The Days Pass, Living in a Log Cabin in the Yukon Territory

Hello again.

The days pass, nearly every one of them with a story in it. Lately, an immature bald eagle has taken to hanging out on the property. Yesterday, from my living room window, I watched it take a sizeable lake trout from the water beside the dock. Today, a mature bald eagle with an eight-foot wingspan flew over my backyard.

As I write this, Neil Young sings:

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.

Earlier this morning, as I looked out that same window, hoar frost flaked off the pine trees and drifted casually to the ground. Winter is sneaking in. Some of the distant mountain peaks are covered in snow. They won’t be bare again before Spring.

Ever since I was a young girl, I daydreamed about living in a cabin in the woods someday. In recent years, as I worked my dreams into some sort of reality, I wondered if I’d have the perseverance and the discipline to prepare for a winter in the Yukon. In particular, if the electricity should fail in my modernized cabin, would I be ready?

It’s become almost an obsession. I’ve been putting in long days cutting down dead trees and building up the woodpile. Last winter when I first arrived here, the kindling that I could have used for the woodstove was buried under snow. It wasn’t until spring that I knew what was here. But this winter I should be okay.

I had my first test last week. A tremendous windstorm came through the Territory. Massive winds ripped thousands of trees out of the ground and in many areas, sent them crashing onto power lines. Where I lived was one of those places. We had no electricity for two days. And because I get water pumped directly from the river, that also meant no water, toilet, or shower. And of course, no electricity also meant no furnace and no stove.

Luckily, it wasn’t cold outside, maybe 50 degrees F (10 Celsius). Still, I used up quite a bit of wood from that new stockpile while keeping the wood stove going for heat. For cooking and boiling water, I dug out my propane camp stove. Some friends drove in from town and together we filled up plastic jugs with water from the river and lugged them to the cabin. This allowed us to fill the toilet tank, the dog and cat bowls, the teapot. We ate what we could from the freezer, grilling too many burgers on the BBQ. And we drank warm beer. It was fun, but mostly because we knew it was only temporary. That night, playing cards by candlelight, we didn’t need the stereo to sing to us, or the electric stove to heat our water for tea. Together, my friends and I roughed it some, a little like those who originally lived here along the river.

Since then, I’ve continued to chop wood though I don’t carry water.

Another plus to clearing out the deadwood from the surrounding bush is in lessening the fire danger. The wildfires this last summer in the Yukon were lethal– hundreds were left to burn uncontrolled at any one time. Sometimes I could barely see across the river for the smoke. It’s the kind of thing to make you lay awake nights; living in a log cabin surrounded by trees. The village I live in has just one aging fire engine and a handful of volunteer fire fighters.

I’ve also been trimming the lower limbs off trees on my property. We burn them in the fire pit beside the house. Twice the smoke was spotted by people on the bridge downstream and they came to see if my house was on fire. One of the guys who stopped by is a prospector living in a cabin up the road. We got to talking and Frank said he knew about my flying, and that I’m a licensed pilot. This from a guy I’ve never met or heard of. Life in a small village, I suppose. He told me that years ago he used to do some flying too. While he talked, he petted his dog that looks like a mini-Golden Retriever but is really a hunting breed known as a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever.

Frank wore a camouflage jacket, one that didn’t look like it was just for show. I turned the subject to hunting with an ulterior motive in mind. The thing is, I love moose meat. Sure enough, he tells me he gets one every year. A lot of hunters can’t use all the meat and give it away so they can justify taking a new one each fall. The trick is to find those guys before they give it to someone else and offer an exchange. I’d planned to barter fish, but the only ones in my freezer at that moment were from the supermarket.

“I’ll take you flying if you’ve got any moose meat you can spare,” I told him. His face brightened and he agreed. A few days later he showed up with some thick steaks, homemade cranberry jam and from his mining claim, a rock the size of my fist.

I turned it over and pointed to the gold flakes concentrated on one side. “Pyrite?” I asked. I’ve been collecting rocks since I was a kid and I know that Fool’s Gold is the most common of the sulfide minerals. Moose meat is one thing, but I couldn’t see him giving me a chunk of raw gold.

“It’s a form of Pyrite, yes,” Frank said. “It’s the kind that if you had enough, it could be valuable. There’s a bit of silver in our claim, too. We got some interesting results back from samples we just took in.” A little reluctantly he added, “It might be promising.”

I didn’t know if I was looking at what some of us call a “Yukon Character” or if the man on my couch sipping coffee was a future millionaire. Then again, up here, it’s often the same thing.

That’s not to say every prospector in the Yukon strikes it rich. But one thing they all have in common is the will and desire to live a life that includes backbreaking work, lonely days and nights, and the threat of bears.

The life of a Yukon miner has always been that way. Jack London, himself a prospector in these parts for a time, once wrote to a friend, “Nay, there is not a soul who can appreciate the comforts of civilization unless they have first roughed it in the Northland sense of the word.”

That night I grilled one of the steaks and fried a moose kidney another friend had given me. They were good. Damn good.

I haven’t seen any bears since spring, but last week my morning visitors included two foxes. I’ve been dog sitting a young husky, and it was Sam who woke me because we had company. I was alternately yawning and trying to calm her, assuming all the while that she was just imagining something out there. When I bothered to look through the glass of the mud room doors, not five feet away was a fox with eyes that glowed red in the half-light like the wolves’ eyes of horror films. It was staring dead at me. I took a hard swallow, blindly petting Sam’s head, whispering, “Good girl, Sam. Good girl.” Her growl was comforting to me, and I didn’t try to stop her from barking. Why didn’t the fox run away? Our eyes were locked onto each other, and I seemed to be the only one bothered by it.

I stood straight up, and the fox took two steps toward me. Sam went crazy, jumping toward the glass door. I was afraid if she got out, there was going to be a mauling and I didn’t want it to be either of them. I jumped up and down, waved my arms, and tried to scare the animal away. The fox just sat there and stared. It was unnerving.

Finally, it took off. The next morning, when Sam started up again, I expected to see the fox outside the door. This time, however, it was two foxes, and they were merrily chasing each other beside the river. They even ran up onto the dock, then swiveled their heads around as if inspecting their kingdom. From there they chased each other to the neighbor’s yard. I would have sworn the two were in love.

After appearing three mornings in a row, the foxes disappeared altogether.

I have yet to tell you about my flight to Juneau over the glaciers, or how I attempted to fly alone on a moonless night through a mountain valley and why I had to suddenly turn back. Soon, I’ll write about it all.

As winter progresses, more and more of my time will be spent indoors. The sun rises by 9 AM and sets before 6:30 PM. In terms of the cold, I’ve come to think now in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. It makes sense that zero should be the temperature for freezing. It troubles me to remember what the Fahrenheit equivalent is for minus ten. At night, I take the dog for long walks to the mailboxes across the bridge. When we come back, the porch thermometer reads minus 8 in Celsius, 17 above in Fahrenheit. I’ve already acclimatized; when the wind isn’t blowing hard, it makes for a pleasant night’s walk.