Got Wolves?

We do! Tim and Paul went out today to help a friend in the valley lay linoleum in their kitchen. When Tim got back tonight he said there was wolf tracks just down the old road less than 1km east of here. They first played on the road and hillside about 5km east of there at km 21. Tim says it looks from the tracks like a frolicking good time (my words, not his, guys) was had. There were tracks up the bank then what looks like sliding/tumbling marks back down. I hope it doesn't snow tonight! I want to take the snowmobile tomorrow and get some pictures. They then walked west toward the cabin and finally moved on to the lake less than a kilometre away from here. It was a little too dark to see how far they went out onto the lake and whether they crossed it or just made a wide berth around the front of the cabin on the ice. Maybe at that distance away they smelled us or heard a generator and decided to take a detour. We will never know. I do have a little faith now that we may get to hear them howl if they are back in the lake valley again. For the safety of our dogs it is good that they did not come any closer. We have been told by a previous resident that the pack will send a female out as a decoy to lure a dog out and when the dog gets far enough out the pack will cut off his retreat route and get the dog. She almost had it happen here one year when a new pup was lured down the trail by a wolf. Their older dog was making quite a racket and she went out to see what was going on. She saw the pup taking off up the trail and a black wolf sitting up the trail a ways. She was able to call the puppy back and all ended well. I hope we don't have to deal with that here for the sake of our senior citizen dogs.

The sun has not shone here for days, so the generator runs daily to keep charge in the batteries. We were away for last week and it was a pretty cloudy week. This week has started much the same and we are either looking forward to days on end of sunshine, and if we can't have that then we would rather have heavy snowfall. If it is cloudy, the clouds might as well be letting go of something. Looking at the Mackenzie forecast it looks like there may be some sun coming. That would be nice. None of our solar lights have not been on for quite some time now! The sun is now coming above the mountain across the lake again so when it does decide to shine we will get full benefit from it.

While we were out and seeing friends and family - we were asked many questions. We were more than happy to answer them in an effort to help others that don't already, understand why we would leave a perfectly comfortable life to come do this. For most aunts and uncles, the general consensus was that they had to live like this (hauling wood, melting snow, etc.) when they were growing up and would not go back to this kind of lifestyle. That is more than understandable. Everyone did agree that it was a great adventure and everyone looks forward to new postings on here. I'll definitely keep up with them now.

There was a small misunderstanding while we were out that we clarified today and had a good laugh about. I asked Heather where the skunk was that they had gotten while we were out, I was curious how big they were, etc. After a confused look, she said there was none. They had sent us an update that I was sure said they had gotten a skunk. It turns out that she was trying to say that after a day of checking traps that they had been skunked. So we are still at 1 lynx, 1 wolverine, 139 marten (128 for sale, 11 damaged in the traps by wolverine and other marten) many squirrels and zero skunk.