Call of the Wild by Grieve Guy

Author:Grieve, Guy [Grieve, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2015-04-15T22:00:00+00:00

24

DOYON

As the light faded and the cold increased I settled into a simple rhythm of existence. Each day I worked hard cutting wood and melting snow, gradually learning tricks to make my work more efficient. Before felling a tree I first cut the tops of little saplings and bushes that stuck out above the snow, then laid them out in a line where the tree would fall. The brush acted like a snowshoe, holding the tree up and preventing it from falling too deep into the snow, and making it much easier to work with. As the days passed I grew more confident, and began to feel that I was learning the ways of the wild white land of the Interior. The Interior is not easily accessible to the newcomer – there are no majestic peaks or crystal clear rivers, just thick bush and forest, dark sandy beaches and silty rivers that soon sink away as the cold winds of winter bear down from the north. The newcomer has to work hard to find its beauty, cutting through bush to reach the ridges and hills and snowshoeing for miles to discover the gentle balance of lake, river, forest and sky. My life had been pared down to its barest essentials – the cold had long since stopped my watch, and I was keeping time by daylight and the slow, clockwise movement of the plough around the pole star. The days passed slowly, mostly without event, and I savoured their simplicity.

Don had told me that I must work to maintain my trails, as they would become increasingly vital as more snow fell. So each day I walked down the portage to the slough, my snowshoes packing the newly fallen snow on to the hard, previously compressed snow. Overnight the trail would freeze, and become harder as the depth of compacted snow increased with each day’s progress. My woodgathering and hunting trails which had once led me across exhaustingly deep, powdery snow had also begun to freeze and harden down, and thus became increasingly useful. As the snow continued to fall it rose up on either side of my trails like English hedgerows, and increasingly the animals used my trails to get around. I had become the equivalent of a local government roads contractor, and as I passed along the trails each day I would observe what had passed before me.

The trees resounded with the shrill call of red squirrels, and their scampering footprints criss-crossed my trail. I followed the progress of the odd lone wolf or fox which used my trail as a short cut to the grass lake. There they hunted for arctic hare or willow grouse, which rested during the day on the sunny side of the lake. The grouse left beautiful patterns, the stiff feathers at the ends of their wings slashing delicate lines into the snow as they whirred into the air. I would stop whenever I saw these marks, and Fuzzy and I would hungrily search the nearby trees in the hope of catching the birds unawares.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.