A Conversation with Owls

They’re back! “Hoo-hu-hoo. Hooo hooo,” say the owls, from the tips of the highest spruce trees. We rushed out, never having heard them so close. Usually we hear their conversations as a distant echo but that night a couple were right in the yard, as if to say, “we’re back”.

Autumn in the yard

We hear owls all winter. They call to each other through the long hours of darkness, always the same refrain, back and forth across the valley. But in the summer they leave us. Perhaps the 24 hour daylight drives them off. But where? Graveyard vaults? The dark side of the moon?

Neil joined in. “Hoo-hu-hoo. Hooo hooo,” he said. They paused. We peered up at them with our headlamps and they blinked back with electric eyes. One answered, shocked, the other exclaimed in agreement. Then they opened their massive wings and soared across the yard, spread wide and white as sails.

First snow

As they passed, the sky seemed to open above us and daylight shine in. They settled far off in the woods, to discuss the strange turn of events in their surprised, breathy voices, like a couple of Scottish aunties.

Last trip to town was very cold. Note ice building on the hull

Ice pans in the river and shelf building from the shore

It’s just us and the owls now. With a week of nights at -15c and ice beginning to flow in the river, we took our boat out of the water.

We flushed and greased the outboard motor, fogged the cylinders, took the battery out and over a couple of days hand-hauled the boat up the bank with our Maasdam Rope Puller.

We rushed to service our snowmachines before temps dropped any lower and got painfully cold.

Out of storage in the old cabin

All this in time for the weather to warm well above freezing and the river to clear of ice. It is smooth and green as a billiard table.

We might have weeks of potential river travel ahead of us, but we cannot be assed to haul the boat back down, reconnecting everything, only to repeat the process in reverse very soon. That way madness lies.

Boat in the yard now

So we are in self-imposed isolation, and if the warm weather continues, it will be a long and lonely freeze up.

Last trip by boat

The average temp here is trending 7 degrees higher than it should be today, according to Environment Canada. We haven’t been here long enough to know if this just happens sometimes or if it is a symptom of man-made climate change that will make our lives more precarious each year.

Neil falling on creek ice whilst getting water. Don't worry, no one saw

I know where my suspicions lie and I brood on it as I do the pre-season maintenance on our petrol-driven engines. Including generators and chainsaws, we own 9. I am a despicable hypocrite but the only viable renewable solution is nuclear.

Draining toxic gear oil from our gas guzzling 20 yr old snow machine

I would gladly use it. I loved swimming in the sea around Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station, it was always nice and warm (true, btw, try it if you live in England). But suitcase reactors are tricky to source.

Butchering moose ribs. Due to the warm up we decided to can most of this meat

We have filled our oil lamps with another fossil fuel, kerosene, and placed them back on the table. Autumn is our darkest and loneliest time. The nights are drawing in sooner and linger each morning. We lose 7 minutes of daylight a day. 

We have a cluster of celebrations in October and November, both of our birthdays, Hallowe’en and, if you’re British, Bonfire Night and Diwali. I wish we had someone to celebrate them with. Putting in snowmachine trails, visits to friends, trips to town all seem a long way off.

Homer got the bones

But we do have Homer and he is full of joy, and worries about not much beyond critters stealing his moose ribs. He stands guard to keep the jays away and sadly, grabbed and killed a pretty wee marten that was having a nose around our meat shed.

Light fingered intruders

He is, though, petrified of our cold cellar and won’t come in the cabin if the door is open. So even our dim and exuberant dog is not immune to autumnal gloom.

Cold cellar, or The Dog Dungeon as we like to call it

I am reading a pre-Hallowe’en ghost story and have scared myself witless (The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters- oh my God don’t go near it). I’m now too frightened to go out for a pee at night. I usually avoid ghost stories. We are very remote and it can get creepy.

Old cabin in the woods

I knew a couple who lived in a tiny cabin stuffed full of clutter. They became convinced that whenever they lost or mislaid something, which was most days, it was the work of a poltergeist. It’s easy to get carried away with the idea that you are not quite alone. The woods around us that seem so wild, so empty, are not.

From the ridge

We took a hike a few miles upriver on my birthday to a spot with a jagged-looking ridge. There was an empty boat on the shore.

The Marie Celeste at Woodchopper Creek

As we went further into the woods, with each pile of bear scat we came across, I got more scared we’d find the chewed and scattered remains of its occupants. We didn’t, but we did come across an old iron bedstead, some trap line trails (still clear as if cut only yesterday), an only-just-standing cache full of ancient marten boxes and a pathetic and dismally collapsed cabin.

Collapsed cabin

Cache

We have found a few cabin remains here and there in the bush. Usually a scatter of sinking logs and planks, rusting wood stoves, tin cans, jars and broken plastic buckets. The remnants of other people, other lives. Trappers, miners, fisherman, woodcutters, psychos, axe murderers, who knows now who they were?

Cleared trail. As if someone might have travelled it yesterday. But who?

There are abandoned steam locomotives in the mountains here, going God knows where, no one remembers, and the tracks are long gone. There is even an old power station somewhere up the Chanandu River gradually fading into the woods.

Not so wild

I’ve heard that in the old days, if someone died in their cabin, when their remains were eventually found, the RCMP would just throw the frozen corpse into the cold cellar and leave the cabin to decay. It was too difficult to get the body out and the ground was too frozen to dig. No wonder Homer is scared of ours and I cannot imagine a more lonely way to die.

But with the river water rising from snow melt in the south, and no running ice, we may yet get a visitor by boat. We get very few, even in summer and I fear our alone-ness will soon make us too weird for people to want to stop. Will we become too “bushy”? The term isn’t a reference to beards and underarm hair, though that’s definitely true, it means the particular kind of oddness associated with spending too long alone in the bush.

What IS she doing? Bush weirdo

It means not being able to stop talking when you eventually meet someone, it means petty fears and grievances being blown out of all proportion so you’re apt to greet visitors with a shotgun, or just hide away from them.

I worry it might happen to us. I don’t think we’ll get violent but we might get fearful and hide in the cold cellar when we hear a boat coming. Should anyone enter the yard, I’m sure Homer will bark viciously to protect his bones and scare them away. If they do come inside the cabin, and open the cellar door, we’ll pretend to be dead. That will prevent any embarrassing social faux pas and the owls will tell us when it is safe to come out.

That will be best for everyone, as with Hallowe’en just around the corner, things can only get weirder.

Blush of sun on the hills on an otherwise gloomy day