Yukon bush life

(Lou, Yukon) The most important events of the last week involve neither lemmings nor our dog. The river has begun to run with ice, temps dropped to -16C and we had our first meagre fall of snowflakes. Winter.  We woke one morning to a flotilla of ice chunks riding the river. Over the past week this has become a steady flow of ice pans spinning and slushing against each other, thick enough now that if you were quick and suicidal you might make a dash from one bank to the other, leaping across them like lily pads. The beginnings of the ice shelf has filled our eddy and lines the river bank and our creek swirls through a series of frozen falls. A difficult, arduous and pointless job For the last week or so we have been swearing, screaming and arguing viciously under the pretext of re-roofing the old cabin.  Things all started amicably enough. We had to rebuild one section of the roof in order to fit a woodstove and make a chimney hole for a recent guest a...

We are now lowing in earnest like flirtatious lady moose and have progressed from practising indoors with the aid of YouTube videos, like some weird bush karaoke, to bellowing from the porch with the aid of our moose bugle. We have fashioned the bugle in traditional style from birch bark and duct tape and are interspersing our “lonely lady” calls with huffing “I’ve got a girlie here” male calls with the aim of making any wandering bulls think there’s a gorgeous cloven hoofed gal on the porch but some other bastard’s got there before him.  Moose bugle enhances the sound and doesn't make you look stupid at all We are calling morning and evening, from the porch and the river, with the aim of getting a bull right up into the yard and preferably into the hanging rack so we don’t have to move him far if we get him.  Anyone who wants to join in go to the links at the bottom and sing-along-a-sounda-horny-moose with us. We’re also thrashing brush with an old scapula bone to m...

Everything happens in the autumn, or “fall” as they call it here. Building projects must be completed before it gets too cold to work outside, anything that involves digging has to be done before the ground freezes and trails need to be cut before there is a foot of snow on them and we can’t get to the base of shrub stems. We have to get all our winter supplies as we’ll be cut off from the world during freeze up. We won't be able to get out until the river is frozen and safe for the snowmachine (maybe a couple of months, maybe more?). On top of all that, this is moose hunting season, the salmon run is beginning and the berries are ripe for the picking. We won’t be fishing, but the rest of it applies. Hunting preparations I have my hunting licence, a moose tag and my rifle sighted in so I’m all set to get our winter’s meat. ( Here's how we sighted in our rifle .) Neil hasn’t been resident for the required time so he can’t hunt yet but he can help with dressing the carc...