Yukon bush life

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 se...

(Lou, Vancouver Airport) A girl’s dream has come true! I’ve often thought, when paying some mechanic for work on my car, I bet I’m getting fleeced here. I wish I knew more about engines. Well, piece by piece, I’m learning how a two-stroke engine works. Three days before we leave for England and one day before we have to take our very large husky, an impossible amount of laundry and various other things to town, the bloody Polaris Widetrak broke down again. It exploded in spectacular style with toxic luminous green coolant spraying out from under the hood like a psychedelic geyser. It is, I now know, simply a broken belt on the water pump that we can easily replace. If we had one. And if we weren’t leaving the country imminently. We had to get to town early the next morning and so abandoned it. In fact, we were quite tempted to leave the damn thing to go out with the ice in spring break up Thank God we had our little ’94 Polaris Indy Lite, Piccolo. We set of...