Fall - everything happens at once

Everything happens in the autumn, or “fall” as they call it here. Building projects must be completed before it gets too cold to work outside, anything that involves digging has to be done before the ground freezes and trails need to be cut before there is a foot of snow on them and we can’t get to the base of shrub stems. We have to get all our winter supplies as we’ll be cut off from the world during freeze up. We won't be able to get out until the river is frozen and safe for the snowmachine (maybe a couple of months, maybe more?). On top of all that, this is moose hunting season, the salmon run is beginning and the berries are ripe for the picking. We won’t be fishing, but the rest of it applies.

Hunting preparations
I have my hunting licence, a moose tag and my rifle sighted in so I’m all set to get our winter’s meat. (Here's how we sighted in our rifle.) Neil hasn’t been resident for the required time so he can’t hunt yet but he can help with dressing the carcass and butchering the meat. He’ll probably do most of the cooking too, if I get one. 

All we need now is a moose. With that aim in mind we are practising our moose calls (you call them in rather than go off after them as they are a teensy bit heavy to move if not under their own volition.) 

Yes, we really are lowing away like flirty-girty lady moose. Guided YouTube videos, the answer to everything. We haven’t called for real outside yet as it’s a bit early in the season but we are getting very good so I expect a big old bull to come lumbering up the porch stairs any minute.

Just one more...

Purple berry madness
When not flirting, ungulate-style, we are obsessively foraging for berries. Berry picking must appeal to some primitive part of the brain as it is impossible to stop once you've started. We took a trip by boat and truck into the hills to pick blueberries and I’m surprised we’re not still there.

Me- Shall we go back now?
Neil- Yeah. I’ll just get this little patch.

(An hour later…)

Neil- OK let’s head home.
Me- Hang on, I’ve just found some really big ones.

(Another hour later…)

And so it goes on. In the end we have to make a pact- 

OK, we are really going home now! Lids on Tupperwares. Let’s go!

You find yourself walking to the truck still scanning the ground like a tramp looking for dog-ends on the pavement.

Then follows the even more obsessive activity of plucking out leaves and stems from the harvest and making the jam itself. We were up til midnight and totally delirious by the end of it. The woodstove is our only cooking appliance and we needed to get it HOT. The cabin walls were smouldering, our brains had melted and everything in sight had been dyed purple. 

Here's how we made blueberry jam.

Castle in the sky
Tearing ourselves away from berries for a moment we have autumn DIY projects to get on with. We must fit a chimney to the old cabin so we can use the woodstove (and therefore have a guest cabin/ workshop in the winter) and rebuild our cache (which had collapsed off its rotten legs at some point and sat looking rather forlorn in the brush.) 

Clearing brush from the cache

The cache (a sort of mini cabin on stilts) will be a handy place for us to store gas and jerry cans when we are away- out of the reach of bears and rodents. Tin strips wrapped around the legs apparently stop them climbing up. 

Deconstruction

We thought it wasn’t in too bad a shape and so, rather than reinvent the wheel (or do anything more than we absolutely have to to get by, which is us all over) we decided to pull it apart log by log and lay each piece carefully labelled in an “exploded” diagram on the ground. Then we can set it up on new legs, seated in properly dug foundations with gravel bases (the lack of which is what caused the rot in the first place) and put the whole things back together log by log. We cut new 13’ legs last winter from some dead standing trees and were ready to make a start.

That’s the hardest part over and done with- we’ve managed to take it apart!

Aside from a small box for our generator this is the first time we’ve attempted working with logs. Logs are much harder to work with than cut lumber. Obviously they are round and tapered, which makes them hard to mark, measure, get level and fit together. They are rarely straight and speckled with knots that stick out in every spot you ever want to make a joint. To join them you must make notches with a chainsaw and axe so they can sit together, which takes some practise.

Notching with chainsaw

So, the best idea for a first log building project is to attempt to construct something on the side of a steep incline that has to stand level and 10’ off the ground when you only have two safety ropes available, some rickety old ladders made of spruce twigs and a handful of rusty nails. Yes, let’s not make it easy.

Foundations- how to get them level?

Picking gravel now

Laying gravel foundations (hair needs dying, yes I know)

Old bits of string and rusty nails

To our utter amazement, after a few days' work the legs and base have gone up completely level. The notching is a bit violent but holds together and neither of us have yet fallen to our deaths. So fingers crossed with the rest of it.

Ignore the temporary bracing and imagine a handbuilt log cache on top and it all looks rather good

The house built of (rotten) sticks
We have also managed to fit the chimney into the old cabin roof, which is an achievement if ever there was one. As there were very few nails and the only two log rafters we discovered were totally rotten it was not hard to get the tin sheeting off. The roof consisted of thin, home-milled wood batons, a layer of mud and the tin sheeting that had once been torn off by a hurricane, (we were told by the previous owner) and looked like it. Although nail holes abounded, there was nothing to nail into except Yukon silt. 

Insulating the roof with mud is an old bush trick that works OK for a few years. Until the roof leaks. The mud then acts, well like mud, and holds a heavy damp layer over your wood and under your tin so it can’t dry. Brilliant. 

Under the mud

The roof construction course I took at the Builder’s Trade Centre in Epsom last year didn’t cover mud. An oversight on their part as we spent most of our time shovelling it off the batons and trying to find somewhere safe-ish to stand. Where it did help though was, once mud free, I was able to construct a frame to box the chimney. 

Very proud of my box. Insulated with some old fibre glass we stole from the squirrels

The stove works now and we can feel very proud that we have managed to fix a full 1/20th of our roof. It IS the most difficult part as it is where the chimney sits, but there is a dispiriting amount of roof and unknown bush “botching” to go before the “roof” is more than a flapping clatter of battered tin. 

Northern lights and stuff
All that plus the distraction of autumn colours. It’s as if the country gives off a final blaze before fading into its winter monochrome. The trees are just turning to gold and the shrubs are deep scarlet and amber. This is often the most active time for northern lights and every midnight pee for the last week has turned into a skygaze at the furling and unfurling of spectral greens and pinks across the sky. The salmon are not exactly leaping but they are certainly shuffling up the river and all we need now is the grunting of a juicy young bull moose to complete the picture. 

Homer update
Other news, for anyone who read my last blog- Homer has still not set foot inside his expensive and carefully built new house though he has deigned to sit beside it.

Twat

Anyhow, must go. I spy a tempting patch of cranberries out the window and the Tupperwares are empty...