Never Alone, page 22
As I’d hoped, my weight loss seems to have slowed significantly, and my lips are whole again, thank god. My thighs are still discolored, but the skin is growing back over the scabs. I don’t know how, but I seem to have finally vanquished the throbbing welts.
Every night is colder and I get closer to the fire, until eventually I spend the evenings straddling it, with my legs as close as I can get them without burning my pants. Too much of its heat is going right out through the smoke hole. Countless times a day, I walk past the piles of stone I’ve hauled from all over the peninsula and look at them longingly. It’s well past time to put them to use for the chimney I planned, but I’ve got to keep my trapline up and that takes all the time I have and then some, so there the stones sit.
Maintaining snares made from fishing line is harder than I ever imagined, even after the hurdle of finding suitable spots for traps and the gymnastic act of setting them. They require constant upkeep. Snare wire stays where it’s put. Rabbits may learn to go around it, but they can’t remove it and eventually one will be distracted or unwary and get caught. Not so with fishing line. It’s easier to snip through than a willow twig, and snipping willow twigs is what rabbit teeth are made for. Every morning when I walk the trapline, two-thirds of my snares have been snipped clean off by the rabbits in the night, and many of those that aren’t have been nosed out of the way, snapping the fragile hairs that held them open. Just resetting the snares I’ve got takes half the day, and I need to be adding more if I want to keep eating, not just maintaining them.
I’m constantly scanning the woods for areas dense with rabbit tracks that are tucked into forested areas with low spruces where trapping is possible. I develop systems. I barb the bases of my stakes, so they hold better in the thin soil and resist the upward force of the bent saplings. I modify my trigger sticks so they’ll be more sensitive where they’re protected from the wind, and less sensitive where strong winds could set them off.
Before my first week of trapping is over, I’ve got three forest hollows covered in snares, and it’s taken everything I’ve got. The right young saplings are few and far between, and as temperatures drop they’re less springy, so I’m starting to innovate. I cut saplings and lash them to sturdier trunks if they aren’t growing where I need them. I substitute rock weights for saplings where I can, securing them with paracord and throwing them over branches to give me the upward pull I need to get the hares off of their feet. Where there isn’t enough soil to hold stakes or saplings for spring poles, I rely on the lifting pole system I learned from Mors Kochanski, a bushcraft legend, and use a swiveling pole to tighten the noose and lift the hare.
With all my innovations and techniques, every snare I set is still completely dependent on those three fragile hairs that hold each noose open and in place.
My system gets more sophisticated day by day, and soon I’m sorting the hairs from my head. Brown strands are for where soil is exposed, so they blend into the darker background. The silver ones are for when the ground is covered in snow, where they’re so invisible I can barely see them myself. As much as I’ve tried to make peace with it, I’m not going to lie—frosty hairs starting to appear at age twenty-five was a little rough. Now, being able to suit each snare to its environment is a godsend.
Who would have thought? Premature graying—my secret wilderness superpower.
47
Snuggle Rocks
My sleeping bag, enormous and fluffy as it is, feels thinner all the time. Finally, one night I shiver for hours before getting warm enough to sleep and then wake up cold, stiff, and feeling unrested. The bag is rated to minus forty, and I doubt it’s even gotten below zero yet. This doesn’t bode well, and I need to do something about it before I burn through my remaining calorie reserves by shivering all night.
It’s time to implement phase two of cabin construction—ceiling insulation. I’ve been avoiding it as long as I can, since a lot of my light is coming in through the green plastic of my tarp roof.
Hot air rises though, and I’m losing too much heat through the thin plastic to wait any longer.
The quickest and easiest insulation I can think of is bushy treetops all over the roof. I head out to harvest, remembering as I do that this is another prime number day. Hey, maybe something magical will happen! I cut and haul the bushiest young black spruces I can find, always cutting where the thinning will help the neighboring trees.
I plan to pile these on the roof, but I need more structural supports before I do. I have an idea of where to go for the poles I need, but it doesn’t feel right. I follow the impulse to go elsewhere, letting myself be drawn to where the pull is strongest. It doesn’t make any sense, but I find myself going out past the rock arena to the grove of spruce trees, where I searched for the grouse on equinox.
I see the perfect tree and approach it to lay my hand on it, when a tree to the left of it grabs my attention. It’s a little crooked and less convenient to reach with my saw, but the message I’m getting is “Take me,” so I cut it instead. I stand aside as it tilts toward me and falls to the ground. As it does, it reveals the tree behind it. My eyes rise up from the trunk to its tip, drawn by a splash of color. Sticking out of the trunk, well above my head, is an arrow with bright pink fletching.
I can’t believe my eyes. I feel like turning around to see if someone is playing a trick on me, just like I did when I found the letter-N sticker, but I know I’m all alone out here. This looks like my arrow, but how could it possibly be?
Holy crap—the grouse! I lost the first arrow I shot at the grouse when it disappeared into this grove of trees. This is that arrow!
I looked and looked for it, that day and after, but never found it. No wonder. I wasn’t looking above my head. I’m almost too stunned to be excited about it. This is crazy—what are the chances? This is the second long lost arrow that has come back to me. It only happened because I chose to let go of the logical place to cut a tree and follow an urge I couldn’t explain, then did so again to cut this unlikely looking tree instead of the perfect one beside it.
And of course I found it on a prime number day!
I hurry back to the cabin with the tree over my shoulder and tuck the arrow back into my quiver, next to my other prime number arrow, still incredulous. Over and over the miraculous happens out here, but I’m blown away with surprise and wonder every time. I’m still shaking my head about it as I layer the roof with young spruce trees. I shingle them around the smoke hole, hoping they’ll let smoke out while keeping my precious heat in. I’ll get to the chimney soon, I tell myself, once I have the whole ceiling insulated.
It’s now dark enough inside the cabin that I need my headlamp on during the day. I’m scrambling in my backpack for parachute cord to secure more rafters for my now heavier roof, when my light falls on my buckskin overalls. These are what I continued to furiously sew when I should have been leaving for the airport to fly north, and are the main reason I missed my first flight to Yellowknife. In that way, they have already been invaluable, because accidentally missing that flight gave me another day and allowed me to put together the fur lining of my parka. I couldn’t have predicted that result at the time, but back in that other lifetime I obviously considered them important enough to risk my trip to complete. And yet, I still haven’t worn them.
But here’s the thing—I never had any intention of wearing them. I know overalls are standard gear in cold climates, but for some of us, they also mean taking our parkas off to pee, thus letting out more body heat than they save. Knowing this, like the world’s largest sweater, I made them more as a source of raw material than a garment. I originally planned not to bring paracord, so I thought I’d likely be cutting up most of the buckskin outer layer of the overalls for cordage, patches to repair clothing, and similar purposes. By the time I changed my mind about the cordage, I was at base camp, and it was too late to think about other overall options. I used some of the leather for the slingshot I made early on, and the salt buttons I put on them have been invaluable, but other than that they have just sat here. They’ve got me thinking though, and now I’m certain that they can keep me warmer at night than any amount of ceiling insulation.
I dig out my precious buckskin bundle and the magic needle from day two. I turn the overalls inside out to reveal the liner—heavy wool cloth from a fabric store, which I triple washed in hot water until it was as thick as an oven mitt.
Since the day I first placed a hot rock in my lap during my evening tea, crotch rocks have been my best friends and constant evening companions. They keep me warm and comfortable by the fire, but they cool quickly, and once they do, it’s into the chilly sleeping bag for me. What I really need are rocks with enough mass to hold the heat much longer and a way to take them into the sleeping bag, without melting it or burning me.
I pirate thread from the overall seams and use my multitool scissors to cut the wool lining out. Some quick lines of stitches and slits cut around the top for a cinch closure and bingo—now I’ve got a thick wool bag to insulate a hot rock, so I can safely snuggle with it all night.
Some of my hearth rocks are already cracking from the hot fire. If this keeps up, I’m going to need a good number of stones to have enough snuggle rocks to last all winter. The only round stones of the right size that I’ve seen are down by the water. The shore is already icing up along the edges, so I’m guessing the rocks I want will be locked away beneath the ice soon. I head down and find several perfect candidates. I’m staring into the water looking for more, when I notice a spot right off the ledge that isn’t solid with cobbles like everywhere else. It’s a light colored, opaque surface that doesn’t look like granite. I grab a stick and give it a good poke. The stick sinks in and comes up with a few small grains clinging to the tip. Sand! The sand I need for my clay mix!
To reach in, I take my coat off and push my sweater sleeve all the way up to my armpit. My hand is still two feet from the bottom and my skin is burning from the icy water. I’m not about to wade in there. How can I get to the sand without giving myself another case of hypothermia?
I’ve got it! My rusty tin cans and parachute cord! I head home and lash a can to the end of a long stick, then try it out. Even with the stick, the can barely brushes the bottom. I need to get a few inches deeper. There’s nothing to do but strip. I put my sweater down on the icy rock ledge and lie flat out on it, naked from the waist up. I plunge my arm up to the shoulder in the frigid lake and bring up half a can of clean lake sand.
My fingers are so numb that I can barely grip the stick by the time I have a small pile harvested. It will have to do. I make a carrying bag out of my T-shirt and haul the sand up, place it next to the clay and heap moss over both to keep them from freezing solid. The effort of hauling the rest of the rocks up the hill keeps me from getting hypothermic, but the skin of the submerged arm is flushed and tingly for the next hour.
After dinner, I build up the fire and carefully heat the best-looking stones. Stones from lakes and rivers can explode when heated, as any water that might be trapped inside expands as it turns to steam. I heap heavy logs on top of them to absorb the impact should that happen, but they heat without incident.
Once the best of the bunch is too hot to touch, I use a stick to roll it out of the fire so it can cool in the open air. When I pop it into the wool bag, my “snuggle rock cozy,” the smell of burning hair floods my nostrils. Too soon! I manage to dump it out before it does more than char the surface of the wool. When I can touch it with a bare finger for a fraction of a second without burning myself, I try again. Perfect. It steams but doesn’t smoke. I tuck it into the sleeping bag while I drink my tea and prepare for bed.
I’ve been shivering for at least half an hour, often more, upon crawling into bed each night. The cold nylon sucks up my body heat until it’s finally warm enough to be comfortable. Tonight the lining is silky and inviting, wrapping around me like welcoming arms. Amazing!
I use my feet to push the rock down into the bottom of the bag where I can rest my feet on it all night. Before long they are too hot, and I move the stone around, distributing the heat to different places. I don’t fall asleep any faster than usual, but it’s a delicious, rather than an agonizing process. I finally nod off in a fetal position spooning the rock, and the comfort of it goes beyond just its temperature. There’s something so soothing about a solid weight, a substantial mass to wrap my arms around, that seems to multiply the warmth it radiates.
When I wake up in the middle of the night for my customary sleepless hour or two, I’m almost too warm for comfort, but this is such a new and alien sensation that I relish it, and my late-night survival strategizing is calmer and more content than the usual frenetic hamster wheel.
It takes several nights to perfect my process, moving the rock around the fire so I don’t get hot spots that will burn the wool, while achieving the perfect temperature to maximize heat retention. Once it’s just right, I pop it into the cozy and watch the air-dampened wool steam until it’s dry, so I’m putting warmth, but no moisture, into my sleeping bag.
Instead of dreading the icy nylon, crawling into a warm bed to snuggle with my woolly darling becomes my favorite part of the day.
48
Moon Mysteries, Moon Wisdom
A lot of people wonder how bleeding women deal with their moon time on Alone. The answer is that a lot of the time, they don’t. The body pays attention, and it knows that famine conditions aren’t optimal for starting new life. When calories are truly scarce and the body isn’t getting enough to have resources to spare, it stops ovulating and shuts down the reproductive system until things improve. I’ve been eating steadily for a while now, but it isn’t enough to sustain me long-term, and certainly hasn’t made up for the near total caloric deficit of the first several weeks.
That’s why I can hardly believe it when, just like clockwork on the day it’s due, I feel a deep, familiar ache in my midsection. Phantom cramps, I tell myself, and continue to walk my trapline, but I’m getting nervous. I haven’t reached the third hollow before it’s clear that there’s nothing phantom about them and that I have a situation to deal with. Participants who will be menstruating while on Alone are provided with sanitary supplies and strict instructions not to repurpose them in any way. Before I make it to all my snares, I abandon the trapline and head back to the cabin for some of those supplies.
I’m not someone who goes about their normal routine while bleeding with nothing but minor inconvenience. My cramps didn’t start in earnest until I was a junior in college, but when they did, they made up for lost time. They were so out of the blue that I had no idea what was happening and thought something was terribly, terribly wrong with me. Until that moment, although I’d had a cycle for many years, I’d had only an occasional ache in my belly during my period and never really understood what some people complained about with menstrual cramps.
By the time I was twenty-one, they regularly crippled me with excruciating pain, diarrhea, nausea, and sometimes vomiting. The more I resisted the pain and cursed my body, the worse it became. I went from someone who avoided medications of any kind to someone who kept ibuprofen within arm’s length for at least one week each month. I judged myself for my weakness and my body for betraying me so cruelly.
It wasn’t until my thirties that I started to look deeper into the source of my cramps—why some months were almost manageable and some beyond excruciating. For the first time, I realized there was a pattern. My cramps were always the most intolerable when I wasn’t listening to my heart and didn’t have my own back. They were debilitating when I was unhappy in my relationship with Chris but felt too guilty to do anything about it. When, after our divorce, I became increasingly aware of the abusive behaviors of my new partner but moved across the country with him anyway, the pain was beyond anything I had ever experienced. My body was telling me, No! Stop! You can’t do this! But I wasn’t listening, so it kept saying it louder until finally I did.
It took years to turn that epiphany into action. I realized that how I treated my body throughout the previous month had a huge impact on my cramps. I got better at loving my body and found that if, instead of willing myself to resist the pain, I relaxed and breathed deeply into the very source of it, it would ease. It wouldn’t go away, but its grip would lessen enough for me to fall asleep, and I would wake up more comfortable. It took the Weaving Earth program, where those who were menstruating were honored and encouraged to nurture themselves and celebrate their body’s cycles, to help me stop dreading my bleeding time. I came to look forward to it as a time of rest, renewal, and letting go of what no longer serves me.
I’d love to have the luxury of spending my first day of bleeding here doing nothing but resting and self-nurturing, but I don’t see how I can with all my pressing survival needs. Once I’ve tended to the necessities, I hike back out to the trapline, slightly bent over but relieved that the pain isn’t truly debilitating.
No rabbits in my snares, and for the first time ever, I’m relieved. I’ve got more than enough blood to deal with already, thank you. I haul water and tuck myself in by the fire.
Today is Thursday, Dance Party day, but even though I have yet to miss one, I don’t have a dance party in me. I sit by the fire, cradling a snuggle rock to my belly, and sway a bit to the crackling of the flames in the hearth, just enough to feel I’ve given dancing an effort. I do my best to speak lovingly to my body, but I’m horrified at my blood loss, which ironically, is significantly more than normal for me. Even with my hunting and trapping I’m losing weight—I don’t have any extra blood or protein to spare.
The next morning, as I toss my used pad into the fire to be sure it won’t attract any predators, a different kind of sensation grips my midsection. Jackpot!
