Caribou was another mainstay. Very good. We found that if you looked closely at the caribou meat there were a fair number of parasites and worms in it. But that seemed to be that case everywhere in the area -so we just didn’t look too closely.
The local deer here are about the size of caribou, maybe a little smaller. 150 pounds would be a very big one.
And bighorn sheep on rare occasions. No relative to mutton whatsoever- incredibly delicious.
On the home front, despite constant torrential rain, life around the cabin has sped up slightly due to it being summer and it not really getting dark out anymore. Everything is busy, including the other people of the world, who seem to be driven to find ways to make me busy too.
Let me tell you a bit about life in the country.
Squirrels are nesting somewhere under the eaves, but not in any place that’s bothering me. They do skitter around in the walls a bit and carry on. I’m just glad to see them around, because I know when they disappear it means something worse has pushed them out.
Relevant to animal life- some unfinished business. I don’t like unfinished business. And there’s a whole lot of unfinished business on this journal. When I disappeared last summer I left quite a few things hanging, right around the time I caught that 100-ish pound halibut from the kayak, which Bobrown challenged me to post a photo of. As far as I know he never came back to look at it. So that is in this post here
Weasel Forges Ahead
@bobrown14 if you’re around these days and missed it the first time.
Some of the hanging things were left by members who have since disappeared, and it seems almost pointless to go back to those posts from a year ago. Still, it always sort of gnaws at me a bit. So I’ll try to at least recap how things went last year and some of the reasons I wandered off from the forum.
I’ve avoided posting this because it will take so long to write that our eyes are going to glaze over from the experience. But I feel like it has to be done somehow. So just skip this if you like....
So last year there was a local rodent plague the likes of which no one had seen, and I was catching mice by the dozens. Until early summer that is, when suddenly there were no more mice. The squirrels disappeared from the cabin too, and most of the birds. It got ominously silent except for some mysterious scuttling in the night.
I had my suspicions, but it was a month before I caught the first rat. I’d never had rats here before. War ensued and I managed to wipe them all out by late fall.
Around the same time the rats were first casting a hush over things, I got distracted by trying to figure out what new animal was living in my roof. I’d started hearing very strange noises in early spring- some sort of creature shuffling back and forth under the shakes on the roof, which are only separated from the interior by about an inch of wood and a layer of tarpaper.
One shuffler turned into many shufflers by early summer, accompanied by occasional strange chirring sounds. Shuffle shuffle chirrrr shuffle shuffle shuffle. I envisioned a couple dozen miniature penguins shuffling back and forth in there.
Eventually it came to me, and I went and lay out there one stoned night and watched as dozens of bats came and went from the roof.
I like bats. And I have to say there were basically zero mosquitos at my place last year. Apparently one bat can eat 1000 bugs an hour, and 10,000 in a night. So I love them for that. And we like to keep the same hours so you’d think we would get along great that way too. But unfortunately, when they come home in the morning, after being out bugging all night, they seem to feel the need to shuffle back and forth incessantly for hours. I think it’s got to do with the baby bats, aka pups. No doubt those pups are fussing around and wanting milk in the morn.
So around 6-10 am, which is really when I sleep best if allowed, it was always too noisy, even with a pillow jammed over my head.
I also started having some bear trouble around that time. To the extent that many nights I’d open the front door and see a trail of huge paw prints up my front steps and back down again. And I had a few things chewed up when I was away from home.
So I moved into one of my outbuildings for the summer- my trimming/jamming space. That was good.
Until one morning in late summer at 4am when I awoke to catastrophic sounds from the main cabin. Stumbling out into the dim light of dawn I saw something that looked like an 8’ tall hairy black Sasquatch walking around inside, swiping at the shelves and counters. There was the thunder of furniture breaking, glass shattering - everything in the place was getting smashed.
In hindsight I realized the bear had pushed the front door open, then later accidentally closed it on itself, gotten worried and was going around flailing at the walls and windows trying to force a way out.
It remains one of the most surreal sights I’ve ever seen, watching that hairy being walking around like a man- decimating my place as I stood there naked staring through the windows with bleary eyes trying to wake up. Fresh out of some dream and straight into a weirder one.
I ran up and opened the back door so the bear had a way out. Instead it chose to walk out through the front window. This apparently happened in slow motion as I watched the ancient glass of that window slowly bulge out before vaporizing into a billion splinters. The glass shards blew across a large section of my yard and still continue to regularly cause bloodshed on bare feet, even though I took a shop vac and a fine toothed comb to that entire section of the yard.
A giant head appeared and looked both ways, before a creature that looked about as big as a wooly mammoth slowly oozed out and dropped to the ground. It walked out into the yard and disappeared in the fog.
Two hours later I was standing in the rubble still trying to compute where to start, when it came back and thumped into the front door.
The fact that it came right back like that, in broad daylight, after having had every chance to leave, clearly defined the situation I was in.
I ran out the back door and around and shot it, aiming for the neck. It toppled over and then fell completely upside down with its legs in the air before flopping over, looking dead. Just like a bad movie, the gun jammed when I tried to chamber a second round, and the bear got back on to its feet and walked off, making terrible gurgling noises.
The worst scenario had occurred! Man I felt so fucking awful. I followed it a little ways till it went into some very thick brush, then decided to leave it for a while. I assumed I would find it dead if I just left it. An hour later I tracked its trail for a mile or so, into a ridiculously thick patch of small spruce trees criss-crossed with deadfall. I could hear it in there gasping. I taped a can of pepper spray to the end of the rifle- figuring I’d have a better chance of shoving that into its mouth than getting a shot off in such close quarters, and macheted my way in there. But I couldn’t see more than two feet ahead of me, it started pissing rain, and I decided things were getting too weird.
I hung around for an hour outside the thicket listening to it groaning, and hoping it would come out. At one point I stopped hearing it, figured it was dead, and chopped a trail in there. All I could find was blood, but it could have been anywhere in there and I wouldn’t see it. I felt sick about the whole thing.
So I went to work late that day.
Next day I borrowed a friend’s dog and we tried to locate it, but no luck.
So that was that. I felt just awful that this animal had been desperate and hungry enough to go this far, and instead of ending it quickly I’d caused it to suffer much worse.
I’ve lived around bears all my life. Like all animals with the possible exception of rats- I count them as friends to some extent. I’ve had hundreds of encounters with them- mostly peaceful with a few that weren’t, and seen quite a few shot when things went wrong. This experience was really just... dark. Quite depressing. I kept thinking of what extremes would push a bear to go this far. It had been an unusually cold winter the year before- followed by a poor salmon run last summer. Did this basically amount to a form of suicide?
About three weeks later I opened the door late at night to find another huge bear, standing on my top step investigating a shelf that’s above my door. My face was about armpit level in a wall of black fur.
I slammed the door on the furry wall and braced it- listened to it smashing things up out there. Then it wandered out into the yard and smashed around a bit at one of my sheds. I ran out and grabbed the animals from their pens and brought us all in the house to wait. It came back to the front door an hour later and I ran out the back and around, and this time shot it between the eyes. If there’s anything ‘happy’ at all in this wretched story it’s that this time the bear dropped dead instantly. Not even a twitch.
We grow the biggest black bears in the world up this way and this one was a real giant. On dissection it turned out to be the same bear as I’d shot before, not a second one. The first shot had found its way right through its throat and the foreleg behind it, without hitting anything vital or seeming to cause any lasting injury. On the day of its last visit I saw no sign that it was limping or in ill health. Looking at the size of its neck I realized it had been a bad target, but at the time I’d been in a big hurry.
The other thing we found was that the fat was about 5 inches thick on its behind. So it may have been hungry, but I don’t think it was starving. Somehow I felt better about the situation after that. Rightly or wrongly it makes me think that the bear takes a little of the blame for its death for its own stupidity. Or maybe it was just driven to extremes by the smell of food in my place. I don’t know what I could have done differently- other than pull off a better shot that first time, obviously.
My girlfriend and I skinned it, processed all the meat, and rendered down almost 20 gallons of fat. Its a horrendous amount of work. I’ve done it twice before and had sworn never again- but my gf was not so jaded and we didn’t want to waste it.
We ran out of steam before tanning the fur, but it is fleshed, salted, and dried and hangs in the cabin for ‘some day when I have time’.
The gods weren’t done smiting me yet. Right near the tail end of this all-consuming incident, a storm came along and felled a large spruce tree on the cabin. It was a great big branchy scratchy thing that didn’t cause any harm but lay on the roof completely covering one side of the house and sticking 30 feet in the air past the peak. I was so busy that it stayed there for a month before I got around to sawing it up and dealing with the mess.
That same storm fell a tree on my power shed and knocked out the power. That accursed shed was always a big source of stress anyway. Long before I even moved here its foundation had rotted out, and the tension of the lines on the power pile attached to it had started tilting it sideways. The roof leaked like a sieve, the main breaker panel was usually wet, and there were mushrooms growing on the walls.
By the time of this storm it was leaning so badly that I feared it toppling at any moment. There was always the same reaction when people saw it. ‘Holy F@@k!’
I knew the power company wasn’t going to sign off on the Leaning Tower of HolyFuck - so I was finally forced to take a week and fix up the shed to sub ‘holy fuck’ levels. The plants were pretty much in the cold and dark for this time but I rigged up a car battery with a light bulb on a timer to at least give some structure to their days.
I’ll mention one last mini catastrophe that happened around this time before the gods finally relented. I was inside my house on a dark and stormy night and heard a bunch of snarling outside. I ran out and saw in the flashlight beam a large coon that had busted into the pen of my beloved chief bunny, grabbed him after a short battle, and was scaling the fence bunny in mouth. When I yelled it dropped the bunny in the mud and ran off. Bunny was dead, laying in the muck and pissing rain like a limp old rag with no heart beat, covered in mud and coon slobber. I carried him into the cabin and as I was going in the door he started kicking and suddenly his heart started up- in a big way. I could hear it hammering from the other side of the room.
I would have had a hard time believing this if I hadn’t seen it happen. I looked around the internet a little and found similar stories of this - including a vet that gave CPR to a bunny for over four minutes before it started up again and completely recovered.
Bunny is fine. Maybe he seems a bit mellower than before. But it’s hard to tell, he was already so mellow he could easily be mistaken for a living stuffy toy. Knowing him he almost certainly hopped right up to that coon to say hi and lick its nose.
There was actually a bunch of other unlucky crap that happened last year as well, the glorious Chinese Year of the Cock. But nothing with any entertainment value.
During this time the plants suffered quite a lot and there wasn’t much to journal about in the plant dept. so I wasn’t around much.
I’ll be sure to sacrifice a chicken or something.
...you have a way with telling your stories of woe, with a sense of humour...
..When I lived back country, I had to shoot three bears, and and can attest to the damage they do once indoors...ate 2 and would have eaten the third, had I found it sooner...man, can't imagine not having venison in the freezer for the winter and following spring /summer ...hope things are going well with the eye...cheerz...h00k...
Must have felt a bit like Job a few times there. Lol! 
Weasel thanks for the years update, great post. My life seems much easier after reading that.
. Glad my life makes yours seem easy. Actually I live in paradise for the most part- just not much entertainment value in posting that aspect. And yeah this year has been much better in all respects. I’ll take a Chinese dog over a Chinese cock anytime. Also that episode with my eye really puts things in perspective, so to speak, and after my latest stint in the city I appreciate living here more than ever.