Dave Olesen’s Musings, from the Hoarfrost River, Northwest Territories, Canada.

As I was doing dog-yard chores on the first morning of Summer, June 21st, I heard from over my shoulder the liquid trill of a swallow’s inflight song. I was delighted to hear it for the first time this year. I wheeled around, and sure enough, there was a pair of beautiful blue-and-white tree swallows flitting and swooping overhead.

About thirty years ago I built a dozen small wooden nest boxes, and mounted them on poles and fence-posts all around the dog yard. I had heard that one of my Iditarod comrades, Joe Runyan, had put up swallow houses around his homestead and dog yard over in Alaska, in an effort to help with mosquito control. What an elegant pest-control strategy, I thought.

I did not know then that unlike Joe’s Violet-Green swallows, we have Tree Swallows here, Tachycineta bicolor, who are not as amenable as the Alaskan variety to having close-proximity nesting neighbors. (Reminding me of another species of critter around here, Latin name unknown, possibly Oldis olesensis.) I think one summer we had at most three of our swallow nests occupied, at far opposite corners of the dogyard area, but we never approached the picture Joe painted of a bustling colony of swallows, flittering above the dogs and “just hammering the mosquitoes and blackflies,” as he liked to say.

We all enjoyed the presence of the swallows. It never gets old to watch an iridescent swallow swoop and bank and dive. They are masters of nonchalant precision aerobatics, even on days of strong gusty winds that would challenge any pilot. They can drop and flare and stall at precisely the right split-second, to disappear instantly into the tiny hole at the nest-box entrance, there to be met with the cheeps of hungry nestlings and to feed everybody up with a beak-full of bugs.

We often laugh about the imagined “first solo” from those swallow nest boxes that were mounted right on top of the pipe in the center of a husky’s circle. The breeding pairs of swallows usually did not choose those, seeming to prefer houses on corner posts of the dog-yard corral, but they did raise young right above an occupied dog-house several times over the years. Thus, for those fledglings, there must have come a moment of truth. A moment I never actually witnessed but I sure enjoyed imagining.

The baby bird, now all feathered up and ready to fly, (“Or so it says here, in my Young Bird’s Flight Manual…”) poised in the round doorway of the only six-inch space it has ever known, atop the dog’s steel tether-pole.

Geez, never done this before. Perched on the brink. All that Gravity down there, eager as always to claim its own… And not more than four feet below me, that grinning sixty-five pound sled dog, looking up.  Panting. Fixated. Maybe even a bit hungry.

Talk about do or die.

“Go for it!” smiles the bemused dog, looking up at the tiny morsel of baby bird, “Just flap! I’m sure it’ll work out fine. There’s nothing to this flying business, from what I’ve seen by watching your mom and dad.”

Gulp. Flap flap.

The other day, seeing that pair of swallows inspecting the nest boxes again, I was hopeful. Maybe this was the year they would once again decide to stay. I watched them fly past one nest-box mounted on a corner post of the corral. Each of them flew to the house and perched on top of the box; then one at a time they hovered at the entrance hole, peering inside. They perched together on top.

“What do you think, honey?”

“A little small, but it looks clean enough. Pretty much like we left it ten or twelve years ago.”

“Still not much closet space…”

But no. Again this summer, the swallows came, stayed for a day, evidently assessing the food prospects, and then disappeared. It looks like we are to have another swallow-less summer here.

Because why? Not sure, but I am quite sure it is because swallows eat mosquitoes. And, yet again, we have next to none of those here, so far this summer. This is by now an ongoing mystery here.

Oh, there are still mosquitoes in the North, trust me. Last year, which was similarly (and delightfully) mosquito-impoverished here at home, I made a late July fuel-cache flight up to the research camp at Daring Lake. Only 135 nautical miles from here, but a world of difference. After landing I taxied in toward the dock, where three people stood wearing full head-to-toe bug armor, including face masks of netting and even, I think, gloves.

“Oh boy,” I thought. “These are not newbies either; these are people who have been here quite a bit. The bugs must be really bad.”

Bad, yes. Awe-inspiring even. In the twenty minutes we spent wrestling with and offloading a couple of drums of fuel from the plane, I think I donated at least a pint of blood to the good old-fashioned cloud of mosquitoes around that dock. 9500 feet and +3 C. on the flight back to home has never felt better than it did that evening.

I can’t account for our ongoing mosquito famine here. We thought maybe the 2014 fire had caused it. At first, I’m sure it did, because the landscape here was utterly black and scorched for several years. Then we had a few dry winters with low snowfall, and after that a bizarre up-and-down fluctuation of water levels in the big lake, from 2020 through 2025 (thanks, BC Hydro) and also a lot of variation in the groundwater and the inland lakes and rivers.

This year, though, it seems as though we might be getting back to some semblance of normal. We had adequate snowfall, and so far this spring we have had nearly an inch and three quarters of rain. (Not a lot, but this is normally fairly dry country.) The woods and hilltops are not soggy, but neither are they crackly and parched underfoot. There is green vegetation everywhere, and the lake level and river level are up and rising.

Question is, where are the mosquitoes?

Not that we miss the little buggers, and not that there aren’t a few around. In fact there are probably more around than some people would even consider tolerable. Those folks have likely not seen what the North can dish out, when it comes to mosquitoes.

To tell you the truth, this uncanny respite from mosquitoes has me concerned. They are pesky, yes, but they must surely be an integral part of the grand scheme of things. Plus, as I often said years ago – if it wasn’t for 50 below zero in the winter and clouds of mosquitoes in summer — well, everybody and their brother would come live out here. (Oldis olesensis might not like so many nearby nest-boxes.)

I do miss the mosquitoes. I know that sounds weird. More than mosquitoes, though, I miss the swallows.

It’s an old theme with me, this daylight / darkness / latitude. Bashing away at people’s preconceived notions, jousting at windmills. I do enjoy it.

Our annual “long day” began on May 25th. It’s 1320 hours, May 25 to July 18. No darkness.

On the morning of the 26th, I woke about quarter to five and stepped onto the deck to have a look at the wind pennant. We still had an airplane out on the ice. Two of them, in fact. Their landing gear is fat tires now; the hefty steel skis were swapped a few days ago for cushy rubber — a welcome change after a winter of bashing through wind-packed snowdrifts on takeoffs and landings.

The ice beneath those two parked planes is still solid and thick, more robust than we have had in the last days of May for the past six years. Pickup-truck thick out away from shore, maybe school-bus thick. But with one plane working far to the north every day, and soon to re-locate to a camp on the tundra, the other one needed moving from the ice onto terra firma.

The quirk of our convenient shoulder-season sand-patch landing area (we try to keep from calling it a runway, lest anyone get too grandiose a vision of it) is that it is a classic “one-way in / opposite-way out.” Landings are made uphill, northeast (060 True), and takeoffs are always downhill, toward the southwest, bearing 240. Downwind landings and takeoffs are not, er, prudent. I have never attempted any. Well, okay, there was a puff of a breeze behind me, landing uphill a few years back in the Husky, but the short strip was entirely behind me as the plane finally stopped rolling. A good reminder not to mess with the laws of physics, even in a lightly loaded Husky. Gravity, inertia and Mr. Bernoulli are to be respected and obeyed.

Anyway, at 5 a.m. the other day, with a forecast for a windshift later on, the wind was perfect. East-northeast, 8 knots, on the digital weather box by the window. It was time. “He who hesitates is lost,” and yadda yadda. I poked my head into the bedroom and told Kristen “I’m gonna go move the Bush Hawk. The wind is perfect.”

By six a.m., with another trademark inelegant spot landing completed, I was sauntering home down the trail, bear-spray canister in one hand and mug of coffee in the other. Breathing easier, as I do every year, to have one chunk of expensive machinery off the ice and up “on the hard,” as the boaters would say. I was relishing the two profound luxuries of the morning — the warmth that had precluded any need to mess with pre-heating the plane; and the never-ending daylight.

Our 1,320 hours are ticking past. The sun still sets every night and rises every morning, but while it is down it never dips to the magic six degrees below the horizon that makes for “legal darkness.” And — AND — this glorious 55-day bath of sunlight is NOT offset in winter by a 55-day period of darkness. Because, well, I won’t go into it again. Skeptics can read my post of September 2024, or even the eyeball-glazing original version from November 2018.

Being an insufferable pedant, I want to trot it all out again here — the magic of Civil Twilight, the slanderous mis-characterizations of winter at 63 degrees N as grueling pitch-black payback time. Suffice it to say that the lights have come up. Yee-haw! When, many sunlit weeks from now, at midnight in late July, I glimpse those first night-time stars again, I’ll be happy to re-make their acquaintance.

It is that time of year here when I chuckle over the old trucker’s CB-radio adage: “Watch out for those soft shoulders and dangerous curves.” A great double entendre which of course made it into at least one country song. I wish I knew the tune.  

Soft shoulders now, in late April, being both sides of every snow trail we use. Packed hard by six months of winter sledding, hauling, walking, skiing and skidoo-ing, but now bordered by bottomless powder. One brief slip of attention, one lurch at the wrong moment, and you and your dogsled, skis, or skidoo are careening off into unpacked fluff. Stuck, floundering, wallowing, and cursing. The trail now has now become the high precarious ridge, not the low and guiding valley.  

I vividly remember first encountering this condition 45 years ago, almost to the day as I write this, coming down Pike’s Portage on the final evening of a six-week journey, Yellowknife to the Thelon River and back to Reliance. My sled was heavy, the trail was steep and high-centered, and there were ten trail-hardened dogs who surely sensed that we were closing in on the end of our journey. I noted that night in my journal – “Soft snow on either side of the steep trail down Pike’s, like mashed potatoes. The most challenging sledding of the trip.”

April 24, 1981. Right over there, on that slope east of Reliance. How can this be? I was 23 years old, full of the marvelous brash confidence of youth and only dimly aware of the multiple layers of naivete and sheer dumb luck that had blessed me and my companions in getting as far as we did. By that evening we were in Reliance, amazed to be off the trail and back in the warmth and modern surroundings of the old Environment Canada weather station. Electricity! A shower! TV! Our trip was nearly done. There were still some adventures ahead but the crux was behind us.

Forty-five years. I was thinking about that span of time today, as I went up the hill first with a team of eight dogs and then with a skidoo, to cut and haul in a big load of bucked firewood. This has been the coldest April in our 39 Aprils of carefully kept records, and it ain’t quite over yet. Despite Herculean efforts, the firewood supply around the homestead reflects how relentless this cold has been.

(An odd side note – we had no communication on that trip back in ’81, and we had mused to each other one day in the tent, windbound in a blizzard, that “Hey, who knows, maybe some nut-case has shot Ronald Reagan.” And it turns out – some nut-case had! And now tonight I come in from the wood-haul and catch a blip at the tail end of the BBC hourly news –something about a shot, and a president, and a close call at a hotel in Washington. Very same hotel, it turns out.)  

Forty-five years. The blink of an eye, or maybe most of a life. Depends whether you are a chunk of bedrock, an old white spruce, or a steadily aging human being. 23 years young then, in 1981.  68 years old now, in 2026. What struck me today, though, was the span of forty-five years and the fact that I was still doing pretty much the same thing, all these years on, in virtually the same place, still careening down a slope on a steep trail into McLeod Bay, trying to remember the tune to the Willis Brothers’ song.

Some would say this is evidence of a lack of imagination, but I dispute that. I have no shortage of imagination. All those years ago I dared to imagine a life out here, and after several more forays and false starts in 1983 and 1985, I was here to stay by 1987. And happily by then I had met someone willing to imagine right along with me, complete with soft shoulders and dangerous curves. And now that life of ours here has been mostly lived. My long-suffering wife knows I have a good imagination, because she has seen me imagine some pretty wacky undertakings in our time here. A certain nine-ton wooden sailboat comes to mind, as do a few octagonal log buildings. Not to mention all the things she could name (quite quickly some days) that I have imagined I’d done but actually never did, and words I imagined I didn’t say, but actually did. Ahem.

I don’t think being in the same home place, doing a variation of the same thing, over and over again for forty-five years constitutes a de facto shortcoming, or a lack of anything. I prefer to frame it as Persistence. Vision. Loyalty. Stubbornness. Infatuation with a place. And so on. Of course I must view it this way, or else I would wonder what I have done with my time. As my dear hero the poet Gary Snyder, soon to turn 96 and still living in his chosen homeplace, wrote, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.”

The thought of a forty-five year span also prompted me to dial backwards from that 1981 sledding down Pike’s, and dialing the years back from there landed my daydreams in the year 1936. (Happy Birthday, Mom!)

This 45-year span back from 1981 is especially striking to me since I have been at work for many years now on a piece of historical fiction set in the 1930’s, and set in this same stretch of landscape: Reliance, Pike’s Portage, and the Thelon River. Having now marked forty-five years here, I am better able to imagine those forty-five years back from 1981. A lot has changed, and a lot – like dogsleds and sled dogs, soft April trails and heavy loads of firewood – has not changed a bit. Looking back 90 years is not so hard when you can stand in the same place and see half the distance in your mind’s eye.  

But hey, if we want to talk about a need for imagination – try to imagine the next forty-five years here! Makes my head spin. 2026 + 45 = 2071. Our daughters will be 75 and 72 years old, if they make it that far.  Kristen and I, along with everyone of our same-age peers and colleagues and siblings and our “generation” of Boomers, will be long gone.

And what will be happening here, in April, 2071?

“Here,” in the local sense of the east end of McLeod Bay, the slope of Pike’s Portage, this cluster of log buildings near the mouth of the Hoarfrost River? And here in the watersheds of the Peace, the Thelon, the Mackenzie? The country called Canada? And on out from there.  

Now that is something interesting to mull over, while cutting and hauling some late-season firewood. Don’t get too lost in daydreams and conjecture, though, or you’ll be slewing right into the mashed-potato pow-pow at the side of the trail and cursing a blue streak in no time flat. Just like in 1981, and 1936, and now 2026. Those darned soft shoulders and dangerous curves. That song makes me laugh every time.  

Don’t knock th’ weather. Nine-tenths o’ th’ people couldn’ start a conversation if it didn’ change once in a while.

• Abe Martin’s Primer : The Collected Writings of Abe Martin and his Brown County, Indiana, Neighbors (1914).

This post is going out, as is my habit, in the final few hours of the month.  Deadlines are wonderful things, wonderfully effective at getting things done, even when self-imposed — as this one is.

Sometime around the Vernal Equinox, which this year fell on March 20th, I caught wind of some reporting that March 2026 has been the coldest on record for some parts of the Northwest Territories.

I was away from home on a wildlife survey flying job, and given what we were putting up with in the cockpit of the airplane and on the ground trying to keep the airplane warm and happy, the claim did not surprise me. It has been a relentlessly cold month hereabouts, but the word that it was setting some sort of record did make me resolve to dig a little deeper on that topic when I got home.  Last night I did, hauling out our handwritten weather records that stretch back to 1987, and examining every month of March from start to finish.  The records are mostly intact, and mostly useful. There are missing years, from the bygone early ‘90’s when we would go off on the dog mushing race circuit and shut the place down completely, and from a year when we languished in the downpours of coastal British Columbia for an entire winter of island life and instruction in wooden boat-building.

I went through all the months of March, here at Hoarfrost River, back to March of 1988. And yes, March of 2026 takes the cake for cold. Granted, this is not a huge span of time, but it is most of my adult life, so it is not a tiny snippet of time either.

My notation last night was not overly scientific, but I am confident it would hold up in the court of public opinion, so to speak. For each of the months of March here for which we have records – nearly forty different Marches – I jotted down a tally of the following: 

• Number of Days with a Maximum temperature above freezing (0 degrees Celsius);
• Number of Morning Observations with a recorded temperature of -15 degrees C. (5 above, F.) or warmer;
• Number of Morning Observations with a temperature of -30 degrees C.(-22 F.) or colder;
• And finally, the number of 24-hour lows recorded at 40 below zero or colder (minus 40 is the same in both flavors, C. and F.)

And yep, this past month, ending tonight, took the prize.

• No days above freezing;
• only two mornings with a temperature warmer than -15 (+5 F.);
• nineteen mornings with a temperature of -30 (-22 F.) or colder;
• and seven dips into the minus 40 and below range, including at least two mornings when Fort Reliance (ten miles from here) was listed by Environment Canada as the coldest spot in all of Canada, at -45 C. / -49 F.

What interested me was the broad spread of the various March temperatures over the years, the trends of some years to be steadily warm or steadily cold.  If there is a real trend over time I am not statistician enough to detect one. And no, I am not a “denier.” Nor would I use the word “believer,” because this business of planetary warming is not some sort of a religion. It’s reality, and it is an existential threat. (Which perhaps we richly deserve, but our children do not.)

The real race in the end came down to a comparison between March 1997 and March 2026, and I had to resort to another set of numbers to break the stand-off.  On 21 days out of the month, compared day by day, the daily high was warmer in 1997 than it was in 2026.  (Heck, we had a day not long ago when the day’s high was -37 degrees.) Case closed, I figger.

That’s my post. So Long ‘til April.  April showers bring May flowers, right?  Somewhere.

________________________________________________________________

For those three or four of you whose eyes have not glazed over yet, I will make a play on words and offer up another snippet from a story in progress.  I have shared a couple of these excerpts from this tale here already, in May and December of 2023.

This one, like the passage above, has to do with A Long Cold March.  Here we have young Telhiruk setting off from the Crystal Island cabin on Artillery Lake, autumn 1930, on his solitary trek east to rejoin his people somewhere east of the upper Thelon. And never to be seen again, except perhaps once, when the final diary entry made by Emil Bode, for December 5, 1930, noted: “Foggy found Tollaru today.” Found him alive? Found his body? We shall never know, because no one ever saw Emil Bode alive again either.  The plot thickens.

…Knox and Hoare had drawn a big sketch map on a beautiful big piece of white paper that Billy had brought up from the police post at Reliance. A rare thing in that part of the world. One morning in early September, about two weeks after Olson and Bode had stopped and crossed with Lanner, Knox came into the cabin and was surprised to find Telhiruk inside, leaning over the map.

“Good one, eh? You like it?”

Telhiruk nodded, and spanned the sketch map with his right hand stretched wide, marking off hand-spans as if using a caliper. He set out three spans to the Thelon valley, east of Tyrrell’s big lake, and looked up at Knox again, his eyes bright.

“What? You measuring? You thinking of going east?”

Telhiruk smiled.

“I need you here. You stay over winter and we can get you back to Baker before spring. Billy‘ll be after me to come, sure as anything. That oomingmuk does not give up.”

Telhiruk stayed quiet, looked again at the map, and walked out the door.

Knox followed him. It was a cloudy day with some drizzle and some fog lying on the tundra to the east. The snow from a few days before had melted away. The breeze was starting to come up southwesterly, and warmer. Telhiruk lit his pipe again, and Knox lit his own.

“It might be late to start for home now,” Knox offered. “But some ice might make it go faster, I guess.”

Two nights later, after their dinner of fish and bannock and oatmeal with berries, they both lit up pipes and sat on the front step of the cabin.

Knox said, “You been thinking about the winter? What I said?”

Telhiruk turned and cocked his head. “Yes. Yep.”

“And?”

“I wanna go home. I wanna walk. East. People will be out there. I can find ‘em.”

“Regular throne speech for you my friend. Holy crow.” Knox laughed.

Knox blew a couple of perfect smoke rings. He had very little doubt the lad could do it. He was smart and savvy and quick. Strong. His joints didn’t ache in the night or come morning. His eyes were sharp, and he was a hell of a walker and one hell of a marksman. It was, what, sixty miles or less straight east to the shore of Tyrrell’s big lake, and maybe thirty more to the Thelon. East of the Thelon, somewhere, there would be Huskies.  Should be. Could be.

It got darker. Knox coughed softly and spit. “I’m off to sleep. Tomorrow we should go across by Rat Lodge. Maybe caribou on that side now.”

Telhiruk nodded.

“And if there are we best be drying some meat for you.”

####

The next morning it was obvious to Jack that Telhiruk was bound and determined to go. And after a night of thinking on it, Knox had concluded that it might well be done, and if the lad was going to try it he would do his best to help get him ready, after all Telhiruk had done the past year and more.

The weather turned warm and fine again. The next day they slid the eighteen-foot square-stern into the lake after breakfast and chores and for the first time ever the little Johnson kicker caught and ran on the first wrap and pull of the cord. Knox laughed.

“Well I’ll be jiggered my friend. This must be a lucky day.”

The wind had dropped and Artillery Lake was a wide blue ribbon barely riffled with patches of cats-paw wavelets. The sand-cone called the Rat Lodge was the most prominent landmark on the entire west shore. They crossed to it in under twenty minutes and Knox steered north up the shoreline. On that west side of Artillery the trees kept on north for about fifteen miles, and sure enough, there were some caribou now hitting that shore, trickling in from the northwest. Bulls, most of them, in prime shape. It was a day of a few seconds of shooting and hours of cutting up and packing meat. By sundown the canoe was heavy and the two men’s hands were crusty with blood. The kicker started again on the first pull and Knox laughed and said, “Somebody likes this plan I think.”

Four days flew past in a frenzy of meat-drying and smoking, cutting hunks of fat into small cubes, repairing bits of clothing, and debating in gestures over pieces of gear. By then Knox realized he was almost as excited about Telhiruk’s prospects as his sidekick seemed to be, as the days kept up blue and the nights got colder.  After all, it could be under twelve days to the Thelon if the smaller lakes all froze good and hard, and no snow came. Maybe two weeks for a walker like Telhiruk, and maybe even just a week or two past that might be some Eskimo camps, on the west side of Dubawnt. Knox almost wished he was free to try it himself. 

… The night before Telhiruk left, Knox took out a wooden box he had been carrying with him for two years. Clear spruce boards edgewise, half an inch thick and dovetailed corners. It was varnished and tight, with a fitted lid and a carrying strap of lamp-wick, about a foot long by six inches, eight or nine inches deep.

Knox set it on the hewn table in the cabin and pried the lid up. He had packed in sixty rounds for the .30-30, six candles, three brass match-safes, a screw-top metal can stuffed with tea bags, his own pocket whetstone, and another screwtop can of ground coffee beans. He took his weigh-scale from the shelf and set the box on it.

“Eight pounds even,” he said. “That’s heavy. What do you think?”

Telhiruk smiled. Nodded.

“Yeah, I think so too. You take it. When it’s empty you can burn it. You might be needin’ a little fire about then, eh?”

Telhiruk nodded again.

Knox laid out the big map he and Billy Hoare had been working on just before they had headed east in 1929. He leaned over it and Telhiruk stood and leaned alongside him.

“Well, tomorrow morning I’ll bring you over to shore. The glass is holdin’ steady and high. This weather does beat all, I’ll say that.”

In the morning, the second to last day of September, Knox came down the path to the canoe where Telhiruk had set his packsack, rifle, and the wooden box with the lampwick strap.

“You have to carry the box in your hand?”

Telhiruk nodded.

Knox shook his head. “No room in the packsack?”

Telhiruk shook his head no.

“Well, I guess you should have some space in there soon enough. After you eat some grub and dig out your woollies. And wear out your first and second and third pairs of socks.”

They pushed off and paddled the short bight that separates Crystal Island from the east shore of Artillery. The canoe shushed up onto the crescent of sand beach there. Telhiruk hopped ashore dry-footed and pulled the gunwale around. Lifted out his gear.

“Good luck lad. Wish I could convince you to stay around.”

Their eyes met and in the folds of Knox’s creased face and bushy brows there was a faint flash of warmth.

“Steer clear of any Chips. They’re not going to be good to you. You steer clear. Your people ‘ll be out there once you get east of the Thelon. Hell, you know that, what ‘m I sayin’? And there’s white men out there, scattered around. Most of them will help you. They know you. Others prob’ly won’t.  You know the ones.”

Knox had said all this already. He was just talking to fill the moment. He stuck out his hand and Telhiruk took it, not a grip but just limp, as his people did it. He hoisted the packsack. Rifle to hand, wooden box. He smiled at Knox with those perfect white teeth he had. Knox gave a comical sort of half-grunt and cleared his throat, as Telhiruk turned and strode away from the beach.

Jack Knox stood and watched him go, after well over a year pretty much cheek by jowl, envying mostly the spring in the younger man’s step. He thought he might never see the lad again. But he might yet, too. At a spur of outcrop up the hill Telhiruk turned once to look back. Knox had shimmied a little forward in the canoe and was paddling away. Telhiruk walked east.

    (yet another "Chicken or the Egg?" conundrum)


I'm close now.
The track is fresh.
Afloat on three feet of soft powder,
I move ahead on these timeless tools of the winter hunt.

Elegant curves of steam-bent frames, white ash.
Toeloops and heelstraps of old bike innertube.

Yes, frames. Yes, bindings. 
But the soul of the snowshoe is babiche.

Soaked strips, laced and woven,
Set aside to dry and tighten and harden.
Coat upon coat of spar varnish,
And now you have your web, your raquette, 
To trust with all your weight
And stride across a world of bottomless white fluff.

There. I see it. 
Dark. Bedded. Ears up. 
Not a doubt now. 
Rifle up, and my aching frozen thumb slides the safety off.

Not a clear shot.
I need two more quiet steps ahead, 
And only the magic of my webbed babiche lets me take them.

The moose stands. Steps ahead, and stands again.

In a moment it is all over for another year. 
No need for silence now, I rush forward, 
On my magical babiche webbed feet. 

Babiche of -- yep, you guessed it:
Strips of moosehide.

In the aviation business, all pilots, dispatchers, maintenance engineers and flight attendants are obliged to take part in an annual training program called CRM, for Crew Resource Management.  I just completed mine again this month. Interesting in year one — but this is year five! Same modules. Thank goodness for that little widget that allows one to double the playback speed of an online lecture. Makes Alvin the Chipmunk sound like a laid back surfer dude. These oft-stultifying refreshers, covering topics like Decision Making, Threat and Error Management, Stress, and the SHEL model are useful, and helpful, but year by year they get drier than a popcorn fart. Every time around, though, I have to admit that something new sticks with me. I guess that’s the point.

This year, it was in the sub-module about Stress, and the tidbit I took away was that one of the warning signs with the onset of stress is the loss of one’s sense of humor. (Or humour.  Depends where you live.) I just tuned in, as we do, to the BBC World News. Oh, man. Maybe, about now, a dose of humor is in order. Here goes:

Been cold where you live? It’s been a cold January in Scandinavia, cold in many parts of North America, even cold down in Jackson, Mississippi, from what I gather. A good old-fashioned blast of winter. The weather reports are full of sullen voices announcing a “risk of frostbite,” to go along with the pantheon of modern-day Weather Warnings and Color-Coded Alerts to which we are all subjected, admonishing us as to the myriad hazards lurking out of doors.

In summer nowadays, day after day, it’s all about the Humidex, or the Heat Index, or the UV Index, or the Air Quality Index. And no longer do we have plain unsexy Warm Fronts, Cold Fronts, Highs and Lows.  Now the atmosphere keeps delivering Polar Vortices, Atmospheric Rivers, and Heat Domes. I’m convinced that someone, somewhere, is thinking up another warning or newfangled description at this very moment. Find this person, please. Gag them.

The grand-daddy of all of these is the ever-popular Winchell Factor, which for years has almost always been mispronounced, and even mis-typed, as “Wind Chill Factor.”

It was 1962, a windy cold January dusk, when Ernie (Ernest) Winchell, 59, a high school physics teacher from Bowbells North Dakota, nearly froze to death. Ernie’s Pontiac Tempest, his pride and joy, had broken down and he was suddenly alone on the prairie south of Flaxton, homeward bound after a visit with his Canadian in-laws up in Weyburn Saskatchewan. The Tempest had a three-on-the-tree manual transmission, and Ernie had been having some trouble with it. That evening, with a tortured mashing of gears, Ernie and his Tempest ground to a halt.

Ernie had set off from home two days earlier, in a rush after classes, because his brother-in-law had fallen seriously ill. That had been during one of the mild spells that sometimes come to the northern plains even in late January, and as the transmission seized up Ernie realized that he did not have much on board in the way of warm clothing. Off in the distance, a mile and a half at most, he could just make out the ninety-watt porch light of a house on the outskirts of Flaxton.

Hatless, gloveless, and with just a nylon windbreaker over a cotton work shirt, Ernie set off, earnestly, on foot. From his line of work, he knew more about physics and thermodynamics than most people, but he was confident, and male, and 59.  It was only about 10 below zero, Celsius, but Ernie was not Celsian — and in those days neither was Canada — so it was really 15 degrees above zero, Americano.  Not bitterly cold, not for January in western North Dakota, but the prairie breeze was whistling straight out of Alberta at a solid 20 miles an hour (remember miles?)

It was a very close call. By the time Ernie arrived at the doorstep of Edith and Martin Tollefson, he was nearly done for.  His speech was slurred, he had lost the use of his hands, and he had passed through the shivering stage of chilling to the point where he was convinced he was getting warmer. Hypothermia training courses call this phase “paradoxical undressing.” Ernie was right there, and he had started fumbling to unzip his windbreaker.  In short, had that nearest porch light been even half a mile farther down the road, it would have been nighty-night on the side of the road for Ernie Winchell, just a steady slide into the deep sleep of hypothermia.

Martin was at the curling rink in town that evening, but happily, Edith Tollefson had seen some very cold men in her life. She took Ernie in, put on the kettle, got down the brandy, and propped Mr. Winchell up close to the woodburner. Ernie revived, phoned his wife, and arranged to get the Tempest towed in to Bowbells. The next day, he resolved that he would make it his mission in life to educate people about the amazing double-whammy heat-loss knockout punch of wind combined with cold. The rest, right through to widespread mispronunciation, is history. He began writing articles, appearing on radio and television, and lecturing at the U in Grand Forks. The Winchell Factor was born.

Within fifteen years of Ernie’s near-death experience, Winchell Factors started to appear in weather broadcasts. Sadly, there was confusion over the derivation of the term, and it quickly became common to hear it pronounced Wind Chill.  Ernie Winchell was an old man by then, and he was Swedish Lutheran, so he did not make a fuss over this confusion with his namesake Factor. He did live to see his quest steadily gaining ground.  He passed away in his sleep in 1983, snuggled up next to a warm Mrs. Winchell in their warm bed at the Bowbells Senior Residence.

Okay, I made all that up.  Shamelessly imitating my dear friend Dave Barry. (Okay, I made that up too.)

Still, it really is the wind, in winter, isn’t it?  Moving cold air is a force to be reckoned with. It comes at you, feinting and ducking and sliding in, jabbing and poking and turning bits and pieces of your face and ears and fingers dead and white. Winchell factor, folks.  Ernie knew.

Calm air, by contrast, even at forty or fifty below zero, is more like a ghostly presence than a raving, murderous adversary. Walking around in calm deep cold, pushing clouds of breath ahead of you, swaddled in layers of puffy clothing, you feel like an astronaut on a spacewalk. You sense the bite of the cold, and you know instinctively that you must not get the least bit wet, and you must not fall down and lie inert, and you must keep plodding forward to that next warm place, wherever it may be.     

Sadly, people do confuse the Winchell Factor with the temperature. The shrill Cassandra tone of the weather broadcasters plays a part in this. For nerds like me this can be frustrating. Say it is minus ten (pick your flavor, C. or F.) but the Winchell is sitting at minus 35 because of a stiff breeze.  If your car will always start at minus ten, then hey, relax, your car will start. The temperature is minus ten, not minus 35. Your beloved lump of Ford or Nissan only knows that it is minus ten.  Yes, because of that wind, it will cool right off to minus ten pretty quickly once you park – just as quickly as it would on a calm day at minus 35.  That’s the Winchell Factor. Bless you, Ernie.

One more note here before I go – a tangent that made me chuckle. One day a few years ago I heard a pilot call another pilot on 126.7, the air traffic frequency in Canada.  “Are you inbound for Kirk Lake?” “No, we are going to Cook Lake. Charlie Zero Zero Kilo.” It made me laugh because it was classic pilot talk – spelling by number. All that was missing were a few acronyms.

When I was out on snowshoes the other day, in deep cold, seeking the moose that had made the snowy tracks I was trying to follow, I worked up a frightful lather of perspiration. (Yes, I know better, but yes, it still happens.) But I relaxed when I reviewed what I was wearing.  No less than four layers of wool on my upper body, two on my feet, three on my legs. Wool t-shirt, wool union suit, wool shirt, and wool sweater. Wool mukluk liners, wool socks, wool long johns X 2, and wool pants. Wool balaclava, under wool hat. I was not invincible, but I had — to quote my pilot friend — Whisky – Zero – Zero –Lima  on my side. Wool – not goose down, not Polarfleece, and for sure not Gore Tex – WOOL is our ultimate weapon in the January fight against interstellar cold. Layers and layers of wool, warm when wet, no bells or whistles or chemical compounds.  The finely spun fur of sheep, who – bonus! – did not even need to die to give us naked apes this wonderful weapon in the fight against cold.

My warm bed calls, and I will ramble off. As Mr. Winchell’s factor grips you in the days ahead, find yourself some Whisky – Zero – Zero – Lima and layer it on. Den you be happy mahn, as Bob Marley would say.  And hey – try your best to keep your sense of humor / humour. We lose that, we all be hooped.

 

We have a little stackwall building on the edge of the dog yard, affectionately dubbed “The Cat Barn.” (Long story, but suffice it to say that back when our kids were young we kept a pair of SPCA “rescue cats” at the homestead. They were very helpful with mice and squirrel control, but they were terrible on small birds. One lived to be 18 years old, we think, but there have been no cats here since.)  The Cat Barn is the toolshed for the dog mushing part of our lives. On its walls hang old plaques and trophies from our racing days; a shelf holds a library of veterinary manuals and training books; in a cabinet at the back are pills and potions and ointments, bandages and scalpels and sutures; on the wall opposite the woodstove hang drying work gloves, dog booties, coils of rope, and a few old Air Tindi pilot coveralls that have found their true calling at last, as summertime chore-wear.

By the door I’ve tacked up a couple of clippings and printouts that make me smile. There’s a beer box from the Yukon Brewing company flattened out and stapled up, because the painting of a panicked musher sprinting behind his runaway team is obviously the work of someone who has been there, done that. 

There’s a photo of my favorite U.S. President, Barack Obama, leaning on the handlebar of one of John Baker’s Iditarod sleds. It was taken in 2016, when Obama visited Alaska.  Fishing boats and salmon netting gear are hauled up on the Bering Sea Coast in the background. Obama is staring at John with a look of rapt focus, and John is clearly holding forth with a good Iditarod story, or maybe he’s tossing out some political lobbying, Kotzebue-style.

My favorite cheer-up poster is the photo of a big gray-white wolf, trotting head on through powder snow.  The caption reads, “Maybe I can get some food at that campfire.  What could possibly go wrong?” Beneath that, another line reads “10,000 Years Later:” above a portrait of two coiffured pooches decked out in matching pastel hats, complete with ear openings. The look in the eyes of those two dogs is a perfect mix of bewilderment and canine embarrassment. Because, well, oh, there is this way it could go wrong over the course of 10,000 years — or to be fair, maybe not wrong, but certainly sideways.

That quip from the big wolf surging forward through the snow – “Maybe I can get some food at that campfire” has been re-enacted with remarkable regularity here over the past four decades.  And it has been almost that simple and straightforward, even though we have not taken it to the obvious next step.  To me there is not the slightest mystery as to how wolves and ancient humans began the symbiotic romance that eventually brought us sled dogs, bird dogs, guide dogs, spoiled dogs, purse dogs, and crocheted baby-blue doggie hats.

At least every few years over our time here, sometimes in summer but usually in mid-winter, a young wolf has appeared out of nowhere and begun to hang around.  Most of these wolves have been obviously skinny, and they are shy but not terrified of us, or of our huskies. Nowadays, having been there done that a few times so to speak, we always note the start of this chain of events with a sigh. A sigh, because it is not going to end well. Day after day, night after night, these young wolves get bolder, and gradually the denizens of the dog yard get more and more at ease with them, and it has gone so far at times that we’ve seen a wolf emerge from a dog’s straw-filled house in the first light of morning, and realized that the larger and stronger Alaskan Husky — whose house it was to begin with —  had evidently spent the night curled up outside, in a dramatic display of hospitality.

Every time it happens, a little niggle in the back of my mind pipes up as I watch the wolf: “Maybe we could tame it.”

And of course, yes, maybe we could. But I went down that road many years ago here, not by taming a wild wolf but by raising a newborn wolf I had kidnapped from the wild. I wrote about that in a chapter of North of Reliance, and it’s a chapter of life that taught me a lot.  Not a chapter I will ever repeat, for it did not end well for anyone.  Like I said.  

We try our best to dissuade these hungry docile wolves.  Cracker shells, horns, shouting and waving. It almost never works. And, for some reason – and there, for us, lies the real mystery – these wolves that come by have never harmed a dog here. They are on their own, evidently, with no pack of older wiser adults. 

Perhaps someday this will play out differently. Almost every winter I hear of mushers losing dogs to a pack of wolves, right in the kennel.  Why not here?  

So many questions.  Did these vagrant youngsters disperse naturally from their family group?  Like teenagers heading off from Mom and Dad, determined to find their own way in the world or die trying?   Seems unlikely.  Or has something disrupted the pack, killing off the older wolves?  Again, seems odd, since nowadays there are no expert wolf hunters or even semi-active trappers left in the entire watershed of McLeod Bay — and very few left in the entire NWT.

Conjecture, anyone? Don’t be shy. dave@hoarfrostriver.ca is all ears.

Winter settles in.  Seventeen hours of darkness, temperatures dropping into the double and triple f-words: forty four below, fifty four below…  By now the cute starving photogenic wolf is making off with feeding utensils, and chewing up extension cords and plastic pails in its spare time.  This is not going to end well, but it is going to end soon.

Yes, it would end differently if we just decided to set a few choice tidbits out for the passersby. Night by night, month by month, maybe year by year, something would change and evolve, right before our eyes. To my mind that is certainly how this “dog thing” all got started oh so long ago. It’s as simple as can be.   There is no need to re-invent the wheel here. But I sure bet we could.

Recently someone asked me, out of the blue, where they could find my books for sale. The question was a surprise, coming from this person. I thought that anyone with a question like that would simply “google it.”

Curious about what would come up, I did just that, a few minutes ago, here at my desk in the warm end of the workshop at the Hoarfrost, on a beautiful cold clear morning. And no, I am not going to thank the world’s weathiest man Elon Musk for the Starlink system that made such a process possible out here today. But that topic is another can of worms.

Kinds of Winter is my most recent book, published 2014, and out of the four books I have in print it is, I’ll admit, my favorite. It is available as an e-book, an audio book, and a paperback. All through Wilfrid Laurier University Press, or your local bookstore, or even (gasp) Amazon, apparently.

North of Reliance, first published in 1994, and re-published in 2016 as a second edition (no changes to my writing, some new and additional photos, and a new Preface) by Raven Productions in Ely Minnesota, is still out there for sale. Brand new copies appear to be On Sale now by the company that bought out Raven some years ago: Legacy Bound. I am not on great terms, let’s just say, with Legacy, but hey, they do have the remaining boxes of these books, and the books are made of paper and thus of trees, and thus before I start the process of bringing out a third edition of this book, I am steering you to Legacy. However, I don’t think they can ship to Canada, by the looks of things on their website.

Legacy, having bought out Raven, also holds most of the hardback copies of A Wonderful Country, , the 2005 edition, also a favorite book of mine. It is a collection of the stories of Bill Magie (pronounced same as McGee), an old-timer who lived a colorful life in and around the Canoe Country of the Minnesota – Ontario border. Bill was at various times in his life a wilderness surveyor, a pilot (with a license signed by Orville Wright — see my post here from last April), a canoe guide, and a kingpin in the long battle to preserve the Quetico-Superior canoe country as capital-W wilderness. Bill was a master storyteller — ribald and lively. I met him as a young man when I was attending Northland College, and I tape-recorded, transcribed, and edited his stories back in 1978.

Cold Nights, Fast Trails, my 1989 book about my early years as a dog musher and sled dog racer, seems to be still out there, in nooks and crannies of used books online. It was published by NorthWord Press, but it has long been out of print.

There you have a longer-winded answer to this question than I intended.

This will not be my post here for December, but more in the realm of connecting readers of this blog to these books of mine, and — as luck would have it — alerting you today to the On Sale status of both North of Reliance and A Wonderful Country, at the Legacy Bound website.

One final note for locals in the NWT: The fine folks at the Yellowknife bookstore have copies of North of Reliance and Kinds of Winter right on the shelf. They deserve your support, as do small independent bookstores everywhere, in my view.

Over and out.

It is late on the final evening of the month and I am in Yellowknife for the start of a round of wildlife survey flying, and I am attempting to do three things within the coming hour:

1. Put out at least some semblance of a post here, so as not to break my string of “one per month”;
2. Warm this little three-season trailer up above 10 degrees C. (50 degrees F.) before I turn in for the night; and
3. Turn in for the night.

As I have written here in November at least once in the past, I consider November the finest month of the year for indulging the luxury of that mysterious animal necessity called sleep.

I got to thinking again about sleep back in late October, when some truly lousy weather forced me to set down about sixty miles northeast of Fort Nelson, B.C., at sunset, and quit trying to make VFR flying conditions out of what were rapidly turning into hardball IFR conditions. I was alone, bringing the second of our two little bush-planes down to the airport at Fort Nelson, on floats, there to land on the grass infield alongside runway 08-26, and call it a float season finished at last.

The weather forecast that day had been calling for improvement along the 500 miles between our home base and Fort Nelson, but as we all know, “them are only forecasts.” I had been making steady progress with a few diversions, hour after hour at 90 or 95 knots, keeping sight of terra firma, but as I closed in on Fort Nelson things took a dramatic turn for the worse. And then, as if to add insult to injury, I saw what was causing part of the problem. Struggling along down low, throttled back, a notch of flaps down, cursing and muttering, I looked through the clag beneath and around the plane and suddenly realized — with a whiff all too familiar across the continent these past few years — what I was dealing with. Yes, there was snow on the ground. Yes, some of the smallest lakes were already iced over, and yes, there was a nasty mix of cold drizzle and mist in the air, but there was also smoke. Wildfire smoke rising in wisps and narrow plumes, right from the snow-covered spruce bogs.

I think I uttered a few words that might have astonished my elders, but then I knew deep-down what I needed to do, in the minutes that were left in that day, the 21st of October. I needed to find a lake that looked like a decent bet not to freeze overnight, check its shoreline and look at its water for depth and reefs, and put the plane down. In other words, I needed to give up on the idea of reaching my destination.

This can be a difficult decision for a pilot to make. We don’t make it very often. Not to turn back, not to go forward, just to put down and quit before somebody gets hurt. But it is, in my experience, a relief to come to that decision.

I came across a passage by Jeremy Jones, writing in Mountain Gazette about his life as a snowboard aficionado, dropping down vast steep slopes of untracked powder snow, and it made me nod my head:

“One critical skill is learning to turn around… ‘I haven’t turned around in a while’ is reason enough to reverse course… It’s a muscle that needs to be flexed… “

I had a nice campout there on the snowy shore of Outaanetdeya Lake. Being late October, it was chilly, but I had ample blankets and bedding, and a little pup tent. (I had forgotten just how little it is.) I usually get a bit of grief from my mechanic friends at Fort Nelson, when I come there for inspections, because I do carry a surfeit of “survival gear” in my planes. But they were not chiding me the next day, when I did finally show up, because they knew that the night had been chilly and very long. “Get any sleep?” And I could honestly answer that yes, I had gotten sleep, a good solid ten hours I bet, worrying only a bit that overnight the lake was going to freeze and force the little floatplane to dabble in a new career as an icebreaker. But in the long hours of darkness I could still hear the chuckle of little waves lapping the boggy shoreline a few feet from my bed, so I rested assured.

Which brings me finally around to Sleep, and to something that dawned on me a few days after that impromptu campout. Training in Survival should add one more factor to the “Rule of 3’s” — the reminder that in a survival situation we can last 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water, and 30 days without food.

Next time I get a chance to lecture on that topic, I am going to add one more, and that is Sleep. Often we do not stress Sleep in training for and considering survival. To keep going with the “3 theme”, may as well make it a nice even 30 hours without sleep, at most. Because yes, you can perhaps go that long, but you are nowhere near competent or capable or even coherent as that 30-hour mark comes close.

Good night, sleep tight…

In case you have not noticed, the Toronto Blue Jays are back in the World Series. They were there last in 1993. We listened to the game here tonight, on the radio, and the Dodgers took it so there will be one more game, game seven, played tomorrow night in Toronto. And although I pay almost no attention to any major-league sports during the rest of the year, I do enjoy listening to World Series baseball games on the radio. Probably because it brings me back to my roots, the Cubs, Wrigley Field, 1969, but most of all to a memorable overnight paddling trip in sub-zero weather, a trip mostly inspired by R.M. Patterson of Nahanni River fame.

In 1992, on the eighteenth of October, Kristen and I were here, and as freeze-up loomed we were feeling a bit stuck. Our faithful 25 horsepower Evinrude outboard was kaput.  Maybe today, 33 years on, we could repair it, but back then, knowing what we knew about fuel pumps and impellers and carburetors, we were stymied.

We did not know a lot about motors, but we both knew damned well that there was a big sack of postal mail waiting for us across the wide and icy expanse of McLeod Bay, at the weather station in Reliance. We knew it was there because we could talk to the two fellows at the station by radio. We knew, also, that there would be no more mail coming until sometime in December. We knew there were lots of good things in that big canvas Canada Post bag – letters from near and far, birthday cards, gifts… It meant everything to us, in terms of contact with the world beyond here. To say that Kristen, especially, was really eager to see inside that mailbag would be an understatement.  

In January of 1929, in January, down in the folds and twists of the lower Nahanni River, R.M. Patterson had come to the conclusion that he had better make his way out, downriver, somehow. His trapping partner had gone away and was overdue – no word, no sign.  Food was running low.  He also alludes to the fact that there was a message of some sort to get out to Fort Simpson, having perhaps to do with mineral claims.

So, Patterson being Patterson, he set off down the Nahanni for the Liard, and for Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie.

In January. All by his lonesome.

It was a combo trip to send shivers down the spine of anyone who can imagine its details. Canoe and dogteam:  dogs pulling canoe and gear on the sled, over the frozen ice; canoe carrying dogs and sled and gear over stretches of flowing water. In January. (Did I say that already?)

But off he went. He felt like he needed to try.  And I remember sitting at my desk in our little cabin here, re-reading that account, and thinking, well, I can see across the bay… the mail bag is there…

Today I dug out my journal and I think I’ll just post its entry from back then, wish the Blue Jays good luck tomorrow night, and sign off. It’s still a pretty good story, I think.

20 October, 1992

Hoarfrost River

Back yesterday from an unusual overnight journey to Reliance. Sitting here Sunday morning reading Patterson’s account of a winter’s journey “to the mail,” I decided to just go. Packed the 14-foot canoe with some food and gear – axe, rifle, rice, a caribou heart, butter, bread, cookies, coffee, Coleman stove, repair kit, sprit-sail rig, HF radio, clothes, sleeping bag, tarp, and matches.

Pushed off at 12:55; temperature minus ten C. or so, with sunshine, but clouds off to the west. Within minutes I unfurled the sprit rig and began to pick up an extra push from a light northwest breeze, and also a push from the long swells still rolling in from the west after a three-day blow.

I rounded Dallas Point near Hawk Owl in just fifty minutes – a stretch I had estimated would take two hours. At the island beyond the burn, the one with the square rock atop it, I found myself easing the canoe south, toward the portage, cutting off the corner of the bay.  It is a three-mile crossing from there, and I did not want to just blunder out into it without thinking it carefully through. The weather was stable, the breeze light, and all systems looked “go.” Thus are decisions made – sometimes one truly is “in the right place, with the right people, at the right time, with the right equipment.” Sheer luck can bring it all together, and that afternoon it did. The crossing took just 45 minutes, and three hours after leaving home the canoe bumped against the ice-coated cobble and gravel of the little beach at the portage. 4 p.m.

When I got out of the canoe I was cold, as cold blood from my legs was suddenly circulating again. I was also in a clumsy state of hurry – a feeling of impending darkness and eagerness to be onto the hiking part of the trip.

Began walking at about quarter to five, having tarped over my gear and piled some dry wood nearby for a fire. I hoped to return that evening, following my tracks in the snow back to the canoe. Soon I realized the difficulty that would pose, since the peninsula was covered with fresh caribou tracks wandering in all directions. I would have a hard time following my trail by headlamp. The sky was overcast by then and the moon is waning and rises after midnight. Gradually, fatigue and caution replaced gung-ho enthusiasm, and I adopted a new plan:  stay in Reliance, leave before daybreak, and get back to the canoe early in the morning.

That is how it worked out, and my luck held. The final mile into Reliance was made in darkness, and I knocked on the door of the weather station at 7:15 or so.  Mark and Brent were expecting me; Kristen had called them on the HF radio. I called her the same way, to tell her of my arrival and my plan, and settled in to watch the second game of the World Series. Toronto beat Atlanta 5-4 with a ninth-inning two-run homer by Ed Sprague, a pinch-hitter recently up from the minors.

The morning walk was difficult, taking three and a half hours over the same ground I had covered an hour faster the night before. In the dark most of the way, well before dawn, and with a heavy pack. A grind. Dim light, dull grey overcast, caribou clattering away from me through thick tangles of alder and spruce. Daylight at last, and at 9 a.m. the canoe again. Pushed off at 9:30 in fresh dry wool sweaters, thinking again about a frame pack in light of all the heavy carrying we do. Why did those fall out of favor?

Luck was holding – the crossing to the north shore was safe, but cold and choppy.  No sail up, and I had to stop once to thoroughly rewarm the fingers of my left hand, all the while drifting downwind into the open bay. But they stayed warm after that. Once to Box Top Island the wind was behind me, and I stopped to rig the sail again. Took off with good speed and soon rounded the point just east of home. Paddled to shore through skim and slush ice, and soon was inside with my sweetie, warming and eating, and – of course – reading our mail.

We tuned into all the rest of the World Series that year, on the AM radio out of Edmonton, and we still do listen to most of them, now by Sirius radio. 

Whenever we do I still think of that overnight, and of watching the game on the television at the weather station, beamed into that miraculous 6-foot wide satellite dish.  Those caribou that over-ran the Fairchild Peninsula that autumn, that little green Tremblay canoe, that blue nylon sprit sail.  R.M. Patterson and Dave Winfield. Go Blue Jays.