by Janna Goerdt

Orr, Minnesota (AP)

Gene Goodsky paused as he walked through his maple sugar camp on Pelican Lake. Clear sap dripped slowly into metal cans and chickadees chased each other through the trees, but otherwise the woods were still.

“You know how when it’s quiet in the woods, and it feels like somebody is watching you, but there’s nobody around?” He patted an old maple tree, his face crinkling into a smile. “That’s the spirit of the trees, looking at you.”

Goodsky, 64, Bois Forte Band of Anishinabe spiritual adviser, has been sugaring in these woods for decades. Yet before Goodsky took up the traditional ways, they were very nearly lost.

Goodsky gathered a group of “the old experts,” including his mother and aunts, more than 20 years ago to relearn both the spiritual and practical methods of traditional maple sugar harvesting. Now, Goodsky, also Nett Lake School’s bilingual multicultural teacher, is passing on the tradition.

Every year he takes students from Nett Lake, Orr and Cook to visit the Nett Lake School sugarbush. Students learn to tap trees, collect and boil sap, as well as the cultural history of making maple sugar.

And for several weeks in March and April, Goodsky tends his own sugar camp to which he also welcomes visitors.

He crunched through drifts of maple leaves on a recent warm April morning, passing from tree to tree, watching as sap ran down cedar taps and pooled in gallon-sized cans.

Goodsky collects gallons and gallons of sap each spring. He lets the sap simmer over an open fire, until all the liquid has evaporated, leaving pure, pale-brown maple sugar.

The Anishinabe believe that maple sugar is a gift from the Great Spirit. Goodsky presents offerings of maple sugar, wild rice and blueberries before tapping any trees.

“That makes up our offering back to the spirits,” Goodsky said.

The trees have been stingy this year, though, and the sap run is drying up weeks ahead of normal. Sap flows best when nights are cold and days are warm and sunny, and this spring has simply been too warm. But the thin run will flow for a while longer, enough to make a small supply of syrup and sugar.

“Oy!” Goodsky called as he approached his cousin Earl Day’s sugar camp, a little ways through the woods from his own. A faint “Oy!” is heard in the distance, as Day answered.

Day, 64, grew up helping his family sugar in these woods. For years he helped Goodsky tend the sugar camp, and now returns from his home in St. Paul to tend his own.

“It’s important for me to come out in the spring, to do our traditional ways,” Day said.

He worked to set a few more taps out in the sugarbush, chipping away some of a maple tree’s outer bark and cutting two shallow notches near the tree’s base. Another shallow horizontal cut, and Day lightly hammered the cedar tap into place. Sap sprayed into the air with each blow.

Two kettles of sap, already dark brown with concentrated sugar, simmered over Day’s fire. About 40 gallons of maple sap will reduce to one gallon of thick syrup, which Day uses for ceremonies, as gifts and atop pancakes. Balsam boughs hang from the camp frame, ready to be slapped on top of the kettle to calm a too-vigorous boil.

“I’ll be here all day, until this gets down to syrup,” Day said.

Traditionally, sap is boiled over an open fire. Tribal elders taught Goodsky not to make sugar after dark, because trickster spirits often come out in the evening to make mischief.

“I follow that; I believe that,” Goodsky said. He once tried to work into the night, and set up outdoor lights to brighten his camp. He left the boiling kettle unattended for a few moments, and returned to find all the sugar had burned to a crisp, the day’s work ruined.

“When I first started, I had to learn the hard way,” he said.

Maple syrup and sugar were staples in the Anishinabe diet. They were used for cooking, as a snack and even to season wild game. When Goodsky began sugaring, some of the elders cooked traditional foods at the sugar camp.

“They used to make duck soup with wild rice and carrots,” Goodsky said, “or fish smoked over the fire, basted in syrup. Wow.”

Sugar season preparations begin during “the moon of the hard crust, when the snow has an icy, crusty surface,” Goodsky said. “The next full moon is the maple sugar moon, when the snow is starting to melt.” That’s when the Anishinabe began setting their taps.

Goodsky loves sitting in the same quiet woods where his family once did, listening to the soft “plink” of sap hitting metal. Each bucket and tap has its own tone, he says.

“When I’m out here, I feel good, I feel up,” Goodsky said, stopping to lean against a tree. “I feel connected to the spirits.”

Forgotten buckets are scattered throughout the woods, remnants of sugar camps long ago. They vary from tin cans similar to the ones Goodsky uses to pails pitted with rust, half-buried and filled with leaves. Goodsky has chosen not to disturb them.

“I like to wonder who was the last person to use them, 50, 60, 70 years ago,” he said.

Perhaps students at Nett Lake School will be among the next generation to set out buckets.

During class, Goodsky teaches the fourth-graders to distinguish a leafless maple tree from a basswood, an oak or an elm, and helps them tap a new maple tree. He teaches them to make an offering of tobacco before beginning the harvest.

“It’s fun being out here,” said Danny Beauchamp, 10. “I got to hold the ax when we were tapping the tree.”

Felicia Manson, 9, twisted her head underneath a dripping tap to catch sap on her tongue. “It tastes really good,” she said. “This syrup is a lot better than the stuff you get in the store.”

At the end of class, Goodsky gathered the children, including his grandson, Silver Goodsky, and began the tale of how the gift of maple sugar was granted to his people.

“Any time we are given something, it comes through dreams,” Goodsky said. “This was a story I heard long ago, on a day like today.”

The children sat in a circle around their teacher, listening.