-art by Jeanie Tigullaraq, Clyde River, Nunavut, Canada

I had been outside less than two minutes and now my naked-ape fingers were numb. Okay so at -10°F and a stout north wind,  I should know better than to go out and dump ashes from the kitchen wood burning stove without wearing any gloves or mittens. Admittedly I did pause to take in rising sunshine and draw in a “good morning” deep breath of air. That inhalation was also a wake-up call that the day was nippy and not suited for an ill-clad encounter.

I hurried back to the house from the frozen compost pile, stopping to clutch a couple pieces of firewood from the wood shed. My hands that were quickly becoming rigid claws rather than flexible and tactile digits.

Back indoors, I hovered over the stove. I clutched a couple water-polished pieces of Lake Superior basalt that I keep on top of the kitchen woodburning stove. They are ideal hand and foot warmers. As warmth seeps back into my pain-riddled fingers, I grimaced as I grunted lyrics from John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Hurts so Good.”

Rolling the black silky smooth stone over in my hand I couldn’t help but marvel at how traditional Inuit hunters could tolerate existing and even thriving in Arctic conditions without a stick of wood to throw on a warming fire.

Three weeks ago I frostbit three of my fingertips while out cutting and splitting firewood. The tips on three fingers of my right glove had worn through and exposed the flesh on my fingertips. Over the past few days that damaged skin peeled away and I am equipped with new epidermal coverings on the tips.

Such a mistake in Arctic conditions could be fatal. I stand in awe of the Inuk hunter who would stand on his small swatch of polar bear fur to add both warmth to his feet and make it quieter for him to shuffle. Cold air and snow crystals combined can make for a loud squeaky ruckus. And if you are trying to remain silent above a ring seal’s breathing hole in the frozen sea ice you must remain as quiet as a falling snowflake. You need to hear the muted exhale of a seal as it pauses in its underwater excursions to catch a breath at one of its breathing holes. Shaped like upside down ice cream cones, the breathing hole on the frozen sea allowed the seal to catch a breath. With the primitive harpoon poised at the tip of the inverted cone, the patient and quiet hunter will hear the seal’s appearance in the inverted ice funnel and drive the harpoon towards the seal.

Bending over at the waist, the hunter, resembled a frozen underling bowing to the vast, desolate and frozen landscape. . . sometimes for hours. There are stories where hunters would diligently wait at the hole for the quiet exhale of a seal for over two days. No screen of trees or walls to divert windchilling winds that can easily steal your life. This was not recreational seal hunting, this was grocery shopping. Their family’s survival depended on their hunting skills and their perseverance.

Hunters were covered in layers of caribou hide, one layer, fur to the inside against the skin, and a second outer layer, the parka, with the fur exposed to the weather. The most successful hunters could deal with adversity, suffering and pain.

.How could they do it?

Developing a high tolerance of pain was a valued and necessary attribute. So it is not unusual that as children many of the games they played helped them develop skills and a mindset to hunt and deal with pain.

Sometimes, I wish we would inject only a modicum of suffering into children’s activitys. With electrical games the only suffering comes with strained thumbs as they type and peck across the keyboard. Sad.

Consider the traditional Inuk child. They learned physical games that would help them endure pain and suffering. A marshmallow might best describe modern games of our more urban society. On the other hand the piece of smooth basalt is a better symbol of the games of nomadic hunter-gatherer children. They had to be strong and tough while understanding the polished survival benefits of working together.

One Inuk game emulated two musk oxen bulls. Each child got on all fours and faced each other. Rather than ram into each other they carefully placed their foreheads together and on the signal, they simply pushed until one pushed the other away or one would give up.

Another game, called the mouth pull, would have two youngsters stand side by side. Before the game would officially commence, both participants would reach their arm around the others shoulders and then reach up to their opponent’s mouth. Each player would hook one or two of their fingers into the corner of the other player’s mouth and hook the cheek. At the signal players pulled their opponent’s cheek until one person surrendered.

To learn seal anatomy and how to do with less, children were given a leather pouch filled with the bones of a seal’s flipper. They were instructed to reach into the bag and pull out as many bones as they could grab. Once they had their hand full, the drawstring of the pouch was tightened around the child’s wrist making it impossible to pull out all the bones they wanted to pull out. With only a few bones, they had to lay their retrieved bones in the configurment of the seal’s flipper.

Nothing soothes pain like laughter. Consequently the laughing contest was an important balm. This game, my favorite, was best played during social gatherings. Participants pair up and face each other, usually holding each other’s hands. At a signal everyone begins to laugh. The person who laughs most robustly and longest is the winner. It is not unusual that soon everyone is out of control in a continual flow of laughter.

This simple game could very well be the anecdote for politicians. Imagine these hucksters paired up with a member of the opposite political party, holding hands and then laughing. Who knows where it would lead.

The gray predawn light urged me out of bed. Miss Nancy was still sleeping soundly so I quietly slipped, like an otter, into morning. The chilled bedroom air prodded me to quickly dress. I quietly plodded downstairs to practice my fire making skills and was soon feeding an armful of firewood into the maw of the kitchen stove.

A glance at the outdoor thermometer betrayed the reason the house carried a chill. Minus eighteen. I actually smiled recognizing the good old-fashioned January morning. I kind of miss those rigid Januarys of yesteryear.

The fire leaped into action trading BTUs for stout chunks of oak. I put water on to heat up for tea and sat down. As with most mornings, I glanced out the east window to assess the day. It’s a simple, but not infallible, way to forecast the weather. If I can spy the winter sun climbing out of the east, I am assured of a clear day for the time being. If there is no sun in view or if it is muddled, well the day will be overcast and perhaps that would mean some snow.

To my sleepy surprise I discovered a pair of similarly shaped mountains right outside the window. Was this a vision of what I wished for?

Minnesota has great diversity but we no longer have ranges of mountains, even though we do like to give ski hills and other notable humble rises the title of “mountain.” When we make our migratory trek to the Outpost in the Yukon, we are filled with daily mountain views outside our window.

The pair of mountains I contemplate on this January morning are of a similar shape of my Yukon morning view of Goat and Twin Mountain. They show the gentle age of roundness rather than craggy with tall spires.

Had my Minnesota address gone from its ancient post-glacial sandplain and erupted mutely overnight into towering mountains? Had I slept so hard I hadn’t heard the heaving and the tectonic thrusting of these twin mounts?

I didn’t rub my eyes to coax a clearer look. I couldn’t. I was transfixed.

High on the slopes the slopes of the white-covered range was covered with an otherworldly vegetation of unfamiliar feathery white limbs. I assessed the grade of the incline with keen attention towards the gradual shoulder. Perhaps it might offer me a route to the summit after a hearty breakfast.

That is if it were real. Well it was real. It’s just that it wasn’t a mountain. Instead it was the science of frost forming on the inside of my double-hung window. While it is a double-glazed window with an outside storm, the interior glass surface got cold last night behind our interior insulated cover. Consequently any indoor moisture that collects on the cold glass crystallizes. Clearly Jack Frost built these mountains.

The glowing heart of the mountains captured my attention. Through the translucent skim of ice, the surrealistic dawning glowed like a kitchen stove ember.

It seemed incongruous that this burning star could be entrapped deep inside a mountain of ice crystals. This closest of earth’s stars, the sun, known by astronomers as a yellow dwarf star, bears surface temperatures of over 10,000 °F and is over 93 million miles away.

Within reach of my alpine show was my camera. I wanted to catch the fireheart before it climbed out of the mountain’s core. I snapped a single shot and the phone rang.

I had been gone only minutes but whenI returned to the window, I was surprised to find droplets and an oak woods.  In my absence I didn’t witness the thievery of the morning dwarf star. The mountains were both gone. Had the mountains slipped into a vaporous hideout?

The power of the rising sun had quickly burned off the ephemeral art piece. It was the perfect heist.

Perhaps the real gift had been that the glowing window art had simply been a vehicle to remind me that moments slip away. The experience shows up fully and then in the next seconds it is merely history. . .a fragment of a story. This is not unlike life. I mustn’t despair over the lost phantom image, this was not a mournful morning message as much as it is a vivacious pronouncement to live each moment fully aware and with gobs of gratitude

With yesterday’s snow settled and temps finally edging up over zero, I decided to get a dose of sunlight by going out to cut some firewood. Another reason to brave the weather is that firewood is far easier to split when the temperatures are seriously cold. If your aim is good, the wood fairly explodes.

I bundled up, but not too much since I did not want to render myself into a ball of sweat in the frigid morning air. I loaded my splitting maul and chain saw on my sled and headed into the woods.

I had been swinging my six pound splitting maul for 20 minutes so before I rendered the next chunk of oak into fractions, I took a timeout and sat down on a piece of oak remaining whole.. Alone, I enjoyed the solitude and the sense of doing good work. I leaned over and set another chunk of oak upright for the next mauling. I scooped up a handful of clean snow and snowconed it off my mitt. As I rehydrated, I leaned over the piece of oak I had set up. The concentric growth rings were interrupted by a faint crack that zig-zagged across cut surface. That meandering fissure would be the target of my next swing of the maul.

Inspecting the grain, the cracks and irregularities in the wood carried my mind back half a century when I was initiated into the chore of splitting wood. My brother and I would hike the mile or so to our great-grandparents small farm and help with lawn mowing and other tasks. On this particular day, after we finished up our usual chores, our great grandfather asked us to follow him out to the woodshed. We made our way across the yard and slightly uphill to the old woodshed that was set on the side of the hill. The back of the shed was on the uphill side and it was open in the back so that firewood could be split and tossed easily down into the shed for storage.

Grandpa handed us an axe and proceeded to instruct us how to read the grain of the wood. “Reading the grain correctly and then hitting the axe directly on your target will make the job easier,” he growled. “You’ll wear yourselves out just hitting anywhere.”

Brother Scott and I took turns flailing at the chunk of wood  and we only managed to leave hack marks across the whole surface.

Nearby Grandpa sat perched on his own oak chunk. He leaned over and said, It’ll take som practice to consistently hit the spot you want. But you will get better.”  We swung until our arms were weary.By taking turns we could get a minor respite to wipe the sweat from our brow.

Finally we celebrated our first split piece of hardwood. The next one went slightly better. At one point I wondered if the sun was getting to Grandpa when he lamented how much he missed hard work. For a 12 year old boy, the idea of hard work was something to be avoided if possible.

Eventually we did damage both to the pile of firewood and his axe handle and I suspect we slept well that night.

Now years later I’m still splitting wood. I’m on my third maul. Grandpa has long been buried but I bet he would be proud of the scores of winters that I have piled split firewood. I can be stubborn when I am facing a big chunk of oak is nearly two feet wide. But I have learned that if you walk your well placed blows across the oak block, you will eventually be rewarded with a new tenor in the blows. Once you hear the hollow blow rather than the solid “thunk,” you know that the next blow or two will result in a mighty crack.

For me the act of splitting wood is not onerous. It gets me outside. It gets me breathing big and loosens muscles. As one friend noted years ago, you don’t need to join a health club if you put up your own firewood.

This came home to roost a dozen or so years ago when I bumped into an urban dwelling acquaintance in St. Paul. He noted that in chatting with my wife, Nancy, he learned that we heated our home with woodburning stoves. I nodded and then he puffed up, almost to prove that he could talk the talk of a woodcutter. “What kind of splitter do you have?” he asked.

Without hesitating I responded, “You’re looking at it.” His eyes went wide and he only managed a squeaky, “Really?”

There will be a day when I will say “Enough” and then we will either buy our wood or depend solely on our propane forced air furnace. In the meantime, I simply adjust the duration of the workout. My usual routine is to run one tanks worth of gas through my Stihl chain saw and then split up what I have cut. It’s a sustainable workout and it gives me great satisfaction.

Miss Nancy will sometimes split as well. She prefers the sweet little three pound Swedish Gransfors maul. I’ll never forget her first attempt at splitting a stout piece of oak. She scowled at the oak after several inconsistent blows. Staring at it, she stopped for a moment and in between her gasps of breath, she looked at me and ordered,  “Do not split this one! I’ll keep working at it. But I want to do it.”  And by God, she did it. It took her several trips out to the woods to swing at it but her persistence paid off and the oak surrendered into fragments.

I mostly do all the splitting but Nancy insists on sledding all of our wood to the woodshed from our woodlot. I keep talking about buying a small tractor or a quad to pull wood, but she insists that pulling the wood is easier in the long run and it keeps her in shape. She has literally hand-pulled many cords out of the woods.

So on this sunny January day, it actually feels like an honorable January day with the air temps dipping below zero. With the  old wood box full in the porch,, the same wood box that my great-grandparents used, stacked firewood filling a corner of the basement and two wood sheds nearly bursting at the seams with split wood, I I feel like a rich man.

Today, I get to enjoy the benefits of our labor and feel the heat of this wood twice. First from cutting, splitting and hauling and secondly from sitting in my small rocker, book in hand, in front of the pile of pulsing coals in the kitchen stove.

Thanks for the lessons Grandpa.

This fall has been one of firsts. And that is a good thing when you are 63 years old. And the irony is that one “first” led to a second “first” and that steered us toward a third “first.” Indeed one could say it has been a very “firsty fall.”

First. I killed a whitetail buck with my new takedown Hoyt recurve bow. I had never shot a deer with a bow and arrow.

Let’s back up a moment. Back in the late 60s I had a Shakespeare Necedah recurve bow made from laminated pieces of lovely wood. Like a wood canoe paddle, wood bows have soul.

I bow hunted for deer in high school and again after college for a few years. Marriage, two young daughters and a black lab all required my time so I chose to be a husband, dad and bird hunter. I continued to hunt deer with a firearm and managed to put venison on the table on a regular basis. Archery took too much time so my old bow was stowed on a shelf in the workshop.

Fast forward to a different marriage, daughters matured into adults and married,  and three black labs later.

A year ago, Miss Nancy, my lovely lady, vented frustration when she discovered that deer were making trips into her garden sites and food forest. She is a devoted disciple of permaculture practices and at this point in the development of her food production, deer are not in the formula.

Venomously she spat, “It makes me want to hunt deer!”

Hunting is not foreign to Nancy. Her father, at age 88 just completed another fall on the deer stand. He is an ardent hunter and angler and two years ago, I had the privilege to help him bag his first mature turkey gobbler. Nancy’s mother has shot her share of deer so even though Miss Nancy has never hunted, the hunting gene has always been present. She runs on the protective side and when I first met her she would catch any spider that was scrawling across the floor and release it outside.

Over the winter, I suggested that Nancy consider buying a compound bow and take up archery. I felt she would enjoy the practice and focus of simply shooting at a target and that maybe she would even enjoy archery hunting for a deer. She agreed so last February we went to Full Draw Archery, owned by a neighbor, Willy Lines.

Not only was Willy enthusiastic and helpful in guiding Nancy towards a bow and a pink camouflage trigger release, but also I decided to upgrade and buy a new recurve.

Now I am old enough to qualify for a modern crossbow complete with a trigger and scope, but the thought of that or even using a compound with sights and a trigger release wasn’t attractive to me. I like the archery challenge of instinctive shooting without aids like scopes, sights, and triggers.

Willy, the most skillful archery shot I know, gently tried to convince me that I would likely be more successful in killing a deer if I bought a compound bow. He said, “Tom, I’ll admit I’m using training wheels (the cams on a compound bow), a sight, and a trigger. And I would really like to shoot a deer with a recurve bow, but I guarantee I’m more effective at killing and minimizing wounding a deer with the compound bow.”

I nodded, smiled and bought the takedown bow. He knew I would.

Nancy and I took our bows north to the Yukon Territory for the summer where we shot 4-5 times a week into expensive hay bales that we bought at the Whitehorse Feed Store and Pet Junction. (Three bales of hay in this boreal neck of Canada cost us forty-two dollars!)

Once Nancy became consistent in placing a good grouping of arrows, she asked, “What if I cry if I shoot a deer?

My quick response is that every hunter who kills any game animal should feel regret over the act of intentional murder. I shared that I have shed an occasional tear when I walked up to a dead buck. It’s a huge responsibility to understand that you were the murderer and thief who just stole a life.

I told her, “The day I don’t feel any remorse in killing game is the day I need to question my hunting.”

We both are keen on hunting because it is a way to provide healthy meat to our table. We spend less than $100 per year on grocery store meat. Admittedly in farm country the venison I put on the table is augmented with genetically modified corn and beans that has been sprayed with herbicides so I can’t call it organic. But it is free range, free of antibiotics, and wild meat.

So when I shot the buck in early November, it was beginning to get chillier and chillier sitting on the deer stand. The cold was hard for me, and really difficult for my lean wife. So she suggested on the morning that we were out, that we use her tag on the deer. That way I could still go out when and where I wanted to hunt in the state.

As I gutted out the deer, I set the heart and liver to the side to take home. We always have a ritual of eating heart steaks with scrambled eggs blended in with veggies the morning following the kill.

As for the liver, we usually cut the lobes into meal-sized portions and freeze them. But this year Nancy tried something different in delivering my final “first.” She rendered most of the liver into pâté.

The result was a resounding treat! I am submitting her recipe as she delivered it to our west coast kids via email.

“I just made a large mess in the kitchen trying something new: venison liver pate  (imagine the little accent marks that make that word pah-tay).

It was an overnight adventure (soak liver chunks in buttermilk overnight), an olfactory adventure (mortar-and-pestle juniper berries and cardamom pods, add fresh rosemary and thyme, then cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg), an auditory adventure (sizzling onions, garlic, and spices with the liver chunks, then run it all through the roaring food processor). But most of all, it was a WORKOUT.

Because once you have this lovely fragrant puree you need to squish it all through a sieve so that the final version has no little bits of rosemary stem or cardamom you didn’t pulverize enough. With one break, that squishing took TWO HOURS.  That’s a lot of work for 4 sweet little jars of pate all labeled and in the freezer.

The last cup or so of stuff had all the little bits in it, and my arms were tired from spatula-ing it through the sieve, so I decided to have that portion be part of my dinner tonight and tomorrow. Done.

I think I’d do it again, but I’d make sure Tom was home instead of at deer camp and we could take turns pushing it through the sieve while drinking wine and reading to each other. That would be better.”

So with the late November landscape of snow and cold, I am lucky to last one to two hours in a deer stand. But with visions of additional “sweet little jars” of pate, how can I not persist?

These days, with a retired alarm clock gathering dust, waking in the morning is a mostly pleasant and lazy process. But this morning, I was awakened with an unlikely sense of clarity rather than the usual clamber through the state of drowsy fogginess. In the span of a fraction of a second, my primitive brain had ascertained that a potential threat was walking slowly across my face.

Instantly, I absolutely realized that calmness must reign. Rather than slap this insurgent silly or to leap out of bed with sheets and comforter being launched into an airborne tangle, I remained still and quietly took stock of the situation at hand. I’ll admit, for a moment I felt the need for a violent and quick exit. But if I chose that route I knew it would launch my mate,  Miss Nancy, from her deep sleep, initiating a spike in her adrenaline and there would be consequences that might be painful and costly if we were to become entangled with sheets, comforter and each other’s limbs as we rose to the dawning partnered with panic.

Instead, I slowly reached up to the plodding wasp and quickly flicked it off. The wasp tumbled and landed next to me on the bed. Like a stunned lightweight boxer, it staggered on the sheet. The thin-waisted intruder seemed confused as it slowly moved only inches away from my side.

I could see that the paper wasp was not agitated nor any real threat to us. I lowered my head back into the hollow of my pillow, noted that Miss Nancy was still sleeping, and I decided to watch this wayward wasp.

I smiled and whispered, “Good Morning Your Highness.” This wasp, uninvited bedmate, was not a commoner like me, she was of royal lineage.

Earlier this fall, male wasps (They have no stingers.) mated with any late summer born females. In the fall the fertilized female wasps, future queens, must find shelter to overwinter in if they are to survive winter. The wasp in my bedchamber had likely found its way into the house while it flew slowly through the spat of recent sunshine on the south side of the house. This is where our upper bedroom window is located. This house, built by my ancestors, is over a century old. Based on the autumnal influx of mice and wasps, I know there are cracks and crevices that help them gain refuge from the threat of winter.

There is an adage, that the better you get to know something, like a friend, a pet, a bird at your bird feeder, or a piece of land, the more you care for it. Oddly, the only critter that bonding rarely happens are politicians of opposing parties. Sad. But I digress. So silently I began to bond in a platonic relationship with this wee, lovely bedmate with her unique yellow and black striped pajamas.

The first flush of the morning sun spread on to our bed and illuminated the future queen. She barely moved and I began to wonder if it has been days since she has tasted October’s fresh air or any water or sustenance.

Sustenance for wasps at this time of the year is mostly sugars found in rotting apples or other fruits. During the heyday of summer, when the queen of their social colony is thriving and laying scores of eggs, the adult worker wasps are busy flying off and finding caterpillars and other insect larvae for a high protein food for the wasp larvae. Now that the egg season is finished, sugars are sought after more than protein. Wasps need to convert sugars to fat reserves to survive a long winter of hibernation.

Consequently, wasps and yellow jackets often frequent picnics in late summer and fall. They love sugar and they likely are pleased with America’s passion and addiction to soft drinks. Unfortunately when folks find these insects at the picnic table they usually react with violence and swat the innocent striped insects.

Ignoring these uninvited wasps, or gently brushing them away, will result in a calmer picnic or house. Admittedly the sting of a hornet or wasp is painful but none of them go around looking for folks to sting. It is simply a defense mechanism and if you swing madly at it, the insect is likely to feel threatened and they have no choice but to protect themselves.

With my new friend acting slow and confused, I decided to give her a royal ride downstairs to join me for breakfast. I got out of bed, got dressed and then rested my hand next to the wasp, still on the bed sheet. Very gently I nudged her into stepping onto my finger. With the wasp as my passenger, I made my way downstairs to the kitchen.

I gently grazed the wasp off my finger and on to the countertop while I put on coffee and fetched a jar of homemade grape jelly. I removed a dab of jelly and smeared it on the countertop two inches away from the princess wasp. In short order she slowly made her way across the countertop tapping her antennae like a blind woman tapping her cane down the sidewalk. The wasp paused at the colorful smear and then began to feed.

Fifteen minutes later, I pulled a stool up next to the wasp and set my hot bowl of steel cut oats and cup of coffee down nearby to join her for breakfast. The wasp clearly looked more alert and active as it slowly dined on the sugary high-energy breakfast.

To test its alertness, I moved my finger in close to her head. Her large abdomen, tipped with its stinger, and wings raised up like the hackles of a threatened dog. I pulled away and we both relaxed and dined in silence.

Suddenly, the future queen took to the kitchen airspace and slowly looped towards the dining room window. Her multi-faceted eyes had spied a fine day beyond the window. Realizing that if I spent more time with this potential odd pet that I might not have the heart to free her, I decided to fetch a water glass and envelope to catch it and release it outdoors.

Catching a wasp is relatively easy. You simply put the glass or jar over the insect and slide a stiff piece of paper, in this case an envelope, under the glass. The inserted paper becomes the floor of the temporary prison and the wasp can be carried outdoors.

I stepped out into the sunny, but cool, morning air with my breakfast chum. I pulled the envelope away and the wasp swooped to the outside of the windowsill where it landed and began to groom itself by combing her front legs through the pair of antennae.

While releasing this future queen outside might seem like an act of assassination I think I’m giving it a better chance of survival than by subjecting it to the roller coaster ride of fluctuation indoor temps. I make up that an indoor bound wasp will use up its fat reserves too quickly and become one of those dried, dead wasps I wipe off the windowsill when I wash the windows in the spring. By freeing this wasp today she has some time to find another place to shut down for a long restful winter.

And I will find comfort that for a single morning I was prince to this leggy queen. Upstairs, my lovely lady and queen slept on blissfully unaware of the breakfast scandal.

It was mid-September and we had pulled stakes from our Yukon Outpost.  Our last night in the Territory, we stayed with dear friends who served us up a fine supper of a big black bear roast, salad and spuds from their garden. A huckleberry pie put us to bed out in their big wall tent. It’s tough to leave with these compelling ingredients easing into my soul. “Stay here,” is the message.

Alas we are aliens to this foreign country. (Why does it feel so wrong to think of Canada as a foreign country?)And our time is up so we must head south to the Big Noisy.

A few years ago, a three-year-old, absurdly precocial, bush kid named Juneau was chatting about leaving the Yukon to visit relatives in the “Big Noisy.” He was referring to his mother’s home ground in New York City. And in a nano second after telling us about the big city, he had jumped subjects to livestock. Juneau understood that their big, home-grown pig had to be kept close to the house because the animal was a porcine delight for the local grizzly bear. But he also understood that the hog was going to provide his family with winter sustenance and that was perfectly okay.

For the next two days we enjoyed our drive down the Alaska Highway, a highway we have gotten to know quite well. We have travelled this corridor of civilization for half a dozen years and we know where to dally and where to keep driving.

Gold is abundant on the mountainsides in the fall. If you travel the highway in the ten days from September 15^th through the 25^th, you will be treated to slopes loud in their chorus of gilded colors. These grounded fireworks can be distracting so don’t be shy about pulling over for a good dose of amazing “wows.”

However after having our annual “recalibration” in the Yukon where we are lullabied to sleep every night by a tumbling river, Miss Nancy and I both felt the insipid creep of “civil-lies-ation” as we headed south. An Alberta friend wishes us well and waved us off with a stretching grin and cheer, “Good luck on your re-entry into the “Excited States of America!” I smiled at his joke, but dammit we earned that title! According to a story in the Washington Times, the USA is the most overworked nation in the developed world.

Who cares if Canada is consistently number 5 or 6 as one of the worlds happiest countries! Who cares if Forbes magazine calls Canada “the most prosperous nation in the Americas and ranks first in personal freedom”?

As we make our autumn migration towards an easier winter in Minnesota, there is a very real shift in energy. The pulse quickens exponentially the closer we get to Minnesota. The accelerated heartbeat is not from excitement or even the eventual approach of family. No, the blood begins to race as the gaze goes from glaze to furtive and increased glances in the rear view mirror. There is a direct correlation to an increase in human population to an overall harriedness on the highway. I don’t like it.

However, we found some unexpected solace in North Dakota. It appears that the Peace Garden State has embraced the seductive sell of the extraction industry. But like all boom and bust cycles, their high days will taper and disappear. So just swallow the Kool-Aid flavored, “Git While the Gittin is Good,” and the hell with aquifers, farmland, wildlife habitat and our children’s future.

Our Dakota hideout was the Theodore Roosevelt National Park where we surprised ourselves by staying four nights. In an 1899 speech, Teddy Roosevelt implored, “. . . our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor.” TR would have been proud of us because for three days Miss Nancy and I mountain biked through the bison, forded the Little Missouri River with our hiking boots knotted and draped over our shoulders and packs on our backs to go beyond the civil-lies.

Pulling out of Medora, we found ourselves sucked up in the current of Interstate 94 and swept east towards Base Camp in Minnesota where a summer’s worth of fecund mice hailed us home. We are once again one happy family tucked into a small patch of woods where images of vast, wild Yukon landscapes will be relived all winter.

We use knots a lot. While Nancy and I don’t pretend to be knot experts, we have what we call our “necessary knots.” These are the handful that we often rely on when setting up a camp or tying canoes on top of the truck.

Neither of us is a knot master but we each have our strengths. I am quick with trucker’s hitch and timber hitch and love the bowline ,but when it comes to a taut-line hitch Nancy can tie it in her sleep and do it quickly. This knot is an adjustable knot that is useful for tightening and loosening a line under tension. It is great for setting up tarps and tent guy lines.

Recently, Nancy made a good trade with our Yukon friend, Banjo Kim. She bartered a lesson on how to tie then taut line hitch  for a book titled The Pig Plantagenet. Kim had raved about this tale of fantasy that expounds the world of wonder while reminding us of the constant and fruitless war man has with nature.

Banjo Kim is a black belt nomad and she lives in a world of barter and foraging. She is a pert young woman who was born in the Northwest Territories so she wears her northern stripes honestly. Rarely have I met someone so comfortable with his or her life.

For the time being, Banjo Kim resides about three miles from our Yukon Outpost. She lives in a small wee house that she built on the bed of an 8-foot by 16-foot, double-axel trailer. She can avoid buying property and paying the associated taxes by pulling the trailer to a friend’s land and setting up for awhile. Easily heated with a small wood-burning stove Banjo Kim lives a simple but rich life.

One of my favorite images of Kim was seeing her stride with her decal-covered banjo case in one hand and her other hand hoisting a Pulaski tool over her shoulder through the Whitehorse Farmer’s Market. The Pulaski is hand tool resembles a hybrid between an axe and an adze and is very handy in fighting fires in backcountry and in grubbing out trails. Kim had used it for digging up a piece of garden space.

As she strode confidently through the market and crowds, she looked so utterly normal; and she hardly drew a stare. It was just another day in the Yukon.

Not only does Banjo Kim put up her own wood, but she hunts, fishes, gardens and is an expert and highly regarded forager for wild edible plants and mushrooms. Inside her small abode she had clumps of various plants hanging upside down to dry and scores of jars with wild herbs. It smells like a sage-covered Yukon hillside.

A few years ago she, and likely her banjo, travelled to Scotland and since she was on a tight budget she foraged for wild edibles the whole time she was there. Once could say she grazed across Scotland.

This summer she has become a Johnny Appleseed of sorts as she has wandered all over the Mt. Lorne area planting Siberian pines. Someday she is hoping she and others can harvest pine nuts for culinary delights.

Last year, Banjo Kim was with Nancy and I when I took a fall while rock climbing up on Needle Mountain. I had a very nasty gash in my shin and a broken metatarsal in my right hand. We were 3+ hours from the nearest road so Kim immediately had me chewing willow leaves (nature’s aspirin), while she found some lungwort or bluebell leaves for a compress that was placed under a splint she fashioned over my hand. As for the bloody cut, she had me chewing yarrow leaves to make a poultice that we placed directly on the wound. Yarrow has properties that make it a reliable styptic to reduce or stop blood flow.

Over the past summer she worked contractually as a field biologist for the Yukon wildlife section. She paddled her canoe around the perimeters of Snafu and Tarfu lakes looking for river otter “latrines.” These are sites, usually at points of land, on large exposed rocks, fallen logs or even beaver lodges where otters leave the water to take care of the business of voiding wastes, scent-marking and grooming themselves. . . you know an otter bathroom.

She set up 26 remote game cameras, each overlooking an otter latrine. Then a week or two later she would return by canoe and recover the memory cards from all the cameras.

Besides being a fine banjo picker, songwriter and forager, Banjo Kim is an indefatigable dancer and a skilled butcher of livestock. These are all skills that can earn you a place in what is known as the “colorful five per cent” in the Yukon. (Anyone in this eclectic group is set apart from the remaining 95% of the population.)

Kim has a recently fabricated summer kitchen that she put together out side of here wee house. She also has a canvas wall tent that serves as guest quarters. It was the wall tent that drew the attention of Nancy. She had noticed that some of the guy lines were loose. So she offered to tie some taut line hitches to tighten everything up. Kim was excited to become acquainted with the knot. So a trade was made, a book for a knot.

Knowing we were soon heading back south to Minnesota, we exchanged hugs and good wishes. We left Banjo Kim and her collection of new found taut-line hitches stretching out her proud standing wall tent and we held a tale that would carry us to a land of whimsy.

Damn good trade.

I was  sitting at the edge of our Outpost deck tying my hiking boot, when a green spruce cone bounced off my  head. Thinking nothing of it, I continued booting up.  Immediately a second cone dropped behind me and then a third.  Given there was no wind, I looked up to seek a “Why?” In a second, I saw another small cone sail out from the treetop and drop to the ground. I leaned out for a better view and heard the unmistakeable, sassy Chrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr of a red squirrel. I sat down and remained still. Soon it resumed showering two inch, pale green spruce cones again.

(Can you spot the airborne cone just below and to the left of the squirrel?)

While the calendar reads August, this smallest of the squirrels is deep into autumnal tasks. These hyperactive berserkers know little rest at this time of the year (beserkers were ancient Norse warriors possessed by a consuming frenzy).  Given that they cannot cope with winter by hibernating, they must rely on the boom and bust supply of spruce cones and other food stuffs. These cold weather survivors are champion hoarders.

I grabbed an old dented bucket that I had found a few years ago near the Skagway summit. The bucket was likely a remnant of the Klondike gold stampede, just over a century ago, that brought  thousands of folks  to the Yukon. While I was scolded by the red squirrel, I began to pluck the sticky, resinous cones off the ground and drop them into the bucket.I wanted to see how many cones the squirrel would snip and toss down. Let’s just say it took me longer to shuffle around plucking the tight cones off the ground than it took the squirrel to drop them. In less than 15 minutes I had more than half filled the bucket.

There are at least three distinct red squirrel territories around the Outpost. The frequent squirrel chirrings are a way they post their territory boundaries.For the most part they can be seen zipping here and there in their amazing herky-jerky accelerations and stops, with a single cone sticking out of their mouths like a big cigar.

The squirrel hurries each cone to its storage trove called a midden. The midden is a the hub of their hoarding efforts, usually located under a dense stand of spruce. Long established middens create humps on the forest floor. Many generations of squirrels will use the same middens.  When I step onto a midden, the dome is spongey and soft because it is mostly old spruce cone bracts. The cone bracts are the scales of a cone and protect the seed.

Earlier this summer, I repeatedly encountered white-winged crossbills picking through the middens. I often approached within a few feet of the birds before they would flush. Like the squirrel these birds are fond of the seeds. But without teeth, they have evolved to have a unique beak that resembles crossed fingers. This adaptation allows the crossbill to more easily extract spruce seeds from behind the bracts in the cone.

Like wise investors, squirrels don’t put all their eggs in one basket. They practice a strategy known as scatter-caching. I was introduced to this term over a decade ago when I first came to the Yukon with Nancy to paddle a remote river with the late Yukon wilderness guide, Dick Person. I noticed that every morning as we finished breakfast, Dick would tuck pieces of pancakes or toast into various clothing pockets on his body and daypack. After seeing this pattern develop I asked about it. “Scatter-caching,” he said, “like the red squirrels. You can never be sure when you need a surge of  calories so you improve your odds by scattering your riches.”

Funny, that’s the same advice that our financial advisor gave us. . . .Wall Street scatter-caching.

I have learned from them that red squirrels often gather mushrooms off the ground and carry them up into the trees. The squirrels hang the mushrooms, like drying laundry, high in the spruce or other trees. Being excellent hoarders, they frequently will take advantage of a good fungi year and harvest some for future use.

I carried my dented bucket away, so much for detailed data collecting. As I walked away, a squirrel delivered a scintillating staccato from the treetops.  This was clearly a long string of red squirrel cuss words rather than a melodious goodbye.

Frank is an unflappable fellow.  He is eager to cast off on an adventure to see what is on the other side of a mountain. A self-made, skilled woodsman, he aptly describes himself, “I’m like a grizzly, I follow my nose and I mind my own business.”

Born of German immigrants in Toronto, Frank made his way to the Yukon as a young man back in the 1970s and since then has called this wild country home. He spent eight winters living in a small bush cabin he built 40 miles from the nearest road down the 80 mile fetch of Teslin Lake. When he needed supplies, he would take his dog and sled and go for a two-day hike that was often well below zero to buy grub in the small community of Teslin.

Wincing at the thought of such a task, I asked, “Wasn’t it much harder to pull a full sled 40 miles back to your bush camp than the empty one you had on your trip in?”

“Oh,” he said enthusiastically with a big grin, “Oh I was a happy boy!” He paused to rub his hands briskly together, “Because  I was heading back into the bush with a sled full of grub and goodies!”

Fortified with mostly moose meat, Frank snowshoed and explored miles and miles of  backcountry. One winter when he and his wife were short of meat, he had to resort to snaring snowshoe hares.”There’s not much warming meat on the bunnies.”

Another year, found him without a moose when the lake started freezing up in November. He spotted a tardy grizzly walking along the lakeshore ice. Bears are typically hibernating by then but for some reason this one was still moseying about. Frank  quietly worked himself to a position to make a shot.  He is a skilled marksman and he grimaces while recollecting that his shot was not a killing shot and he ended up having to track a wounded grizz.

Alert, he moved cautiously.Noticing that the tracks were starting to swing in a broad loop, he became razor sharp in his attention. Suddenly from off to one side the wounded bear came through the snow towards Frank. One shot killed the bear. He gutted the animal and removed its hide before pulling the meat back to the cabin. “That bear,” he recalls making a sour face, “tasted like a wet dog smells.” For two days he and his wife tried to eat the bear, but they could not. “At least our dog had meat  for the winter.”

Frank and his wife Debbie had invited us to their home, a two-hour drive from our Outpost to celebrate Frank’s birthday. Frank suggested that we come early in the day to join him on a hike into some country up along the Canol Road.

The 270 mile long Canol Road is a gravel and mud road mostly etched with the texture of washboard and potholes. The summer-maintained road demands sporadic drivers to pay attention.

Built during WWII, this crude  road, dubbed the Canol for Canadian Oil, was built so an adjacent oil pipeline could be constructed. It was determined that the oil would be needed to help support military operations in the Yukon and Alaska. The source of high-grade oil was in Norman Wells in the Northwest Territory. Short-lived, the oil pipeline operated less than a year and was shut down shortly after the war ended in 1945.

There are no services on the Canol for over 140 miles until you get to the small remote community of Ross River.

We rendezvoused with Frank at Johnson’s Crossing on the Alaska Highway for a cup of coffee and freshly baked raspberry scone. The turn-off for the Canol is nearby and after 20 miles we eased on to a meager pull off on the rugged road. I wondered if the dark pile of recently deposited bear droppings had served as Frank’s marker for the unseen horse trail we were to follow.

Debbie had stayed home to render garden grown cabbages into sauerkraut and to tend  the outdoor fire that was slow cooking a Dutch oven full of bear stew and home grown vegetables for the birthday supper. Like Frank, she could tell us a tale or two of bush living that would make good copy for a horrific adventure tale.

Anytime I have gone for a hike with Frank, he foregoes hiking poles or a staff and prefers to carry a rifle. With a rifle he feels he has no need to carry bear spray; nor has he ever had to shoot a threatening bear other than the earlier mentioned grizzly. He understands he effectiveness of bear spray but is more comfortable with his rifle.

We hefted our packs with food, spare clothes, pepper bear spray, cameras and binoculars and fell in behind Frank as he led us from our parked vehicles into the bush where there was really no discernable trail entry. Immediately, behind a spruce,  we found ourselves on a well-used old packhorse trail.

We wondered who had made the horse trail up here and Frank said that years ago this was the outfitting range of the late Old Andy Smith. He guided big game hunters up this way.

“ Old Andy Smith had a deep booming voice and ferocious eyes.” Frank chuckled, “I called him One-and-a-half man because Old Andy proudly growled “I’m one half Tlingit, one-half Scotsman and one-half N_ _ _ _ _r!”

No matter the arithmetic of the pedigree, I was grateful for the trail that “One-and-a-half-man” had etched on this forested slope.

We wove upslope under the pines and spruce and soon encountered subalpine fir. We crossed a couple of swampy areas and two creek crossings and passed several recent piles of bear droppings. There was no disguising the fact that the bears were feeding heavily on mossberries (also known as crowberries) as their piles of waste looked like beautiful black mounds of shining preserves.

After an hour of steady climbing, we broke out of the trees and continued climbing through the knee-high snarl of dwarf birch or as Frank calls it, “the shin tangle.” We paused at a small lively mountain stream banked with blossoms of varying bright colors for face washing and cold mouthfuls. When Nancy exclaimed about the lovely smell along the rushing flow, Frank grinned when he said this was “Weasel Piss Creek.” His timing over his newfound title was perfect.

Another half an hour of hiking found us on top of the ridge and summit. Here the walking was easy on the lawnlike alpine. We stopped to eat our lunch and to glass the large expansive basin that opened below us. Dotted with ponds and clumps of fir, it appeared  like a park setting.

Herds of clouds dropped sheer curtains of rain in the distance and we wondered if they might move our way. Frank assured us, “We’ve got nothing but sunshine. . . in our hearts and we’ve got gear to protect the other parts.”

We glassed the large basin in front of us for signs of any wildlife. Frank was particularly interested in sighting  woodland caribou. He carried a caribou tag in his pocket and if he got lucky, he had four cloth game bags to carry out a quartered out caribou. The lightweight bags make it easier to handle the quarters of meat and keep it clean from dirt and debris.

Why not take advantage of four extra hikers if the opportunity came up? Rather than shuttle back and forth up the mountain he would be able to get it down in one trip if we weenies could manage. Frank reckoned that he has packed out over forty caribou, moose and bear in his lifetime and any help is appreciated.

In less than a month, Frank will  boat to his remote moose camp where he will attempt to call a horny bull into gun range. Rarely does he miss filling his freezer with fine moose meat. We asked about bears that come around his moose camp looking for some food. “Well,” he said, “if a bear comes around camp while I’m there. . . I’ll eat him!” He always carries a bear tag while moose hunting because he likes nothing better than bear stew on his birthday.

The rain clouds avoided us and we resumed our hike to the very summit while Frank stayed put to continue his methodical hawklike glassing the mountain bowl for caribou.

After an hour or so of  roaming the high ridge line, we made our way back towards Old Andy Smith’s horse trail. More than a dozen cackling ptarmigan took to the air as we brushed past a thicket of sub-alpine fir.

Three hours later we were gathered around a beach campfire with plates piled with steaming chunks of tender bear stew. I wondered if the moose near Frank’s distant moose camp could hear our rousing singing of “Happy Birthday.” If so, they might do well to shudder knowing that a keen predator has survived another year.

Our Yukon rhubarb patch resembles an experimental forestry project. One leaf makes an umbrella for two adults and the reddened stalks look like the lean-muscled, sunburned forearms of a ten-year old boy. Real men wear rhubarb leaves rather than a wee frail fig leaf. I’ve even thought of making a shed out of the robust stems.

Today, the long-bladed knife, more like a machete, will render a stalk or two into sweet and tart rhubarb crunch that will be our offering for a neighbor’s annual summer potluck and music jam. (Okay, I’ll admit, it’s kind of weird to think of her as our neighbor when she lives off-grid about 16 miles away on the Wheaton River.

I’ve never seen such exuberant rhubarb as up in this country. It is continually popping up in the lawn like insurgent dandelions. The cool weather combined with timely moisture and Miss Nancy’s tucking mounds of the neighbor’s horse manure around the plants has created hedges that would prove suitable obstacles in the Grand National Steeplechase horse race.

According to Jill Shepherd,  Alaskan master gardener and retired senior editor of Alaska Magazine, rhubarb was introduced into North America when Russian seafarer and merchant Gregory Shelikhov established the first permanent Russian post in North America on Kodiak Island in 1784. He claimed to have planted it there and wrote in his journals that it did well. (There is no record if he took viable seed or divided sections of the roots to plant.)

Shepherd, author and amateur historian, says that rhubarb was such an important trade item at one time in Russia that by 1638 they had a Department of Rhubarb. In those times it was not used so much as a food item as a dried medicinal, used primarily as a laxative. Only when sugar became cheaper and more readily available did this tart plant become a popular food item.

In Lake Wobegone country, popular Minnesotan radio personality and author, Garrison Keillor sings praises of rhubarb nearly every week on the Prairie Home Companion Show. He is fond of telling the audience that “rhubarb pie is the kind of pie that was worth going through the rest of the meal to get it.” Why thousands of radio fans can sing along with his weekly rhubarb pitch, “Mama’s little baby loves rhubarb, rhubarb, Beebopareebop Rhubarb Pie. Mama’s little baby…

In Little League baseball, I learned to taunt opposing batters from our bench with loud jeers of “Hey batter, batter! What do ya want eggs in your beer?!” We were encouraging them to swing the bat and hopefully miss the ball. I had no clue that the phrase was a popular WWII expression that indicated you wanted a bonus or something from nothing. I simply emulated the ribbing of the older guys. And I also learned that one could get in a “rhubarb” (argument) with the umpire or the opposing team.

While I’m not aware of any major rhubarb between the two countries that once battled in the bloody American Revolution, both Britain and Alaska (USA) take great pride in their rhubarb and both host many festivals revolving around the plant. I shudder to think of face-to-face pitched battles swinging sabres of stout rhubarb stalks at each other.

When Miss Nancy and I began coming up to our Yukon Outpost, I discovered a proper bush ax in the wood shed. The worn and chipped axe head had lost its original wood handle long ago and someone had added an axe prosthesis to rejuvenate it’s cutting days. Now there are two pieces of spot-welded aluminum conduit duct-taped into place. It’s truly a thing of beauty and a testament to my late Great Gramma Schmidt’s adage, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

The bent and battered handle is sketchy on pine or spruce but it’s perfect for stout rhubarb.

While my rhubarb crunch is damn good, I get more compliments from the rhubarb chipotle salsa that I make. I got the recipe from Yukoner, Michele Genest. She is an excellent cook and author of The Boreal Gourmet. Her books provide spectacular visual treats as well as culinary treats.

So here is the simple recipe. Enjoy.

Rhubarb Chipotle Salsa

(This is very good with chips, veggies or grilled game)

Ingredients:

1 tsp olive oil

1 med. onion

2 cloves of garlic

4 tbsp chipotle pepper in Adobe sauce

4 C fresh or frozen rhubarb*

½ C packed brown sugar

½ tsp salt

Preparation:

In a saucepan (I use a cast iron frying pan.) sauté onion in oil until translucent (7-10 minutes)

Add garlic, stir and sauté 2 min.

Add remaining ingredients and stir and cook about 10 minutes.

Let cool and puree. (I simply mash the cooked rhubarb with a fork.)

The salsa stores well in the fridge for 2 weeks.