Living Primitively

For the past year and increasingly over the last months I have had so many equipment, economic and motivational problems that I find myself spending almost as much time at my parents’ farm as out in the wilds.

With currently no good sleeping bag, rain clothing and footwear I will need to get money to buy some until traditional replacements have been made.

Also, I am tired of doing everything alone. There is lots of motivation in a group doing things together. I am considering joining one or more of these “wild moons” to see what can come out of it.

I just wanted to make this clear, so that nobody thinks that I’m living constantly all alone out in the forest when that is not always the case.

This weekend I have been running a course in making traditional fishing gear and using traditional techniques to catch brown trout. Unfortunately there was only one participant, but hopefully that will be better next time.

First a little about the weather. The last two days it’s been between -5 and -10 C, so the lakes have frozen over, making for beautiful scenery, but difficult crossing of lakes and seine net pulling.

The crafts that were covered was: Netting, making a bone hook and a fish spear.

The techniques that were used taught were: Chasing fish into a landing net, using fish trap, “dances with fishes”, tickling, spearing and using a seine net.

In addition, cleaning fish and preparing them for drying was covered.

We made quite a good catch. Bjørn Erik got four fish with the “dances with fishes” method in short order. This method involves charging into the river, stepping on and kicking the fish so it gets confused then grab it as it wedges into a tight spot, like inbetween two rocks. The short sequence of photos of the badly dressed guy (hehe) is meant to illustrate the method.

Catch with the use of landing net: 27

Catch with hand fishing methods: 16

Catch with the seine net: 314

Catch using other methods: 6

Unfortunately I’m almost completely out of cash so I’ll have to work in the city for a couple of months. My plan is to live outside anyway though. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to update the blog every now and then.

Since I’ve had my kids visiting, I haven’t really been able to go on any long trips. So I have done some crafts instead. A pretty big burden basket of willow is one of them, a spoon is another. I don’t have a crook knife or spoon knife I burnt out the bowl in the spoon instead of carving it. Although the basket isn’t perfect, it’s my best so far. To a large extent I used Jon’s excellent tutorial to make it.

Also been doing some experimentation with twining some large juncus rush I found. No pictures available yet as there are a few things I have yet to figure out about the process.

The water is receding a bit after the floodlike conditions that prevailed here early this week, which makes fishing easier. Haven’t done any large scale fishing yet, have caught a few dozen with the landing net and a spear. On the occation of this picture, my oldest girl was less than thrilled about posing with this freshly killed trout.

Up until now, I have used my parent’s farm as storage facility and emergency sanctuary. Since I am relatively new at this and still do quite a few mistakes, I need somewhere to retreat to if I discover severe shortcomings in my equipment.

To have a spot where I can do the formerly mentioned, grow a few vegetables and house people on courses I have bought a small, abandoned farm. It is very small (about 4 acres) with two houses on the property, in dire need of renovation. This will be something that I’ll do as get the time and money. The plus sides of the smallholding is that it is situated quite close to where I usually hunt and fish. It was also cheap.

My kids are currently visiting, so we were out testing a new landing net. This is one of the ways I use it. The current stretches out the net bag and you drive the fish down from above. This is called “mære” in the local dialect. We only caught two small ones, but it was good fun. This wasn’t in a very active stream. All the good streams and rivers are virtually unfishable at the moment due to very high rainfall over the last days. When it recedes I’ll start the big autumn fishing for spawning trout.

After the moose hunting season started, the reindeer were gone from the forests and I had to venture far into the mountains to seek them out. I went into an area which I had never been before and found two herds. There were some huge bulls, but they’re inedible at this time (due to mating season), even dogs will not eat them.

Up in the high mountains, finding cover is not very easy, but if one moves in the shadows and pay attention to the wind direction one can still get very close. On several occations I was down to 15 metres of some animals, all the way down to 3 metres one time. With a bow I could have exploited this opportunity, but due to the danger of shooting into the horizon with a rifle, I had to wait until they had moved down below me. In the cover of some rocks, I shot one calf. The herd ran some 40 metres and I had to sneak around again and by keeping my head low I managed to get into the middle of the herd and shot another calf.

If I had a scope I could easily have filled the rest of my quota on this occation, but part of the experience I find is to get close to the animals before I pull the trigger.

After this, the herd ran out of range. I decided to carry down one calf and submerge the other one in a pool to keep it out of reach from foxes and ravens.

While this was the major event for me, since the last posting, my brother and two of his friends were also hunting birds and we did some chase netting. 24 trout being the result on that occation.

The lemmings are still numerous, although not as much as in August, I killed a few and ate them. Conterary to local belief, they are not poisonous and are actually very tasty!

Winter is showing it’s first signs, ice on the lakes and small snowfalls marks this new time to come.