To Scribe a Log

(with David Nickel and Tim Nickel)

William’s handprints on the boat windshield, my mom Lorene (1936-2023) wrote on a scrap after a trip to our cabin on a peninsula of Nemeiben Lake.

My two-year-old had been sitting on her lap.

May 29, 2025, almost two decades later—even the BBC was reporting a historically devastating wildfire that rippled, scorched, whispered, snapped across Saskatchewan’s north, calling for a state of emergency. Our cabin north of La Ronge was in a burn zone, roads to the lake closed and so remote we had no way of learning if it was being consumed or already gone.

My brother David helped to build it in the summer of 1979. The white pine logs had been picked and cut during the winter on the east arm of the lake and one calm day floated on a boom twelve kilometres to the cabin site where builder Don Allen (1936-1984) and his crew began to work.

David texts: To scribe a log is to match the bottom surface of one to the top surface of the one it is to rest on. It is done by marking with a kind of caliper that you trace along the log and that follows the contours of both in concert, thus giving you two lines to cut which will join tightly.

Don was an amazing craftsman. He would run along the log with his chainsaw to make those scribed cuts and I remember his double-bladed Swedish axe which he used for fine work at the window openings and log-end notches. 

Highway 2 was still closed when my brother Tim, his wife Sherry and their friend Mark began the four-hour trek north from Rosthern. They were allowed to pass at the check points. It’s about nineteen kilometres from Nemeiben dock to cabin. They navigated out of Bell Bay, past acres of char and the occasional burst: green ruff of a shore, a green island fronting burn, past Propeller Rock, Sunset Island, and through the Narrows. Tim’s Island announced they were in reach. Will it be…they rounded, saw Barbie’s Bay and then the cabin, partially hidden by birch and perched on a rock.

Maybe the rock saved it. And Tim, Sher and Mark not stopping that weekend.

Tim texts: We were inundating the area with thousands of gallons of water as far as the hoses would reach. We used all the water from the loft tank (the intake hose on the pump had half burned). Sherry was filling containers and putting them out the back door for Mark while I was hauling five-gallon pails from the lake. Sherry was going around with a tea pot for a while because she could put the spout right into the moss under the surface. A lot of the smoke was coming from under the surface of the moss. There was stomping. That was the first three hours.

The following week, on June 16, my husband Bevan and I joined Tim and Sherry on another trip. Around the cabin’s whole perimeter was a delineation: burn that stopped within a few feet, sparing even the propane tanks against the cabin’s back as well as the side deck where Mom would bring out pancakes she’d make on a rectangular cast iron griddle over the two front elements of the propane stove. We’d devour them with coffee on sunny mornings, talking for hours and looking at the lake.

Inside was still. On the flour tin, chipped polar bear mug, Dad’s handmade furniture—couch, table, chair, driftwood ladder—I touched her fingerprints. Don had scribed the logs. My mom had scrubbed and stained them.

Each breath was thanks, for the path between charred remains to the filleting rock,

bearberry, bunchberry, wild lily-of-the-valley rising from the moss,

twilight, across the bay and further back a possible boreal owl’s call and at the front a concert of ducks and birds—northern shoveler, northern pintail, common goldeneye, spotted sandpiper, solitary sandpiper, black-capped chickadee, red-winged blackbird, common grackle*—their song dwindling like lights turning off one by one as Tim and I waited and listened and talked on the rock by the water until the evening became silent, startled only now and then by a loon,

for the outhouse with its creaky door, toilet paper stored in the old Nabob tin with the red, ripped plastic lid. Nearby wild roses were growing above the blackened ground. She’d have noticed that, written it down on a scrap I might have found.

*All species listed were observed at Nemeiben Lake on June 16, 2025 by Paul Riome.