the air search. Anderson’s party had called on the county sheriff for help and he’d enlisted the services of a local plane. But in making a landing in front of the Shomshak camp the plane broke through the ice and cracked up. It was a deputy sheriff, Adolph Johnson, with a Canadian pilot named Ostlund who picked up Ward and the lost man.
They flew Anderson to a near-by resort where he was given hot food and was treated by an Ohio doctor hunting in the area who stayed over an extra night in the event he might be needed. Later the sheriff, Henry Saarinen, drove Axel to the hospital. Ward walked on to his own camp, going by way of the Shomshak cabin to let the lost man’s party know that he had been found and brought out.
The following August the Minnesota Safety Council cited Ward for saving Anderson’s life, the first person so honored in that state for the rescue of a hunter.
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Months later Axel Anderson left the Veterans Hospital at Fort Snelling on crippled feet. The medics had to cut flesh from both of his heels, part of the bone of one, and amputate all of his toes about an inch back from where the toes and feet join.
When his feet are completely healed and he has been fitted with special shoes, Axel says he’ll make one more trip to Crane Lake and to the place where Ward found him. Ward didn’t see or hear the plane that roared low over Anderson about an hour before the two met. Still, Anderson insists the plane was there and won’t rest easy until he crosses the ridge behind which it vanished and finds the camp where he believes it came down.
