Never Alone, page 25
It isn’t true, I decide. They’re wrong, that’s all. All they have to go on is the numbers on their scale, but those are just one measure of health. I’m the one who lives in this body, and while I’d prefer it still had a little more meat on it, I’m amazed at how much more vital I feel than when I was eating plenty but dealing with chronic injuries back home.
I’ve finally taught myself to trap and was hitting my stride before the rabbits dried up. There is no way I am ready to leave this place. I’ll try harder. I’ll figure it out. I’ll do everything I can possibly do. But if I’m honest with myself, I know that I’ve already been doing all I can think of to do. Ultimately, how long I stay isn’t up to me. It’s up to the land and the lake. I walk down to the rocky shore and dip my fingers into it.
“I’m not done learning about you, Tu Nedhe,” I tell it. “I know we have more dances in store for us.”
I also need to be realistic. If I’m already on weight warning, it’s time to let go of my hopes of winning this thing. I can handle that. I want to win, but it isn’t why I’m here, and I’ve still got my biggest motivations—wildness, beauty, freedom, and connection. I might not get to be the last one out here, but that doesn’t mean I can’t succeed on my own terms.
If winning is out, what does success look like now? How many weeks would make me feel successful?
Eight weeks, I think. Two full moon cycles. Living here that long would be significant, and far more uninterrupted time than I’ve ever spent in the wilderness. It won’t be easy, but I’m determined to make it.
I can’t afford more hungry days though. Not any, not ever. I head back to the cabin and carefully portion out the pemmican I’ve got left, cutting it in half, then in half again and again until I’ve got a bag full of equally sized, perfectly rolled pemmican balls. One per day, right up until day fifty-six.
That done, I think about other measures of success. I don’t want to leave without making something incredible from my pile of rabbit rope. I’d hoped for a whole blanket. I don’t have anywhere near enough for that, but I’ve got enough for a smaller project. Time to figure out how to make something warm and beautiful from them.
The project is going to take more space than I’ve got in the cramped cabin, and this is the clearest, brightest day we’ve had in weeks. Very well then. I believe it’s weaving day.
I carry the ball of rabbit “yarn” out to the open rock of the arena. I wedge two peeled poles into my laundry line, giving me two stiff vertical supports about a scarf’s length apart. I wind the rabbit rope around them, and it gives me a fuzzy rectangle about five feet long and ten inches wide. Perfect!
The inner strands of paracord are slippery against the fur as I twine it around each length of the rabbit rope, weaving them snugly together on my makeshift loom. It’s delicate work, and my exposed fingers turn bright pink and ache with the cold. I have to stop several times to go warm up and make hot tea—because Woniya doesn’t take risks with the cold anymore—but I keep at it.
Even with the sobering news, I can’t help but be jubilant. I live for crafting; it’s what my hands were made for. I’m standing in a wild paradise in the buckskin pants, fur parka, and boots I made myself with hides I tanned. Now I’m also weaving with furs from animals I caught with my own cunning—it’s a dream come true.
My cheeks are sore from smiling as I pull the scarf off the loom and wrap it around my neck. Now I’m cozy, gloriously fuzzy, and beaming at having finally fulfilled my promises to the rabbit gods. I’ve used every part, further intertwining my life with theirs and, this time, making it literal. I feel like a superhero who’s just been given their costume.
Between the med check and scarf project, the day is already gone, but it’s Thursday, and I’ve got a lot to celebrate. Every week I come up with a different theme for my weekly dance party. Last Thursday, during my moon time, it was one of slowness and self-care. Tonight, I want to dance not by myself, but with this place—in surrender and partnership. A waltz, I decide. At first I think I’m dancing with the lake, but as I close my eyes and dip and sway to the rhythm in my head, I feel the bright sun, such a rarity, across my eyelids. The lake is always here, my constant dance partner, I think. Today I’m waltzing with the sun—a fleeting but potent romance in this land of ice and snow.
The gray skies and lake effect snow have meant little color at sunset lately, but tonight the lake is calm, and the sky is rich with color, all of it amplified in the lake’s reflection. It’s well below freezing, but I want to feel this dance fully, so I shrug out of my thick parka and baggy pants and pull my kidney warmer down to make a skirt. I want to feel free and feminine and beautiful, to lean into the fullest expression of myself and my relationship with everything around me. A woman, alone, in love with this life.
I place one hand over my heart and one on my belly and count out the rhythm—one, two, three; one, two, three—in my head, my eyes closed and the bright sunlight painted across my lids as my boots squeak on the bare granite.
I open my eyes just as the last dazzling rays of light are slipping away across the vast water. I let the departing sun lead and twirl me around the granite dance floor then laugh, breathless, and give it a little curtsey. As it disappears below the horizon, I blow it a kiss, thanking it for the dance, and then I sing it all the way down into the lake.
My quiver made of home-tanned leather with bobcat fur ruff. This came from the bobcat shown on page 38.
Some of the crafts I made on the peninsula, clockwise from bottom left: 1. Waist-tied willow basket for harvesting berries. (buckskin ties visible on back of basket and left corner); 2. Berry storage basket with spiral of peeled willow; 3. Birch bark container; 4. Empty paraspool; 5. Spoon with handle shaped like a grouse feather; 6. Spatula with handle shaped like a trout.
The knife sheath cover I made from the equinox squirrel, my first game on Season 6 and the first animal I shot with a bow.
Reproduction of my improvised power snare with fishing line loop. This loop is braided line, which shows up against the snow, but I had only clear monofilament line on Alone. The loop is tied open with three of my own hairs, one tied to each vertical stick and one to a partially buried stick beneath the snare.
Detail of one thin hair tied to the snare loop.
Me in my rabbit rope scarf, January 2023.
Part four
Becoming Ancestor
55
Surrender
Building a bedstead is another of those projects I’d planned to do “once I have all the food I need and some time to kill.” Haha. Like the scarf, it’s a project I don’t want to leave here without completing, so it had better happen soon. A bed doesn’t just help make a hovel into a home, it also has very real survival benefits. I’m wasting time and calories laying out my bed every night and packing it up every morning. Even more significant is the fact that sleeping above the ground is far warmer and more comfortable than sleeping directly on it, so I’ll get better rest and burn less calories to boot. Saving calories is kind of like bringing in calories, so it’ll be like virtual rabbits—not that different from dream beasts!
To save space and materials, I plan to build the bed right into the wall, which means tearing down the wall and rebuilding it. While I wait for a window of good weather, I get my materials prepped—peeled uprights for the legs, long horizontals for the sides, and the shorter crosspieces that will support my spruce bough mattress.
The next clear day, I start at first light and have the south wall torn out by midmorning. A wide-open shelter is a powerful motivator. My hands fly as I notch and lash, and then round the ends of all the pieces, so I’m less likely to bruise myself on pokey edges in the confines of the narrow cabin. By nightfall, the bed frame is solid enough that, if there was room for it, I’m certain I could jump on it. It looks like something you could buy in a rustic homes catalog for thousands of dollars.
It’s another few hours to make the mattress—spruce boughs of descending size with tiny branch tips on top and a layer of sphagnum moss over everything. Settling onto it, my parka and sweater neatly hung on one bedpost and my headlamp and bow in arm’s reach on the other, is like heaven. Plus, with all the space under the bed, I’ve quadrupled my covered storage space. Why did I wait so long for this?
And that’s it. My rabbit rope project is completed, and while there’s always more I could do, the last major project of the cabin is now finished too. My life here is all coming together, cozier and more comfortable all the time. The only thing between me and total wilderness surthrival is, of course, food.
I’ve done all that’s in my power to do. I’ve fulfilled my promises and shown this place my dedication. Whatever happens now is what is meant to be. Beyond watching and waiting, harvesting firewood, and walking my perpetually empty trapline, the only job that’s left to me is the one I find the most challenging—surrender.
It’s not my strong suit, but I do the best I can, opening myself to all the possible outcomes, from achieving food sustainability to being pulled at the next medical check.
Then, incredibly, something shifts. I’m checking my trapline one morning when I see movement and a hunched white form against the brush. A hare! The first I’ve seen in weeks, and while the others were all brown, this one is white as snow. I take aim and my arrow strikes near its feet, sending it running. My aim is slipping, and no wonder. I’m far too happy to worry about it though—because rabbits are on the peninsula again! And if they’re on the move, they’re trappable. The sensation in my cheeks reminds me that the last time I smiled this wide was the day I made the scarf, but now I’m beaming all the way through my trapline. Not because there are rabbits in it—there aren’t—but because I see their tracks in the forest for the first time in well over a week.
It’s been a while since I bothered to set a new snare, but suddenly I’m brimming with enthusiasm. With a pack full of matched sets of uprights and crosspieces I can cut to length, spools of paracord innards and fishing line, and, of course, tangled wads of my own hair, I trudge out to a new area I scoped out just before the Great Rabbit Exodus.
Sure enough, there’s fresh rabbit sign here as well. I use every trick I’ve got—lifting pole snares, rock weighted mechanisms, and spring poles snares—and hair triggers for them all.
Please, please, please let me have a feast for Samhain!
Though Halloween has now been co-opted by candy and costume companies, its origins are in the Celtic holiday of Samhain, which recognizes this time of year as the one when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead is blurred. If you’re paying attention, you can feel it in the landscape all around you in late October. The leaves turn color and fall as the trees go dormant. Plants everywhere scatter their seeds, die, and compost into fresh soil to feed the next generation. Those creatures who are already too old, weak, or ill to make it through the lean times ahead are taking their last breaths. Their bodies will fall prey to those stronger and will help their predators survive the cold season.
I pay homage to the ancestors all the time, but never more than at Samhain. There’s a reason that traditional Halloween images are those of ghosts, skeletons, and gravestones. They aren’t meant to be terrifying; they’re meant to remind us of those who have come before and to encourage us to honor them and make peace with the fact that we will eventually join them.
Honoring the cycles of life and death feels more important than ever this year, and getting a rabbit feels like a critical part of that.
Then one morning, it finally happens. Trudging out to one of my lifting pole snares, I see a strange white blob against the brighter white of the snow. It’s a hare! My first hare in almost two weeks—perfectly intact and frozen solid. My hands are shaking with excitement as I extract it from the noose. I let out a deep sigh, and my stomach untwists itself a little. No sight could be more beautiful. I have food again! I’ll eat tonight!
All along my trail, there are fresh tracks that weren’t here yesterday. I reach my farthest trap and my heart leaps into my throat. Tucked under a log, in a perfect natural funnel in the rabbit trail, is another snow-white hare. I have achieved my dream! Two in one day! I can’t believe it! It’s a two-rabbit day!
But then, maybe I can believe it. It follows the pattern. This land has shown me that it loves my surrender. It’s constantly testing me—Do you mean it? Are you as committed as you say you are? Even when the food dries up? Even when the temperatures plummet?
When I fought the cold, rather than recognizing its power and changing my behavior accordingly, I got hypothermic. When the rabbits got slimmer, I worked harder. Then the fox came and I had no choice but to let go. Every time things get hard and I resist, nothing shifts. When I finally say, “Okay then, Tu Nedhe, you call the shots. I’ll do my part and show up in every way I can, but ultimately it’s up to you,” I find my joy and gratitude again. That’s when the land starts to give. I don’t think it’s coincidence.
I comb the bright fur of the second hare, watching my fingers disappear into it. It’s far longer than the brown fur of my earlier rabbits, I notice. And then boom—it hits me! I know why the rabbits disappeared! It wasn’t the fox at all; that was just coincidental timing. Every rabbit I caught before the Great Exodus was brown, and every rabbit I’ve seen since is white.
It was the molt!
I know most northern animals molt to blend in with the snow, but not having lived this far north before, I always assumed it was a gradual thing. Apparently not, because in two weeks, every rabbit out here has gone from lovely brown to solid white. It’s got to take some serious energy to grow a whole new coat of hair, and being pure brown against the snow or pure white against the dark soil and forest would make them incredibly vulnerable. Of course they lay low while molting, and only get active again when they’re well matched to the backdrop.
My feet dance their way home. Eating my fill today and still having food tomorrow and the next day is huge, but the hares returning doesn’t just mean eating again; it means my luck is changing, it means the ancestors are with me, and most of all it means not getting pulled.
56
Feasting with the Ancients
As I pull the silky white hairs apart to begin skinning the first rabbit, I see brown hairs beneath them and another jolt of realization hits me. Apparently, they don’t just lose their summer coats and grow in winter ones; the winter coat grows out through and beyond the short summer fur until it covers it completely. No wonder these incredible creatures can survive in arctic temperatures: they’re wearing a fur parka on top of their down coat. Just think how warm and fluffy my next rabbit rope project will be!
With hares on the move, my hopes for a long-term stay are rekindled. If the rabbits keep coming and I keep my weight up, this thing isn’t nearly over, it’s just getting started.
Instead of other projects, this afternoon I simply sit by the warm fire, cook, and eat. I revel in the sensation of food in my belly. I sigh deep contented sighs and picture the nutrients pouring in everywhere, filling up the places that have been hollow and empty for too long.
This life is the most real and beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced. The lows are so hard, the joys so complete. It’s always been my goal to live for a living, rather than work for a living so I can pay someone else to create the things I need. I worked hard on the Oregon homestead—building my own home, tanning hides to make my own clothing, subsistence farming, and hunting and gathering for my food, but I always had a cushion. It did exactly what the name implies, cushioned me from the realities of what survival and surthrival really mean. It kept me from feeling the full depth of the human experience. Having endured true lack and true hunger out here, I now know what real abundance, gratitude, and blessings are. That knowledge will change my life forever. Food in the belly, the cook pot, and the larder? Enough firewood to last for days and an entire afternoon to sit and relax? That is true wealth. As is the other thing I’m getting to experience right now—eating two rabbits’ worth of organs in one sitting, can you imagine it? And eating more than half of a rabbit in one day? Unbelievable!
I tuck away the backstraps and front shoulders—the best cuts—for my Samhain feast. I go to sleep warm, comfortable, and blissfully full.
Samhain arrives cold, snowy, and gray, and I get a squirrel in a snare to add to my feast. I manage to find a patch of cranberries largely untouched by Zoinkers. Cranberries will have a special place at the feast, and I’m glad to have some fresh ones.
I’ll be celebrating someone else, in addition to the ancestors, tonight. October 31 is my mama’s birthday as well as Halloween, making her a proper witch and a magical lady. She’ll be celebrating it somehow, but she’ll also be thinking of me and wondering if I’m okay. Being sure that I’m well fed and content on this day is a gift I can give us both. Cranberries are her favorite, and she always makes a big batch of homemade cranberry sauce to last through Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’ve never really liked cranberries, but I’ve choked them down most of my life to please her. I look forward to eventually being able to tell her I’ve finally come to appreciate them.
I spend hours cooking everything to perfection, using an entire third of a salt button—enough to have the food actually taste salty, a rare treat for me. I drag the camera case to the center of the cabin for a banquet table and set it with three plates—one for me, one for the ancestors, and one for my mama. Then I realize I forgot to make a costume for the party. What shall I be? But I only have to think about it for half a second. I mean, what does my world revolve around right now, and who showed up to celebrate with me? Rabbits! And given my arctic diet, I’m more and more rabbit every day, so let’s make the outside match the inside. I fashion some ears out of folded birch bark and tuck them into my hat, then paint a nose and whiskers on with a piece of charcoal. I check myself out in the viewfinder of the camera. Pretty good for a wilderness costume!
