Foraging the tundra

It's a different way of living here.

Half a continent away stock markets are crashing and here I am picking wild cranberries until sundown. Jenafor makes all her own jam, jelly and syrup from the blueberries, tundra berries, crow berries and cranberries they pick in the fall. Gerald shoots a moose every fall as well and the meat lasts through the winter, a good value considering the sky high food prices in this town. The neighbors borrowed the quad the other day and brought us some fresh caribou backstraps which will be dinner tomorrow.

There's something to be said for hunting and gathering food. Out picking cranberries by myself today I found myself focused intensely on the act of foraging as I became more skilled at picking the dark red berries, scraping them off their branches in handfuls, depositing them in my bag. In the two hours I was out on the tundra I only stopped periodically to do a give a look around for a polar bear - there have been a few sited around town the last couple days. Although I didn't have a rifle with me I had a cracker gun - a pistol which shoots a noisy shell - and I didn't wander too far from my quad.

I spent some time down on the beach today, watching the tide go out, and collecting rocks for the fireplace that's going to go in the dog yard tent. It was good to get out on my own for a while, away from the house and away from town.

I'm looking forward to start spending more time with the dogs, getting more comfortable with them, and letting them get more comfortable with me. Gerald says I'll be driving dog sleds by the time he's done with me, a prospect that seemed a little ridiculous at first, but after reading more of Bern Will Brown's dogsled adventures in his Arctic Journal it's become more and more of an exciting opportunity, and therefore a possibility. Dogsledding, I believe, is an activity that takes a breakdown of mental barriers, especially for someone who grew up in a city bent on car culture and away from working animals. Last night I broke down some of that barrier when I began to see dogsledding, with Brown's literary help, in an adventurous light. It's a reliable way of getting places in the north, not to mention environmentally friendly. So mush, woah, gee, and haw, bring on the dogs.

Isobel and Thunder.