Over the past year I have been travelling a lot and also working quite a bit. It looks like 2012 will be some of the same, but I’ll also try to live outdoors more again. Inspired by the “Happy People” video I decided to make a couple of those sable traps (Martes zibellina). Although the sable is long since extinct in this area (if they were ever here), we have pine marten (Martes martes), which is very similar.

A side note about the photo below is that I stuck most of the branches from the felled pines into the snow to make it easier for the moose to eat their needles. Since people started only planting spruce, even where there used to be pine, I fear that the moose has too little quality winter feed available to them.

Back to the trap. Almost everything about it is fantastic. It doesn’t dislodge easily when it’s not supposed to, but still locks in place quite well when sprung. You can use lighter weight logs than with a regular log deadfall and the roof makes maintainance less needed. From now on I’m going to make all of my traps with such a roof.

Features to notice (some only observable in the movie):

• The bait stick is stuck into the roof, making it pull directly out of the notch when bait is taken. Normally the trigger twisting can be a problem, but this is eliminated with this set up.
• The bait is out on the side, so that the marten has to stretch his neck and get his body between the logs. Because of the roof, the bait won’t be snowed on.
• To eliminate the need of tying the roof logs, a cleft stick is used to support them against a tree.
• The climbing pole directs the marten in from the right side of the trap and makes them more likely to bother with going for the bait.
• The trigger sticks are tied with a string to the trap itself (with sufficient slack of course). This eliminates the problem of having to replace them because they’re lost in the snow when released.

On the minus side it can be mentioned that it takes 2-3 hours of work to make (plus triggers) and that the trap isn’t really practical to make without a metal axe available.

I’ve never put all that much effort into trapping, but with this new tool I’m more eager to do so.

Here is a photo from the common type of habitat in the shade side of the valley floor. Mixed pine and spruce with the occasional birch.

Another picture looking up onto a mountain called Ramnfjødd (Raven mountain).

This picture doesn’t look all that exciting, it’s of the tip of a pine branch. These sometimes lay in clusters under certain trees. They signalize that the capercaillie has been feeding above, which they usually do when food becomes unavailable on the ground. Sometimes you can also find their poop mixed with the needles. They usually have a few trees they favour, so if you take note of these trees you can return at another time, sneak upon it and shoot the bird.

The fur on the sleeves of my coyote parka got worn off in some spots, so I decided to cut out the thin parts and replace them with new fur. Lacking tanned coyote fur, I used racoon instead, which is actually of pretty similar quality.

The picture on the lower left shows a piece of tanned racoon fur and a piece of tanned (and worn-off) coyote fur – both are winter pelts. The hairs are of similar length and insulating properties, and in the end the patching is hardly visible (lower right). Ready for some cold weather!

I’ve posted about the skin boat I made earlier this summer…I appreciated all the feedback and questions about it. I’d sure do a few things differently with the next one, though this one has been quite satisfying so far. This is how it’s currently stored…

…tied to the ceiling of a crafts shelter to keep it away from ground moisture.

I’m always curious about how the things I craft perform when they’re used on a everyday basis. Here are some pictures from one of my more recent trips in the woods:

The toboggan, finished last spring, seems to work just fine. I actually salvaged my gear lashing cord when I was running short of rawhide for my skin boat so I need to make some more…

The other pictures show some of the landscapes you might encounter here in the northwoods. Whenever possible and practical, I like to camp in hardwood forests such as the maple forest shown above, since they provide excellent firewood. Bogs and swamps can be hard to travel through in the summer time, but in the white season, once the ground is frozen and covered with snow they are easy to cross on snowshoes (and toboggans, if any gear needs to be hauled).

A little while ago I made this crooked knife with my friend and fellow craftsman Jarrod StoneDahl.

After using mass-produced crooked knives for a number of years, I came to appreciate the qualities of a hand-made tool more and more. On some of the more specialized projects that involved a crooked knife, I noticed how my hand and wrist started hurting after a while. Traditional craftsmen used tools that were matched to their needs, including the shape and size of their hand. The handle of this crooked knife has a thumb rest for additional support which greatly reduces the stress put on the wrist (see picture on the right) – and how that thumb rest needs to be shaped depends on who is using the knife – there is no “standard”.

We used his forge to craft the blade and fit the extension of the blade into a notch in the wooden handle, glued a wooden plug on top and wrapped it with linen string. More recently I put a sheath together to protect the blade. Jarrod has been making quite a number of such individually crafted crooked knives and if you have an interest in this subject, I recommend checking out his blog.

Reindeer (and deer skins in general) are very sensitive when tanning hair on. The sharpness of the tool is important, otherwise you will put a lot of strain on the grain and produce a spotted piece of fur or in the best case scenario; eskimo tan. Eskimo tan is super soft, but the durability of the clothing is not satisfactory if you don’t shoot enough caribou to make a new set of clothing every year or two.

The scraper is made of flint, but any knappable stone can be used:

They don’t seem to need resharpening very often at all. This small one I use as a dry scraper and as a stretcher on small skins such as leg skins. I also have a big one that acts as a stretcher on bigger skins.

On the veidemann course this year, following the tradition, the students made a moose skin currach. I had to use it when crossing the lake a few times recently. The lake was just starting to freeze over and I had to break my way through at some spots.

In the lower half of the walls, the three layers of birch bark are covered by turf peeled from rocks. The upper part is spaghnum moss collected in the bog.

The inside of the earth lodge still needs some fixing to be as nice as it can be. I’ll also have to make a door, but for now I’ll use a skin as covering whenever I am using the lodge.

Lessons learnt for next lodge:

• Go smaller, the amount of raw materials needed for this structure was immense.
• Make it round, as it will then reflect heat better.
• Use a different solution for the top, so it is possible to close the top when the lodge is not in use.

This will probably be main camp for the fishing operations I do in the lakes during autumn. However it is too close to “civilisation” for where I want to have my winter camps.

In this area, if nature was left alone at least within a couple of hundred years what would probably happen is that the Norway spruce (Picea abies) would take over and you’d get boom and bust cycles due to forest fires. This is a sustainable system, like any other natural system, but it’s not optimal for biodiversity, animal density and not least human density. In order to get a richer environment, there must be a kept a higher than “naturally occuring” ratio of open spaces,

All over the world, also locally, burning was one of the tools to keep open spaces and forest floors more productive and openly spaced. Whereas I have more or less given up the thought of burning forest floors in this area (would probably be too dangerous and might shift the vegetation too much), open spaces like dry bogs and meadows were burnt here traditionally to improve pasture.

Burning meadows is something I have done since childhood, so it was not a focus this year, although it could be very interesting to see specifically what kind of plants are favoured by burning.

Two kinds of patches were burnt this year. The ground underneath one hazel (Corylus avellana) bush that was coppiced last winter as well as a dry bog with grass, heather (Calluna vulgaris), various berries and spagnum moss. I was a bit concerned with parts of the bog area, which overlaps with a very dry patch with cowberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea) and bilberries (Vaccinium uliginosum).

There is a relatively short window in which burning the lands is possible without causing damage to animals. It has to be done before the birds lay eggs and before the fire hazard becomes too great. The best is while there are still large patches of snow, where the fire can be curbed before it gets out of hand.

The burnings were done on two seperate days, in nice weather with almost no wind (although it seems that the fire calls upon the wind when it gets going to a certain size).

The hazel burn was pretty straightforward, and was a very slow burn, mostly grass burned and some leaves. Decideous woods seems rather safe to burn.

The dry bog burn was different… This time I tried not to limb the pines to see the effect. I didn’t remove the junipers (Juniperus communis) either. What happened was of course that the junipers burnt like petrol and flamed up quite a bit up into the smaller pines, killing the smaller ones.

Lesson number one:

Conifer branches must be kept out of reach of the fire if they are to survive the fire. If young trees are ever to develop in such areas one needs to take at least a decade of burning breaks every now and then in a particular spot.

Burning frequency is part of the experiment. With the hazels I plan on burning every year, to promote a rich herbal understory and since the regeneration of the hazels seems less impacted by fire.

If I burn the dry bog, what will happen is that after a few years, the understory will be grass alone, and I’d prefer to keep some of the heather and the berries for variety. I’ll start off with the guideline that when the ling is past it’s prime and is dying off I’ll do another burn. My hope is that this will increase berry production and reduce the amount of spaghnum moss, which very few animals consume.

After the burn everything looks kind of barren, but after relatively short time things regenerated. Especially with the hazel burn there was an explosion of growth after the burn. What was very interesting with the bog burn was that the patch of concern regenerated particularily well and might carry new berries already next year. Whether the species composition has shifted is too early to say. Only thing that is a definite is that a lot of the spaghnum moss was burnt and since they grow very slowly this will be a lasting effect when burnt every few years.

Hazel burn:

After a few weeks:

A month or two:

Showing hazel growth in midsummer:

Dry patch after burning:

After about a month:

At end of growing season:

From further out in the bog:

Same place about a couple of months after burning:

At high summer:

Showing the dead moss being replaced by grass:

It seems that burning promotes the growth of valerian (Valeriana sambucifolia), angelica (Angelica sylvestris), fireweed (Epilobium augustifolium) and wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca). The two first are probably due to their ability to spurt new growth quickly with their big roots. Fireweed probably due to prolific seeding and germination. Strawberry I have absolutely no idea to why, maybe because the burn removes competition. This burn from last year shows valeriana.

Recently I also visited Jarrod Stonedahl, a friend of mine who’s a skilled woodworker – those of you who have some interest in this subject may want to check out his new blog which has some great posts on birch bark canoes etc.

There are  a number of craft projects that I want to work on before the beginning of the white season: my fur parka needs some patching along the sleeves, the mukluk soles are worn through and need replacement and my snowshoes could use some new rawhide lacing…plenty to do. On the other hand, I´m looking forward to really test out the toboggan I finished last winter. I´ll be posting updates here along the way.

In the meantime, here are a couple impressions of the northwoods fall:

Beavers are getting ready for winter too and flooded this wetland

A typical fall scene...

It was spring – the maple sap was just beginning to flow and the white blanket of snow had disappeared from the ground. I had done some research about the styles of skin boats used by various Native peoples in the northern hemisphere and consulted a few people who knew a thing or two about that subject. I decided to construct a small canoe that would be ideal for exploring the small creeks and streams of this area, similar to the solo canoes made of fiberglass that my campmates and I use. Consequently, the dimensions are fairly similar, with a length of about 10 feet and the widest part being about two and a half feet wide (I can´t provide exact measurements since we don´t have any measuring devices at camp).

The frame was to consist of seven long saplings forming the sides and bottom of the canoe, with the keel/bottom pole connecting all the other poles at either end of the canoe. Hardwoods twist less when they´re drying than softwoods, and since I was looking for straight, flexible and preferrably light materials my choice of wood was limited to a few species…so let´s continue to

Part I: Assembly

On a fine cold spring morning, I ventured out by canoe to harvest the frame materials: I selected a dozen straight maple saplings for the main frame and about six dozen hazelnut shoots for the rib pieces. The first task was now to peel the bark off all the gathered materials for more rot resistance. Over the next days I slowly assembled the main frame, inserting wooden spreaders and support poles where necessary in order to give the canoe its intended shape. I ended up carving down and flattening most of the frame saplings and all of the rib pieces to achieve more evenly bend, and since the materials were green, no steaming or other treatment was necessary.

Lashing the rib pieces to the frame required a fair amount of rawhide, since each of the 60+ ribs was tied to seven frame saplings, with the rawhide being streched as much as possible prior to tying it off to prevent loose lashings. In order to more securely lock the individual ribs in place, I wrapped rawhide along three of the frame saplings, connecting each rib to the neighboring ones. Still, the lashings allow for a little bit of movement and flexibility, which makes the canoe more shock-resistant. Say you´re bumping against a rock: The impact gets dispersed throughout the frame rather than being focused on the point of impact (which might cause a break) as is the case with e.g. nailed frames.

The raw frame was now finished, and I applied several coats of oil & a little bit of pitch in order to preserve the wood and make the rawhide lashings more water-resistant. Besides its preserving qualities, the pitch also helps to keep rodents and other animals from chewing on the frame to get at the fat…

Now came the skin cover. Ideally one large hide would suffice to cover the frame – no sewing required, and besides that, every seam is a potential weak spot too. With no such hides being available to me at that point, I pieced several smaller hides together – one small buffalo hide and four deer hides proved to be sufficient.

In my research about skin boats I came across a waterproof stich that several Inuit tribes used for their kayaks and umiaks. It´s a rather time-consuming affair since the stiches do not go through the entire hide, but instead enter and exit from the same side.

Once the cover was finished, I folded it over the sides of the canoe and started cutting one side to match the shape of the canoe. The cut side was now ready to be lashed to the frame, and after a few ties were in place (starting in the center of the canoe) I repeated the same process on the other side. I was working my way towards the front and back of the canoe on either side, making sure the skin cover had no wrinkles and was tight (but not too tight as the rawhide shrinks and tightens on its own as it dries).

With the skins on but still wet I decided to go for a test ride, and after stiching up a minor hole, there was almost no leaking. Since it was a hot and sunny day it didn´t take long for the skin cover to fully dry – time for the last step, the oiling & pitching of the canoe.

Et voila – canoe finished! Or so I thought…which brings me to

Part II: Lessons

The cover was dry alright, but the shrinking action had opened up the seams too which meant the seams weren´t really waterproof anymore. What I realized then was that Inuit people usually pre-soak their boats prior to using them – this way the hide swells up around the seam and allows for no more water to come through. I decided to try another approach – pitching the seams similar to how it is done on birchbark canoes. Adding some powdered charcoal to melted pitch to help it set & harden, I covered the seams on both the inside and outside of the canoe with the mix.

As for the cover itself, it turned out that my first application of oil and pitch was leaning a little heavy on the pitch side – it kept being sticky even ater drying and therefore quickly adhere to anything it was touching -leaves, grasses, sticks…Scraping off the excess pitch and re-oiling the frame (with less pitch) seemed to remedy that.

Now…ready for the maiden voyage. There was some minor leakage and the sides of the canoe were a little lower than I had originally intended as the frame was warping somewhat during the drying process. Other than that, it seemed to work pretty well and it proved to be stable even on a windy lake. On another test ride, a stick protuding from a submerged tree trunk scraped along the bottom and got hung up at the seam, causing some leakage. Tamarack offered a practical suggestion for this particular issue – adding a keel pole to the bottom of the canoe, to protect the skin cover and seams from scraping on objects. And I can say, after going up and down creeks, through alder thickets and over beaver dams, that the keel pole truly works!

Keel pole on the upturned canoe

Something else I discovered on a longer canoe trip was that the skins do eventually absorb water (through prolonged rain or just being in the water, which, by the way, doesn´t mean that it´s leaking). And when this happens, the canoe gets a lot heavier – so heavy indeed that portaging become a lot more labor-intensive. I haven´t been able to find a way around that yet – maybe that´s just the way with skin boats (unless you use a modern varnish)…

Some lessons come the hard way, such as when I was re-pitching the seams after the aforementioned canoe trip. The next day I discovered that there were a number of holes along the seams. How cou that be, after just pitching it, and no prior holes? Closer examination left no doubt about it – the last application of pitch was so hot that it had melted through the hides! The lesson here seems obvious – make sure that the pitch has cooled down enough so it won´t damage the skin cover. I now test the pitch with my inger to make sure it´s not too hot. After weighing my options, I ended up cutting out the affected parts which gave me the oportunity to practice patching the boat.

Now, after having elaborated on all the “hang-ups”, I´d like to add that the skin boat is indeed a great pleasure to paddle…there´s a sense of connection and satisfaction that is unique to something crafted by one´s hands and the materials nature provides…

Resources

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the process, the canoe or anything related (just leave a comment and I´ll eventually get it, though it may take a while). I´d like to thank all the people who´ve been providing valuable information and suggestions, particularily Tamarack Song. Some books and websites were also particularily helpful, some of which I´m listing here for those who want to do more research about the subject:

- Skin Boats and Bark Canoes by E.T. Adney and H.I. Chappelle

- The Aleutian Kayak by Wolfgang Brinck

- http://www.bushcraft.ridgeonnet.com/building%20a%20canoe.htm

What we formerly did was to drill a hole into the tree and hammer in a wooden stick with a groove in, so the sap would collect and run into a bucket also hanging from this peg.

I wanted to try a more primitive method of tapping this time. I made two cuts with the axe and put a straw in the middle to guide the sap into a bucket

The season for sap starts when there is rarely frost in the nights anymore until the time when the ground starts drying up after the snow is gone. Quality is best at first, getting more harshly flavoured later.

When you’re done with tapping (I tapped this tree for weeks, giving several litres per day) you can take out the straw and pound the wound flat and it will probably heal up to a lesser or greater degree. I don’t recommend using this method where birches are rare, since it’s potentially more destructive than the drilling method, of which can easily be plugged after you are done tapping.

This is the prototype I am making of a new portable trap, inspired by Ainu and Eskimo traps. It has the potential of becoming very powerful, scaled up or down to suit any kind of animal. I don’t want to tell you how it works, as that should be pretty evident. It can be used in combination with snare, but my plan for this one is to have spikes underneath to keep the animal from getting away. It should however be strong enough to kill them outright.

Regards

Torjus

This kit beaver was feeding in the margins of a pool in the river. It took a while before it noticed me and I got pretty close.

This common European viper was highly energized from laying in the sun through the morning. They usually make themselves home on dry ground and rocky areas, but are usually not found in relatively fresh clearcuts because of the many ant nests usually found there for the first 10-20 years. Ants will gang up on and kill any viper they come over and consume it in their nest. This is the only venomous snake in Norway and although the bite is not usually lethal to healthy adults, I keep a respectful distance.

And finally a Norway lemming, a common prey of the formerly mentioned snake in years of abundance. An animal subject to enormous fluctuation in population and generally very important to the ecology of the mountains. This is appearantly the second lemming year in a row, something which I have never heard of before.

Regards

Torjus