Meat, fur and festive bones

(Lou, Yukon, Winter Solstice)

It’s dark now.

We haven’t seen the sun for months but apparently it rises somewhere every day, just as usual. Sunrise is around 11.20am and sunset at 3.15pm (making a guess from data in towns to the south and north of us).

Our world is softly lit. There is no shadow except that of the moon when she’s around. Wonderful for portrait photos if you are a middle aged lady with the occasional wrinkle, which of course I’m not.

Not a wrinkle or a grey hair in sight

We get up early, and by the time grey begins to seep into the sky we are often ready for a snooze, but we grab each hour of daylight with mitted hands. It must be utilised and, most importantly, witnessed.

Then we are in bed very early. 10pm, still bang at it on the Kindles, is very rock’n’roll for us.

Darkness is a luxury. You don’t have it in the city. Electric light blasts you through winter at the same pace as summer.

A kerosene lantern glows in each corner of our cabin. That is all they do, they don’t exactly light the place up. So we have headlamps perpetually strapped to our foreheads with batteries at some stage of deterioration. We're always blundering around, even in the afternoon if our shutters are up. Our bush friends can’t understand why we don’t hook some LEDs up to a truck battery and light the house up? 25 years working in London. That’s why.

Not to be dragging myself out of bed and on to a bicycle or down to the train in the dark, cold and drizzle, that is the luxury. Or heaving myself around at midnight under the obligation of doing things, work, fun or otherwise. Neil would probably hibernate if only I would get all the wood, water and bring him meals in bed, but I’m mean like that.

And our meals take some preparation. We brought our moose shoulder in to defrost and butchered it over a couple of days. Some kind friends lent us a grinder so we’ve been making mince meat. It’s great fun, though I can’t quite explain why.

We aren’t good at butchery yet. We just sling cut chunks, unlabelled into Ziploc bags, then into a plastic tote outside. It creates an element of surprise to our meals that is otherwise lacking, as we never know what we’ve got til it’s defrosted.

There was a small patch of hide left on our shoulder which I am tanning in the hope I can use it for mending mitts. We didn’t keep the whole hide. I helped a friend scrape the flesh off one a few years ago and you could not have less fun with rancid fat and biting flies if you tried.

The traditional tanning method is to use the brains. Each animal contains enough brain to tan its own hide apparently. Isn’t that marvellous and doesn’t it make you want to have a go?

We once tanned caribou hides to make bed matts and I asked a friend about brain tanning. He said “Well, yeah. If you want your bed to smell of brains.”

I bought a commercially made tanning kit (see footnote).

Rubbing on homemade tanning preparation. I should have been a hand model.

I’m improvising now with salt and flour. It’s worked on rabbit, and I remove any dried flour out of the fur with Neil’s comb (“What’s this white stuff in my comb?” “Dandruff” – he hasn’t twigged yet).

I hate to waste anything we kill so we’ve also been combining pest control with creating an interesting starter course to our evening meal. Albeit, a very small one.

Fried Cajun Squirrel Wings. Not bad (Yes, we had another miscreant squirrel in the old cabin.)

His “hide” is pinned to a board and basting in flour and salt. I’m now two squirrels towards the 200 or so I’ll need to make something useful, but I can at least stuff one in each mitt as a handwarmer.

Travel update
Some bad news. Our Xmas day expedition to our friends 30 miles away is off. The mountains are drifted with snow so they can’t get a snowmachine to the rendezvous point.

Ice at the corner

The good news- Another feeble snow fall has allowed us to get the snowmachine along our new land trail. We can now cut off the insane car crash of ice that blocks our corner.

The trail is humpy and grooved so there is no chance of carrying a passenger. Driving is a challenge. You must preempt on to which side the machine will suddenly try to roll over so you can fling your body weight to the opposite.

Stuck

I imagine trans-Atlantic one man dinghy sailing might be easier.

Made it to Happy Creek

And then on to the river

We can’t travel the distance any faster as one of us still has to walk, but we can carry heavy tools.

Our Alaskan friend has started to make a trail on the river in our direction but was turned back at a big pressure ridge. Now we can use our land trail, we started yesterday downriver to meet his trail, still hoping to get to theirs for Xmas. There is one beautifully smooth section.

Testing ice on the smooth bit

It’s quite short, and the rest of it is like driving over a pile of scrap metal scattered across large rocks, so one of us still has to walk for most of it.

Getting over a small pressure ridge

Twenty-six river miles. That’s a long walk on Xmas day.

A big dump of snow will fill the trail in and change everything for us.

Slow going. Me and Homer on foot, machine pounding along behind.

Otherwise we will be at home on Xmas day with the consolation of a surprise cut of moose meat and BOOZE! which, against all the odds, we have saved for the day.

Festive tree and decorations

There are thousands of square miles of boreal spruce forest here, but not one decent Xmas tree. Conditions are so harsh nothing grows straight or bushy. Once cut, they all look like Dickensian orphans, crippled with rickets and bent with starvation.

We picked the best of a bad bunch, after hours of wandering getting very cold, and it now leans pathetically by the wood pile. I made decorations from old birthday cards and sellotaped them on. (I threaded them all with cotton last year- what a bloody waste of few hours of my life that was, never again.)

As the ground is frozen, we can’t dig earth to fill a bucket, so it sits in our waste tea and coffee grinds bucket. Or rather, it leans precariously out of it. The lean gets more extreme every day so by 25th I’m sure it will be laying flat on the floor like a drunken reveller. As will we, maybe.

We’ve brightened the yard up with a dash of festive scarlet by hanging our butchered rib cage in a spruce tree. Well no, it’s for the birds, but isn’t it pretty?

We hung it in a tree that a poor wee flock of chickadees visit every morning. We weren’t sure if they’d eat it and we have succeeded only in scaring them away. They’ve not been back since. I can’t say I blame them, but the thought was there.

And Homer got his Xmas present early. We don’t usually feed him raw meat as it has parasites, but we have some extra worming pills. And everyone gets to make themselves ill at Christmas.

We are still hoping to make it to our friend's place and so are dreaming of a whiter Christmas to fill the trail in.

Merry Christmas everyone! Have a wonderful time one and all, and try not to get worms.

Footnote: From a US company, thetanneryinc.com. Absolutely marvellous and as easy as this kind of thing ever is. Caribou hides are known to lose their hair quickly but ours have held theirs over years of use.