WOW!

I am overwhelmed by the response to "One Snowflake in a Blizzard" from strangers, friends, and family. The comments and e-mails that we have received not only help me to feel that our efforts are worthwhile, but they also give me hope for the future, knowing there are so many kind, compassionate and caring people out there in the world. As some of you may know, last year we set out on a cross-country road trip, traveling 15,000 miles across Canada, south into New England, and then back across the northern tier of the United States. We began in a town called Hope (British Columbia). It seemed like an appropriate place to start a journey that we called, “Looking for Hope.”

It was not hope for ourselves that we searched to find, but hope for the future of our planet. We did not go with any preconceived idea – had no idea what “hope” would look like when we found it. Many find it in their own religious or political belief systems. I personally don’t find hope in exclusiveness. There are some things that should transcend the divisiveness that that can create. I find hope in small communities like Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia where we spotted a group of four people holding handmade signs. Bob said, “Oh I hope this is what I think it is.” It was. These were peace activists who had been doing this every Saturday morning. There were only four on this day because it was the Thanksgiving weekend. Usually there were more. As we stood talking with them, cars went by honking their horns in support, people waved, and passersby would signal thumbs up. I still remember that sunny fall day in Annapolis Royal, and those four bright, passionate people with their signs, calling for an end to war. One of those people was “Jane.” Yesterday we received a wonderful e-mail from Jane, letting us know that she has been reading our blog, and telling others about it. Then an e-mail came from a friend of hers in California. The previous night, Jane’s twin sister who lives in a log cabin in Ontario posted a supportive comment to “One Snowflake.” Talk about connecting dots across the continent.

Jane and Peace Activists in Annapolis, Nova Scotia

Another community that gave us reason to hope was the whole state of Vermont. So when I read about a 60-year old professor from Brattleboro, Vermont who was going to walk 500 miles to Washington D.C. to deliver a petition for the impeachment of Bush/Cheney I immediately went to his MARCH IN MY NAME website. That connection brought us in touch with others of like mind and we received supportive comments from them also. As Bob reflected at the completion of our trip, “There is a genuine recognition of the problems that we face and acknowledgement of the seriousness of those problems. There is also a deep commitment on the part of many of the people that we met, to do something about them.” They see the better world within our grasp, achievable by working together for the common good. That is where hope lies. It is what Paul Hawken writes about in his book, “Blessed Unrest.” We are connecting the dots.

Thank you all for your concern, support, and for spreading the word. PEACE

... P. L. Morningstar
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One Snowflake in a Blizzard

It’s easy to feel isolated on this Backroad when a heavy snowfall dumps a foot-and-a-half of snow overnight making our road impassable for several days, and an Arctic outflow sends the temperature plummeting to –11 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 with wind chill factor). We have no telephone lines, no cell phone towers, and our emergency battery/hand-crank radio receives only one station, CBC Radio One. When we turn on the radio and hear nothing but static, we know the power is off in Kitwanga, knocking even CBC off the air. So much for the emergency capabilities of our radio to keep us informed! Our satellite connection to the Internet is our lifeline, our connection to the rest of the world out there… especially now. After the big snowfall, I strapped on snowshoes to trudge a short distance to our satellite dish to dust off the accumulation of snow. I stepped onto the snow and immediately sank 18-inches into the soft, powdery stuff. My progress to and from the cabin looked more like a ploughed trench than a snowshoe trail. But we got back online and I uploaded new postings to our two blogs. It is times like this that I begin to wonder if anyone is even reading what Bob and I write. Are we just throwing words into the wind? The communication pipeline is filled with news, entertainment, information of every sort, millions and millions of websites, chat rooms and personal blogs. Unless someone posts a comment or sends an e-mail, we have no way of knowing if what we are putting out there is worth the effort; or if our words are lost, only to accumulate on the Worldwide Web with all the others. Not unlike one small snowflake in a blizzard - a blizzard of words and images.

... P. L. Morningstar
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Northern Exposure Redux

Long before I headed north to live, I enjoyed watching the TV series Northern Exposure, set in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska. Cicely was an isolated community of colorful characters and misfits, who even in their eccentricities managed to form a supportive bond with each other. Now that I live in these northern latitudes, all I have to do is look around to find those same kind of unique individuals that entertained a television audience with 110 episodes over a period of five years.

There is of course, Eric’s Garage in Kitwanga where the same group of guys have been meeting for coffee twice a day for years. Then there is “Chris the Swiss” who lives just down the road from the garage. He came to Canada from Switzerland 58 years ago but still speaks with a Germanic accent. He has lived in Kitwanga for 38 years, raised his kids here… “But they’ve all moved away” and his wife is gone. He has a barn and a few cows, “It’s something to get me up in the morning,” he says with a shrug. He also butchers wild game for people and runs a backhoe for hire, which he used to dig the water line that runs from our creek to the water turbine. Every time he sees us he waves a hand in friendly greeting.

Then there was Ken, the 7-feet-plus Jack-of-all-trades. I say “was” because sometime during our cross-country trip this fall, he closed shop and left town. In his mid-fifties, he had done a little bit of everything; lived on a sailboat in the Desolation Sound, did some logging and panned for gold. He was well spoken and bright. He owned – or managed – the Bulldog Towing Company, auto salvage, truck repair, used car sales, and the local U-Haul franchise. Used car sales sounds a bit grand for the tiny row of five cars in varying degrees of decrepitude that used to line the chain link fence. They were a lot like what we used to call “island cars.” They didn’t look too good – a little rust here and there – but they ran, most of the time anyway. Ken and his employee, “The Mexican,” salvaged auto parts from wrecked cars and used them to fix up old clunkers. When they got one up and running, it went into the “Used Car Lot.” It could take up to a year of salvaging parts to get one car ready, but time doesn’t mean a whole lot here.

“Dumpster Dan” isn’t here any more either. He used to oversee the public dump just outside of town. A small man with dark eyes and hair, he had a wonderful French-Canadian accent, and his dog loved to chase after the eagles, ravens, and rats that competed over the piles of refuse. “Dumpster Dan” is either in jail or on the lam – depending upon whom you talk to at any given time. Either way, it doesn’t look good.

Then there was the obituary I spotted in The Northern Connector – a free newspaper that arrives in our mailbox once a week. We usually use it for fire starter, but this time I opened it and saw a headline that read, “Northwest loses a character as Mighty Moe passes away.” Mighty Moe, whose real name was Maurice Beaudoin, was born in 1934 in Swastika, Ontario. (Yes, there really is such a place. It was named after the Swastika Gold Mine staked in the autumn of 1907.) He got into acting at an early age “after an injury hampered his ability to do school work.” No mention of the kind of injury, or where he did his acting. The article continues, “While living in Ontario he trapped and was a prospector before joining the merchant marine in the 1950s, a career that took him around the Great Lakes.” From there he came to northern B.C. to work in an asbestos mine in the Cassiar region, then bought a trap line, and slowly got into the tourism business at Cotton Lake. “Officially it is known as Cotton Lake. But to the man who lived beside the lake just off Hwy37 north of Dease Lake for years it was Lac de Mighty Moe and the resort he ran was Mighty Moe’s Place.” I guess he was quite the promoter… when speaking about an event that was to take place at the resort, he admitted, “It’s really just the second one but I call it the 10th annual canoe race because people take it more seriously.” After 25 years at Mighty Moe’s Place, he moved permanently to Terrace in the mid-1990s when he, “lost his resort through circumstances never fully explained.” But that didn’t stop him from promoting tourism. “For several years, Beaudoin camped out at the highway rest stop between Terrace and New Remo, decorating his aging blue pick-up truck in flags and stuffed animals. There he’d talk to tourists…” until the Dept. of Transportation blocked off the entrance to the rest stop. His final years were spent at the Willows Apartment Complex, but he still drove around town in his pick-up and dropped in often at the Happy Gang Centre (Senior Citizen Center). Oh yes, and he briefly hired himself out as a male stripper. (Mighty Moe photo credit: Dustin Quezada/The Northern Connector)

Latest local news? The Kitwanga Coffee Cup has hired a “Pastry Chef” from Kansas. Northern Exposure redux? Of course, I guess that makes us part of the cast of characters too.

... P. L. Morningstar
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Dancing Feet

The Artic chill is here. Last night’s temperature dropped below zero, and despite Bob’s getting up every two to three hours to put more wood on the fire, it was only 55 degrees in the cabin when we got up. A friend tells us that by next week we will be at twenty-two degrees below zero. On days like this the warmth of the woodstove cannot reach much further than a few feet. So today was spent huddled beneath feather comforters. The quickness with which northern temperatures can drop is a reminder of the risks that come with the territory. Risks that occasionally end in death.

Soon after we moved here we began hearing stories about Edith Mary Essex, the postmistress of Cedarvale when that community was a thriving village with a sawmill, school, and general store. A cable ferry crossed the Skeena River then and a Canadian Pacific Railroad brought passengers, supplies and the mail. Edith never married; she cared for her parents until they died and then lived alone the rest of her own life. But she had a lover who was twenty-two years older than she – Marice Dahlquist, a wanderer who had left behind wife and family. He died in 1951, years before she did, but in a small fenced cemetery tucked into the corner of a farmer’s field, the two are buried side by side. Every day Edith walked a mile-and-a-half from her cabin to the wood-framed store by the side of the river, to sort the mail and take care of customers. Only a shell of the building (photo above) remains to mark this once thriving community at the end of our backroad. Edith was also a poet, with two small locally published books to her credit. The poems, often humorous, were about the seasons, nature, and her neighbors. Like the small community she lived in, Edith is now gone. In January 1996, during a frigid winter storm, Edith evidently got up during the night to put more wood on the fire and fell. A neighbor found her the next morning, frozen on the cabin floor. She was 89-years old. Her epitaph reads: In Memory of the Country Postmistress, “She had a singing heart and dancing feet, but they were never free till now.” I would like to have known Edith.
... P. L. Morningstar

Alarm in the Night

The shrill ringing of an alarm clock disrupts the night. It is 1 a.m. Bob pulls back the covers and staggers out of bed, flashlight in hand. I can hear him lift the plate off the woodstove, and the thump of wood as he refills the firebox. The outside temperature at bedtime stood at a frigid 3-degrees Fahrenheit. The fire has to be kept going. Half asleep as I am, thoughts go round and round in my head about fire bells in the night, and these dark times in my country. I think about the courageous few that have heeded the alarm and are trying to save the Constitution from the corruption and abuse of power by the Bush/Cheney administration.

John Nirenberg, March in my Name, 24 Jan 2008, after a meeting with an assistant to Congresswoman Pelosi:

Impeachment is divisive they say; there is only one year left, they say; the hearings are getting at the underlying causes, they say. Hoping for a return to the Constitution is just that, hope. And that’s all they have - except for fear - which is so pervasive in the Democratic play book that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will go down in history as the American Chamberlain, ceding to the Republican bullies their abuses, their violations of the Constitution, their lies, corruption and war crimes.

Through the continued silence on impeachment, when they know impeachable crimes have been committed, the Congress is complicit. Not just Democrats but all Republicans, too. They are witness to the silent alteration of the Constitution; they are witness to the corruption and unethical behavior and in their silence give consent. Even if the votes aren’t there they must force each and every Representative to declare for their constituents and history just how they stood when the facts are brought to light. It isn’t a partisan move, it’s an historic moment of truth.

The Washington State Legislature Bill SJM 8016 has passed committee. It calls on Congress to initiate impeachment hearings for the President and Vice President. One of the sponsors, Senator Eric Oemig, (D-Kirkland) posted this statement on his website:

My constituents have spoken. At this crossroad, they want action. They want us to exercise all means to honor our oaths and protect the Constitution. The means provided to a state legislature is a joint memorial. This joint memorial exhorts Congress to invoke the means that the Constitution provided to them to preserve the Republic.

My great fear is that if we fail to pass this memorial, we will tell the citizens of Washington State that we are as unwilling as Congress to draw a line and take a stand.

It is never too late to do right. But some opportunities can be lost. When this President leaves office, a window closes, and his stain will bleed deeper into the pages of our history.

Remember, we are not trying to get rid of a president. That will happen naturally. We are defending the Constitution. And, defending the Constitution will become monumentally harder if we do not impeach.

Congresswoman Pelosi says that impeachment is off the table; that it is counter-productive; it would be a distraction from the “important” work to be done by Congress. Others think it is too late, that this administration only has another year in office, and they can’t do much in that time. Think again.

The United States has blocked the release of a landmark assessment of oil and gas activity in the Arctic. Scientists at the release of the censored report in Norway said there was “huge frustration” that the US had derailed a science-based effort to manage the race for the vast energy reserves of the Arctic. Earlier this month, the Bush administration drew widespread criticism when it said it would auction off 30 million acres on 6 February, of the remote Chukchi Sea, one of the last intact habitats of the polar bear. The sale to oil and gas companies has been rushed through before Congress can complete efforts to protect the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, a move that would complicate efforts to sell its habitat to major oil companies. Kassie Siegel, the climate director at the US-based Centre for Biological Diversity said the censoring of the Arctic report was typical of the actions of the White House. “It fits a pattern of downplaying, denying, and suppressing climate science at every turn. It’s all part of the Bush-Cheney strategy of handing out as many fossil fuel entitlements as quickly as they can in their final months in office.”

Bob resets the alarm clock for 3:30 a.m. and climbs back into bed. He knows his vigilance is necessary. Once the fire goes out, it takes a lot of time and effort to rebuild. So he listens for the alarm and tends the fire throughout the night. As I drift off to sleep, I think about what a high school history teacher once said…”The Constitution of the United States is the heart and soul of our country.” The alarm bells are ringing. We are in danger of losing our nation’s heart and soul, and once gone, we may never get it back.
... P. L. Morningstar

Tracking

Today turned out to be a bright, sunny day so in the afternoon we decided to go for a walk and see if we could find evidence of the wolf and moose that we had seen yesterday. It had been relatively warm yesterday but was now several degrees below freezing so we really weren't sure what we would find.

First we found the distinct tracks of the moose where it had crossed the meadow in front of the cabin. Then out on the edge of the road we found wolf tracks. Big guy, at least 5 inches across on the fore paws. Most probably the wolf we had seen last year that Morningstar photographed, and the one we caught a quick glimpse of yesterday. We followed the mixed prints west along the backroad and eventually found where each had come out of the woods and finally gone their separate ways back into the woods.

Then we passed the spot in the road where a beaver and the road maintenance crew have been going head to head. Last fall the beaver dammed a culvert that runs under the backroad, creating a nice little lake that covered a good portion of the road. The road crew came along and cleared out the culvert. The beaver rebuilt his dam… water covered the road again. The road crew came back – put a metal grate across the culvert. Even better for the beaver. This continued until we left on a two-month road trip across the country, so we had no idea of what we would find today. Well, it looks like the beaver is winning the battle. He is on the other side of the road now and there is evidence of his recent work – fresh chips, and pointy stumps. In the spring when the snow melts, I’ll bet water will once again cover the road.

On the way back we decided to look in on our own beavers at the pond adjacent to the cabin. We didn’t see any activity, but we did discover more wolf tracks, crossing the ice near the beaver lodge and continuing into the woods directly behind our cabin. Now we have a better idea about what has been holding Yu-Ling's attention at the back window these last few nights.

... Bob Weimer

Moose Track

Wolf tracking Moose...

Sourdough Bread

Over the years I have enjoyed several episodes of baking bread. Usually sourdough bread. In each of these episodes there have been some sort of difficulties to overcome. The first winter when we lived on the sailboat and were cruising in the Pacific Northwest, the main problem was getting a good sourdough starter. This was solved when we landed at Ganges Harbor on Saltspring Island. The folks at the small bakery in town generously shared a bit of their starter. Then it was a matter of calibrating the propane galley oven. A couple of oven thermometers later and we had that solved. Then there was the problem of the persistent ambient humidity aboard a boat and its effects on the flour - but it was always worth the trouble. The smell of bread baking filled the boat, and eating bread fresh from the oven with homemade soup was outrageous.

So now we are living on dry land again and it is winter and baking sourdough bread was sounding like a good idea. A few new difficulties of course, but that was part of the attraction. The sourdough starter was solved because we had picked some up at the King Arthur Bakery in Vermont last fall. It was supposedly a direct descendent of a line of yeast from the 1700s. The flour was from the Fairhaven Co-operative Flour Mill in Bellingham, Washington, some of the best. Then there is the matter of the woodstove. The oven heat varies depending on the temperature in the cabin as well as the vigor of the fire in the firebox and maybe depending on what's on the radio. I still have the thermometers from the boat days and they are now hanging in the oven. They don't agree with each other and neither agrees with the one built into the door of the oven. O.K. The instructions say preheat the oven to 350 F. So I throw in a couple of good sized chunks of wood and begin mixing ingredients. After the first rising the temperature is still too low so I throw in a couple of more sticks. Soon it's too hot. In fact it's too hot in the cabin. Open the window. Second rising is coming along nicely. Good time for a nap and of course the fire dies way down. And the cabin is getting cold. Close the window, more wood on the fire. Finally my three thermometers average something like 350 F, in goes the bread. That's when we see the wolf. Not much of a sighting but lots of excitement for us. Then a moose appears, looking anxious and coming from the direction where we saw the wolf going. Lots of drama. O.K. I lost track of the bread and the oven temperature. The smell of toasting bread brought me back to an appropriate focus. A quick rescue and it was cooling on the side rack and Morningstar was making the soup. Supper turned out great. Homemade soup and slightly singed sourdough bread and much talk about wolves and moose.

... Bob Weimer
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Chinook Wind

A warm Chinook Wind swept into our region a few days ago. The temperature rose above the freezing point; icicles turned into liquid drips and puddles of water now surround the cabin. The softening snow, a foot deep on the roof, slid off, rumbling like a mini-avalanche. Last year when we first experienced this event, we thought it was an earthquake. The whole cabin shook. Poor Yu-Ling. This time it happened in the middle of the night, waking us all up. Yu-Ling sought refuge under the bed. We went back to sleep. I can see bare ground and moss exposed beneath the trees. Yesterday’s high reached a balmy 43 degrees Fahrenheit. And the warmer weather has brought out the wildlife. We saw a lone wolf crossing the driveway, and a moose made his way across the field in the direction of ice-free Stronach Creek. The moose’s winter diet consists of twigs and bark of deciduous trees, such as the red osier dogwood and willow that grow along the streambed. In fact “moose” derives from the Algonquian’s name moz, which means “twig eater.”

But there is still plenty of snow… four-feet of snow doesn’t disappear overnight. Bob is busy making sourdough bread. It will go well with a bowl of homemade soup. It may look like March outside, but the forecast calls for lowering temperatures (down to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) and snow flurries. Winter is not over yet.
... P. L. Morningstar
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Seven Sisters

Seven Sisters Mountain, backdrop to the cabin.

The Cabin

The moment I saw this cabin, sitting at the end of a dirt track that curved across an open meadow. I knew this was home. Nestled in a grove of evergreen, it was dwarfed by the jagged peaks of the Seven Sisters Mountain, four of which are over 8,200 feet. Bob and I looked at each other and agreed, “This is it!”

The cabin was hand built in 1987 by a recently arrived immigrant from Germany. He came with his young wife and two small children. It took him two years to complete the cabin. It seemed that he was in no hurry, explaining to us that fishing, hunting, trapping, and exploring always got in the way of work. I’m not sure his little family felt quite so cavalier. During the warmer months they lived in a tent, and during the winter they lived in a nearby vacant cabin that someone had offered to them out of concern for the children. Talking with the children who are now young adults, there are undisguised bitter feelings about their early years of isolation and hardship. In spite of that, anyone seeing the cabin can appreciate that it is a labor of love and craftsmanship. It is built with cedar logs selectively cut from the local forest. The method used for joining the logs is called Swedish cope because of its origin. The log bottoms are cupped with a gutter adze and trimmed along scribed lines so that each log fits snugly upon the log below. This construction is very sturdy and provides an airtight seal that sheds moisture extremely well.

The two-story cabin’s inside measurements are 20-feet by 24-feet, for a total of 960 square feet. The large open room downstairs serves as kitchen, dining, and living room, with our bed tucked into the back corner, and a partial wall that provides privacy for the bathroom with claw foot tub. The upstairs room that once was the children’s domain has become our work area and library. There are windows everywhere, giving us views of mountains, meadow, and forest. The first summer we were here, I sat at the writing desk that looked out over the meadow and watched as a black bear climbed into the crabapple tree, balancing on multiple branches and stretching to reach apples at the end of spindly tips. Amazing – such balance and agility – but there was also a very surprised look on his face when he fell out of the tree with a resounding thump!

The second-floor stair opening measures only 30-inches by 22-inches, which presented a problem when we had six big pieces of furniture to move up there. Solution? We took out the front windows on the second floor, hung a heavy duty pulley and line over the top beam, attached one end of the line to a sling that held the piece of furniture, the other end was tied to the trailer hitch on the Jeep. Bob stood on a ladder to guide the furniture past the log butts and I was at the wheel of the Jeep. Together we successfully got the furniture upstairs, although a little surgery was required to get the loveseat through the window.

Interior view of cabin.

Ooops!

A little surgery is required.

Red Barn in Snow Fog

A red barn on the Cedarvale Backroad is muted in snow fog.

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Requiem For A Red Squirrel

Yu-Ling lays stretched out on the windowsill. His head hangs forlornly over the edge, and if ever a cat could look sad, he does. It has been three days now since we have seen Dancer, the red squirrel who lives in the spruce tree next to the cabin. We are afraid she has fallen victim to a marten, fisher, or coyote. On the last day that we saw her, she had taken a dried apricot from my hand. It was a big moment… having finally gained her trust. We always worry about whether our human interaction with these small creatures makes them more vulnerable – but there is no evidence that her demise happened anywhere near the cabin. We have to accept that we live in a wilderness habitat, and squirrels are the natural prey for larger predators. Even so, we miss Dancer. She brightened our winter days.

... P. L. Morningstar

Yu-Ling and Dancer eye to eye.

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Living in the Shadow of Mountains

Woodcock Farm, our nearest neighbor on the Backroad.

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MARCH IN MY NAME Update

On January 7, John Nirenberg wrote in his blog, “With braces now on my knee and ankle, and moleskin wrapped around three toes I’m rockin and rollin down the home stretch (while Frank, at 72-years old, just moves along whistling Dixie). Obviously (miraculously) we’re making great time.” John is now in Washington D.C. after walking 500-miles from Boston to petition Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi to pursue impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. No word yet on whether Congresswoman Pelosi will meet with him or not, but on his website he lists his schedule for tomorrow. “On Saturday, January 12th, we'll be starting out at 9:00 at the National Arboretum and head to Union Station and then to the 12:30 rally at the National Archives where the Constitution is housed.” There are many individuals across the United States who are trying their best to save the freedoms and ideals that the Constitution guarantees… freedoms that we are in danger of losing if this administration is allowed to leave office without being held accountable for their lies and misuse of power.

The media covers the Presidential campaign like it is the only thing that is going on, while soldiers and civilians continue to die every day, and bombs continue to fall. The war drums still beat for expansion of the war on terrorism to include Iran. Meanwhile individuals like 60-years old John and 72-years old Frank are out there walking for all of us. They receive little media attention for their efforts. Like all the anti-war activists who continue to hold peace vigils. In an article (Years and Counting, a Peace Vigil Stands Firm) on the Common Dreams website comes this report by Marilyn Gardner. In Needham, Massachusetts, a group has been holding peace vigils from 4 to 5 pm every Saturday for the past five years. Similar peace initiatives exist in other Boston suburbs - Arlington, Newton, and Milton, among them - and in cities and towns stretching from Chatham, N.Y., to Fort Walton Beach, Fla., and from Stamford, Conn., to Seattle. Not all groups stage vigils. Some hold public events with invited speakers. The reporter of this story added her own thoughts, “For some of us who have passed the vigil-keepers many times in the past five years, their presence serves a purpose that goes beyond their specific cause. Their constancy and steadfast devotion raise humbling questions for the rest of us, such as: What cause do I believe in fervently? And what am I doing to support and promote it?"

... P. L. Morningstar
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Wild, Untamed Music

A year ago, on an early January day, we were enjoying mid-morning cups of coffee when I glanced out the front window just as a lone wolf emerged from the birch trees between the cabin and beaver pond. Large and cinder grey, it strode across the snow-covered meadow, crossed the driveway and disappeared into the forest beyond. (the photo – though not too good – is all I managed to get). If I had not been looking out the window at that exact moment, we would never have known it was there but for tracks in the snow. It was the first wild wolf either of us had seen and quite a thrill. A few days later, we heard a series of long howls nearby, ending with a deep harmonic tremolo, then an echoing overtone that reverberated inside of us. I found this description in Barry Lopez’s book, “Of Wolves and Men.”

It was wild, untamed music and it echoed from the hillsides and filled the valleys. It was a queer shivering feeling along my spine It was not a feeling of fear, you understand, but a sort of tingling, as if there was hair on my back and it was hackling. ….Alda Orton, Alaskan trapper

... P. L. Morningstar
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Sunshine on Birch

The sun shone today giving us a clear view of Woodcock Mountain and its heavy covering of snow. I could see across the meadow to the thick grove of birch trees, beautiful in their winter bareness. Paper birch is an important winter food for many forest animals including deer, moose, snowshoe hare, porcupine and beaver. It also makes excellent firewood – to which we can heartily attest. Many First Nations people in British Columbia used birch bark for baskets and canoes. They drank the sap as a medicine for colds. For all its usefulness, the beauty of a birch grove on a sunny winter day, and the pleasure that it brings to me is enough.

It is 5 p.m. and dark outside. Bob just brought in more firewood for the stove. The temperature has already dropped to –10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit). Looks like it will be another cold night.

... P. L. Morningstar
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Snowshoes

Lots of new snow on the ground this morning. Added to the snowfall we’ve experienced over the past three days, this certainly put us over the top as far as getting around. We got the fire going in the woodstove, ate breakfast, and then settled down to check the online news… Oh! Oh! No Internet connection. Probably too much snow on the satellite dish. This had happened last year too. The snow was way too deep for boots alone – almost three-feet - so out came the snowshoes for the first time this winter. After a short trudge from the cabin, I swept the satellite dish clear of snow with the kitchen broom, and now I’m back enjoying the warmth of the stove, a fresh cup of coffee, and the world news online. It’s the little things that count. And the snowshoes hang on a hook by the door, ready for the weeks ahead.

Note: The snowshoes pictured here are a little too heavy and cumbersome for our use. Instead we use high-tech aluminum snowshoes from REI… lightweight and efficient, but not very picturesque. The wood snowshoes decorate a wall inside the cabin. ... Bob

Yu-Ling

Sammy was Morningstar's cat for 17 years. Bob knew him for only 11 years. He accompanied us on all of our adventures; living on a sailboat, then an island, and finally here to the wilderness of northern British Columbia. When he died in August of 2007 it was a great sadness for both of us. Now almost 4 months later and after a lot of grieving, we began to feel the need to fill the empty place he had left. The cabin in winter can be a lonely place at times, and Sammy was always there with his big golden eyes and crook in his tail, to supervise the bedtime rituals, perform his duties as morning alarm clock, and fill our lives with his cuddly affection. So after shopping in Terrace on Saturday, we decided to stop at the Terrace Animal Shelter just to see what was there. We weren't expecting too much… this was just a start. But what we found was an eight-month old kitten that immediately seemed right. “Kitten” is a little misleading regardless of his eight months… he is a BIG cat with a loud purr, long hair and a huge sweeping tail. (Searching on the internet, we came across a description of the Maine Coon Cat, which seems to fit our guy.) He is quiet, gentle and seems to be very bright and alert. His eyes are blue, but show golden or red depending on the light. After a little playtime at the shelter to see how we got along, we signed the adoption papers and headed home. On getting him back to the cabin, he searched the whole place thoroughly then settled down in one or the other of our laps. We had his stamp of approval. Morningstar named him Yu-Ling after an ancient Chinese poet who chose solitude over fame. None of Yu-Ling’s poems are recorded and he is known only because another poet (Wu Wei) mentions him.

On his first full day at the cabin Yu-Ling spent most of his time sitting with Morningstar as she worked at her computer. His alertness and quick moves to investigate new sounds suggests that he will be a good mouser. Sammy was a great companion, but he was not a good mouser. In fact, he was afraid of mice – though to be fair, Sammy had never seen a mouse before moving to the cabin. When we moved in, we found that deer mice had already assumed ownership. We were too soft hearted to use killer mousetraps and opted for the catch and release method… unfortunately they all ran back to the cabin. We didn't know then what we know now - adult deer mice displaced one mile from where they were trapped are generally able to return to their home nests within a day. We were just releasing them across the road. After a week listening to the sound of skittering feet in the night, and the sight of deer mice peeking out from under the stove and cupboards, we were forced to change our modus operandi. Yes, there was Sammy – but he was not interested in catching mice, only in waking us up so we could deal with the ones that were eating his cat food! Hence the VICTOR wooden mousetraps. They were being sold by the boxfuls at the local general store, so we knew we were not alone in dealing with those cute but pesky critters. We tried not to look too carefully at the large lustrous black eyes, dainty nose, and long whiskers when we gathered the sprung traps in the morning, before putting the dead bodies in the field for the ravens and crows.

Okay Yu-Ling… it’s your turn.

... Bob and Morningstar
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