Yukon bush life

(Yukon) Our bend in the river is a windy spot. It’s about to get worse. We didn’t get a moose and so it will be a diet of dried beans for the winter. On the bright side, the wind blows the deep cold away so this will give new meaning to the term “man-made climate change.” Calling for moose on the river We missed our moose, the one we stood 30 feet away from but had no rifle. We aren’t seeing any tracks now so perhaps they have gone back up into the mountains? Lore has it that moose come down to rut when it gets cold. It didn’t get cold this year.  Calling from the porch with birch bark bugle Our lonesome moose lady calls are answered only by cackling ravens and furious squirrels. We haven’t given up, but it’s feeling unlikely. Out early, looking for bloody moose We’ve tried our hand at fishing. We didn’t have line strong enough for salmon and so have improvised with parachute cord.  They aren’t fooled. When we fished salmon ...

(Yukon) You can pay a lot to de-stress yourself in a wilderness retreat with no internet, no mobile phone signal and no easy way in or out. Or you can just come here and give us 50 bucks. Trying to fix the world wide web We are still without the internet but with close relatives abroad, tax problems to sort out and tenants to manage we aren’t sitting around eating lentils, meditating and enjoying the luxury. Yellow souwester weather We’ve made one trip to town in lashing rain and fog to get a new modem, which didn’t work, and so will set off tomorrow with the satellite dish, tria arm and 100’ of cables to be tested by Bob, the internet guy. Hair-raising drive on the Top of the World highway Life without Facebook or Instagram means we have got on with stuff, which is a plus. Neil has gone mad for berry picking and jam making. I can barely tear him away from the cranberry bushes to help with our home improvement projects. Mashing berries. I...

(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...