Living Primitively

My brother Arne and I built some more on the earth lodge today. We have now run out of birch bark and the bark is no longer peeling well from the birches. Because of this the remainder of the lodge will be thatched with modern tarps until spring.

With caribou season being only days away I can’t take the time to peel a lot of unwilling birches. 🙂

The lemmings are quick, so I haven’t taken photos of them alive as of yet. This roadkill one (there ar hundreds) will give you an idea what kind of creature we are talking about.

PS! This is my last (or second last) mobile blogging post as I can not afford to have an advanced phone after all.

Went up to the mountains for a short trip. To my surprise the fish had already started the spawn run and two of them hid under a big, flat rock. To catch them I encircled the rock with a gill net and started probing underneath with a stick. Unsurprisingly, they fled their hiding place and got caught in the gill net. Fairly good sized, the roe, liver and hearts were consumed right after to accompany the cloudberries and dried meat I ate earlier in the day.

The fish themselves were brought down to be shared with my family and eaten with chantarelles and potatoes.

Today I have been preparing some of the juncus stems I gathered for later using them in coiled baskets. Coiled baskets were traditionally not used in this area, but I want to experiment a little with it to see if this skill has any value for me.

As a sidenote, for the first time since 1994 the lemmings are abounding here. They are all over the place and their numbers will take the predator strain off the other small game species for a year or so until they disappear again. This used to be a regular occurence every four years or so, but of reasons unknown they have been gone for a long while. Mice also seem to be exceptionally numerous this year.

Been processing nettle stalks today. What I do is that I pound them gently, split the stalk and pull the bark off the woody core. After that the bark sheets are left to dry and further processing is done then.

The lichen antibiotics seems to be helping, the swollen area has been reduced considerably. But I am also using hydrogenperoxide and a paste directly on the wound. So it’s a bit difficult to separate each effect.

The wound I have on my foot has unfortunately caught an infection so now I need to take it easy for a few days again… And stay indoors. Being such a bad patient I guess I should go to the doctor, but I decided to give a supposedly powerful natural antibiotic a try.

Icelandic Moss (Cetraria islandica), really a lichen, grows on dry ground often along with reindeer lichens. The taste is really bitter, but it’s supposed to work as a tea.

This kind of mishap has really shown me the importance of a group or a food storage…