Yukon bush life

Bull caribou walking across local glacier The tributary rivers in this part of the Yukon were named by an eccentric mathematician. We have the Fifteen Mile River, which we have just discovered is 21 miles from Dawson. Also, the Twelve Mile and Forty Mile Rivers, 18 and 55 miles from town, respectively and just over the border in Alaska, there is the Seventy Mile River, which is 70 miles from absolutely bloody nowhere at all. Fifteen Mile River I believe the numerals were plucked from a bingo machine, one drunken night in Dawson City, and randomly distributed down the Yukon  (See footnote). End of the road- overflow water on the Fifteen Mile. The Twelve Mile River is also called the Chanandu. Mishearing the local accent we thought it was the Xanadu. But the film with rollerskating Olivia Newton-John, that anyone of my age might remember, was apparently not named after a tributary of the mighty Yukon River. What a shame. View from Forty Mile ...

Our cache by moonlight, house behind I started the New Year annoyed at wolves. We’ve spent days working on a trail upriver to Dawson and marking it with wooden stakes in case it blows in with snow. Stakes on the back of the machine The bloody wolves have pulled most of our stakes out and chewed them up. God knows why, perhaps they’re using them as tooth picks. Then they really started fucking with me. The Forty Mile caribou herd are returning from their winter vacation. All 70,000 are plodding back just now, over the hills, down the river and sometimes right through our yard. America’s gone mental with random border policies so will they even get back into Alaska, I wonder? Caribou crossing the trail Maybe we’ll see them plodding back through the yard again, clutching their green cards in their little immigrant hooves and wandering what the fuck happened. With the caribou come wolves. Their howling is so beautifully wild and lonesome...