Yukon bush life

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...

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...