Xmas Chainsaw Massacre
(Lou, Yukon)
One day is the same as another here. A man-made event like Christmas can easily pass us by if we aren’t paying attention.
There’s no dithering on Oxford Street trying to find presents, no carols playing, no family rows about who’s going where and with whom. Nothing to differentiate the day unless we somehow make it special.
We have two criteria for celebrations and festivals- an easy day with no hard physical work and an unusual activity.
A day of chainsawing was our easy day for Christmas Eve. We are burning logs from last year’s woodpile stacked behind the house. They need to be bucked (cut) into stove-size lengths then heaved round to the front of the house in a wheelbarrow. (See our How To on firewood)
Not particularly relaxing or festive, I grant you, but compared to trail breaking or felling trees and hauling them back, it felt like a day of light housework.
Our unusual event was BEER. We haven’t had a drink for months so that made it very, very special. And unusual in that we experienced the first can as a shower and I drank the next in less than a second under extremely high pressure. Like everything else in our bloody house, the beer had frozen and thawed. Two cans exploded as I tried to open the box.
Whilst one can sprayed the cabin I clamped my mouth over the other. Thank the Baby Jesus Christ Our Lord and Saviour, the rest of it was fine and I had to have a bit of a sit down after jacking up my first beer in two months.
Neil played a recording of Silent Night on the computer. It is spine tingling-ly beautiful though a bit redundant here. Every night is totally fucking silent.
Then I slept the sleep of the Undead again, thanks to our day of festive chainsawing. Five winters of running a chainsaw and clinging to a dogsled or snowmachine has left me with carpal tunnel syndrome. A hardening of the tendons which reduces circulation in my wrists and means I wake up throughout the night with zombified hands and arms.
I don’t think it gets worse. Hope not. Though “Zombie Woman Eats Husband’s Brains in Xmas Massacre” would be a much needed interesting story for The Yukon News.
What with the railway strikes and traffic congestion we gave up trying to get to our friends for Christmas. Well no, but we had our own problems with ice.
We started out towards them through very rough ice down the river, buoyed by the knowledge they had put some trail in from their end and the ice wasn’t so bad on their side.
We got 4 miles of good trail in over very rough ice on the first day. But things got rougher the next. Hours of hammering and whacking with maul axes then grinding the machine a few yards through, only got us one mile further.
I gave up when I realised this is how they pass the time in Siberian gulags.
Ahead of us the terrain was even worse. Bank to bank pressure ridges and jagged mess.
Simply not worth busting up our snowmachine and backs for. We decided to wait for more snow to level things off.
A special day
Our unusual and special activity for Christmas Day was, washing. We washed bodies AND hair all in the same day, which must be a first. It involves getting lots of water from the creek, heating it on the woodstove and then trying to rub yourself down with a flannel, getting scorched on the stove side of your body and freezing the other. Hair washing means your spouse tipping cups of water over your hair whilst being bent double with your head in a plastic tote box. And then there’s all the bloody laundry.
So once every two weeks is enough for all that palaver, and even then we try to forget about it for a few days. It doesn’t matter if we smell. No one comes and if they do, they’re always reassuringly smelly too.
Despite the hassle, it was refreshing to be clean on Christmas Day.
We had a family outing up the creek with Homer pulling the chainsaw for us in the dogsled (yes, even more festive chainsawing, there’s no stopping us!).
We cut a path through fallen trees to make a ski trail and to avoid this-
Christmas dinner was moose back-straps and instant potato but that doesn’t matter as we had WINE and I could have been eating Homer’s kibble for all I cared. Neil made a very good Xmas pudding, and I ate til I felt sick. We didn’t row about anything, but apart from that, it was just like Christmas.
Honeymoon with Homer
Homer is doing well as a solo dogsled team. We are at the fun stage of praise and encouragement.
When he gets something wrong, we simply encourage him (yank him by the collar) to do it right and then give him lots of praise to keep him willing to learn. It’s the honeymoon period.
Soon he will know what he should be doing and will be disobeying us when he doesn’t. The battle of wills stage. This is when you have a hard-headed husky dragging you backwards through the brush after a rabbit whilst you scream “Woah, you fucking stupid motherfucker! Wooooaah!!” in an exhilarating symbiosis of human and animal working together as one. We have all that to look forward to.
In view of his hard work, we have punished Homer by moving him to a warm, sheltered spot, out of the howling Yukon wind.
As he won’t set foot in a kennel and temps reached almost -40, we felt a bit sorry for him.
Dogs don’t like change. A bone maybe, or a walk to a different place but animals prefer things to stay mostly how they were the day before. So our cosy new spot is simply The Wrong Place.
We moved his “lean-to” shelter, lay down lots of bedding, hammered a post into the frozen ground (not easy) and gave him a big moose leg bone to settle him in.
Distracted by the bone, it wasn’t til 1am that he realised. “Woof. Ahooooo.” He is always reticent to make any noise. So this was a restrained “ahem- I seem to be chained in the wrong place.” He sat quietly for the rest of the night, sure that we’d realise our mistake in the morning.
Homeless at Christmas
But no, we are determined that he shall have some warmth and comfort. We have not relented. He sits in his old spot, when unchained, looking morose and will NOT go into his lean-to anymore, but sleeps on the snow outside.
On Christmas Eve we decided we would move his lean-to over the spot he slept, and kind of plonk it on him to force him to have some festive comfort. It collapsed during the night.
Used to our perplexing cruelty now, he didn’t complain. However, he did get this on Christmas Day, which made up for a lot.
I got some Christmas mitt liners. Both my moose and squirrel furs turned out OK, thank you very much for asking. I scraped off my tanning paste, oiled them with vegetable oil and left them to dry to a crust state.
The moose is still drying, but the squirrel has dried, been staked (rubbed with a round metal tool to break up the fibres and make it soft and pliable) and sandpapered, and is now fully operational in my left ski mitt.
Plenty of room at the inn
We have now journeyed out in every direction possible and on every means of transport. We have gone up the creek, over the ridge, up the river, down the river, across the land next to us, across the land opposite on snow shoes, snowmachine, foot, dogsled and now skis.
We have made a giant Star of Bethlehem in the snow that radiates from our cabin towards every point on the compass and without having managed to get anywhere at all.
On Christmas Day we set off again. Having got our ski trail in, we skied up the creek, going further than we’ve been before and got a surprise. We found this-
Another unexpected and somewhat spooky building. It is an old bunk house for workers on long defunct mining claims. We’d heard it was out there but had given up looking. It’s been mauled by bears, squirrels, rain and even picked up and moved by the creek in a spring flood by the looks of it.
But there was something heart-warming about finding another little man-made thing out there, in the great wilderness.
The snow is gently falling now and so tomorrow we will attempt the north-west point of our star again and head downriver for a visit with our friends. Or another day in the gulag, whichever it turns out to be.
One day is the same as another here. A man-made event like Christmas can easily pass us by if we aren’t paying attention.
 |
| A glimpse of Christmas sunshine from the river |
A day of chainsawing was our easy day for Christmas Eve. We are burning logs from last year’s woodpile stacked behind the house. They need to be bucked (cut) into stove-size lengths then heaved round to the front of the house in a wheelbarrow. (See our How To on firewood)
Not particularly relaxing or festive, I grant you, but compared to trail breaking or felling trees and hauling them back, it felt like a day of light housework.
Our unusual event was BEER. We haven’t had a drink for months so that made it very, very special. And unusual in that we experienced the first can as a shower and I drank the next in less than a second under extremely high pressure. Like everything else in our bloody house, the beer had frozen and thawed. Two cans exploded as I tried to open the box.
Whilst one can sprayed the cabin I clamped my mouth over the other. Thank the Baby Jesus Christ Our Lord and Saviour, the rest of it was fine and I had to have a bit of a sit down after jacking up my first beer in two months.
Neil played a recording of Silent Night on the computer. It is spine tingling-ly beautiful though a bit redundant here. Every night is totally fucking silent.
Then I slept the sleep of the Undead again, thanks to our day of festive chainsawing. Five winters of running a chainsaw and clinging to a dogsled or snowmachine has left me with carpal tunnel syndrome. A hardening of the tendons which reduces circulation in my wrists and means I wake up throughout the night with zombified hands and arms.
I don’t think it gets worse. Hope not. Though “Zombie Woman Eats Husband’s Brains in Xmas Massacre” would be a much needed interesting story for The Yukon News.
 |
| Looking for a route through the ice |
We started out towards them through very rough ice down the river, buoyed by the knowledge they had put some trail in from their end and the ice wasn’t so bad on their side.
We got 4 miles of good trail in over very rough ice on the first day. But things got rougher the next. Hours of hammering and whacking with maul axes then grinding the machine a few yards through, only got us one mile further.
I gave up when I realised this is how they pass the time in Siberian gulags.
Ahead of us the terrain was even worse. Bank to bank pressure ridges and jagged mess.
 |
| Fuck it. Heading home. |
Our unusual and special activity for Christmas Day was, washing. We washed bodies AND hair all in the same day, which must be a first. It involves getting lots of water from the creek, heating it on the woodstove and then trying to rub yourself down with a flannel, getting scorched on the stove side of your body and freezing the other. Hair washing means your spouse tipping cups of water over your hair whilst being bent double with your head in a plastic tote box. And then there’s all the bloody laundry.
 |
| Laundry. Absolutely no need to see a photo of us washing. |
Despite the hassle, it was refreshing to be clean on Christmas Day.
We had a family outing up the creek with Homer pulling the chainsaw for us in the dogsled (yes, even more festive chainsawing, there’s no stopping us!).
We cut a path through fallen trees to make a ski trail and to avoid this-
 |
| Ski limbo |
Honeymoon with Homer
Homer is doing well as a solo dogsled team. We are at the fun stage of praise and encouragement.
 |
| Waiting patiently whilst we cut trail |
Soon he will know what he should be doing and will be disobeying us when he doesn’t. The battle of wills stage. This is when you have a hard-headed husky dragging you backwards through the brush after a rabbit whilst you scream “Woah, you fucking stupid motherfucker! Wooooaah!!” in an exhilarating symbiosis of human and animal working together as one. We have all that to look forward to.
In view of his hard work, we have punished Homer by moving him to a warm, sheltered spot, out of the howling Yukon wind.
As he won’t set foot in a kennel and temps reached almost -40, we felt a bit sorry for him.
Dogs don’t like change. A bone maybe, or a walk to a different place but animals prefer things to stay mostly how they were the day before. So our cosy new spot is simply The Wrong Place.
 |
| Looking back at his old spot |
Distracted by the bone, it wasn’t til 1am that he realised. “Woof. Ahooooo.” He is always reticent to make any noise. So this was a restrained “ahem- I seem to be chained in the wrong place.” He sat quietly for the rest of the night, sure that we’d realise our mistake in the morning.
Homeless at Christmas
But no, we are determined that he shall have some warmth and comfort. We have not relented. He sits in his old spot, when unchained, looking morose and will NOT go into his lean-to anymore, but sleeps on the snow outside.
 |
| They took my house |
Used to our perplexing cruelty now, he didn’t complain. However, he did get this on Christmas Day, which made up for a lot.
I got some Christmas mitt liners. Both my moose and squirrel furs turned out OK, thank you very much for asking. I scraped off my tanning paste, oiled them with vegetable oil and left them to dry to a crust state.
The moose is still drying, but the squirrel has dried, been staked (rubbed with a round metal tool to break up the fibres and make it soft and pliable) and sandpapered, and is now fully operational in my left ski mitt.
 |
| Squirrel on the left, weasel on the right. Nothing weird about that. Don’t know why you’re staring |
We have now journeyed out in every direction possible and on every means of transport. We have gone up the creek, over the ridge, up the river, down the river, across the land next to us, across the land opposite on snow shoes, snowmachine, foot, dogsled and now skis.
We have made a giant Star of Bethlehem in the snow that radiates from our cabin towards every point on the compass and without having managed to get anywhere at all.
On Christmas Day we set off again. Having got our ski trail in, we skied up the creek, going further than we’ve been before and got a surprise. We found this-
Another unexpected and somewhat spooky building. It is an old bunk house for workers on long defunct mining claims. We’d heard it was out there but had given up looking. It’s been mauled by bears, squirrels, rain and even picked up and moved by the creek in a spring flood by the looks of it.
 |
| Collapsed rotten purlin due to rain leakage. Cosy |
The snow is gently falling now and so tomorrow we will attempt the north-west point of our star again and head downriver for a visit with our friends. Or another day in the gulag, whichever it turns out to be.
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