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Bum Hole Soup

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We’ve few ingredients to choose from, so when our friends came to stay last week I thought I might liven things up with a fried oriental squirrel starter. (S ee footnote ) Norm and Aedes live in the bush too so we hoped they’d be OK with it. Unless they had squirrel for lunch, perhaps. Our friends and their fearsome dog Chewie between Norm's legs Turns out I should have boiled up the anuses that I cut out when I skinned them and made an exotic soup. The oriental ‘wings’ went down a storm. Then Aedes informed us that, when working with hunters and elders in the territory, she’s been presented with live warble grubs (larvae of the warble fly that exists in the hides of living caribou) and a delicacy called Bum Soup. Warble fly larvae Bum Soup is made from the anus and lower intestine (and contents) of a moose, all boiled up into a hearty stew. Wow. What will I have to do to impress these folk? Our poor guests helping us move logs. Traditionally, just about ever...
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The worst thing about here

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Poling the boat across mud flats to launch People ask me, what is the worst thing about living in the Yukon wilderness? Is it bears?! No. You take precautions, you carry bear spray. But fear recedes, just like any other threat you live with day to day. I’m no more scared of bears now than I was of muggers in London. Removing broken asbestos sheet How about the cold, when it’s 40, 50 below!? Nope. Love that. But you must get lonely?  We do. But that’s the deal with all this freedom and beauty. You can’t have the moon on a stick. Collecting water by dog power every morning How about the dark? For the all the long nights of winter, we now have 24 hours of daylight and the clock changes so fast it makes you giddy. The bugs though? You’re getting close now. The incessant itching of bites. The buzzing, nipping, whirring into my eyes, my ears, my nose. The cloud that builds around me as soon as I step outside and follows me wherever ...
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Ghost town

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(Lou, Yukon) We finally made it to Forty Mile on 27th December! Now we can’t get there again. It’s beginning to feel like Never-Never Land. Forty Mile townsite from the Yukon River Forty Mile is a ghost town from the gold rush era, and our nearest “place”. In it’s heyday at the end of the 1800s, it was home to 700 people and had its own Telegraph Office and Opera House. When the gold rush charged on to Circle, it was slowly abandoned, the last resident leaving in 1958. Some civic buildings and cabins remain and are now an historic site. Our friends, and nearest neighbours, live a few miles from there and we’d been trying to get to them since freeze up. We made 12 miles of trail downriver before Christmas over un-obligingly rough ice. Or thought we did. When we remembered to look at the tachometer on the snowmachine, we found the 12 miles almost halved to 6.5. That included the full length of our land trail. We spent days cutting out a land trail on foot (there w...
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