I finished the pemmican today. It’s so nice to have a day off- sleep till ten, get up all cobwebby with dreams, shake myself back into reality. Grind up some dried meat in the blender, mix the meat powder with some melted coconut oil and dried cranberries, pat it into a cookie sheet. Taste it, get a little weirded out but decide that ultimately, if I was hungry enough, it would taste like fucking magic. Grinding that meat up was a bit of a strange experience- for some reason the smell of the warm meat powder and the look of the little sinew threads all wrapped around the blender blade seriously turned my stomach. And there’s not much that turns my stomach. It made me mad at western civilization for feeding me shiny-clean shrink-wrapped meat my whole goddam life, either that or none at all. In the bright clean aisles of the grocery store, where is reality? Where is the violence of eating? Life and death? It’s all so weird.

pemmican all mixed up and ready to be squished into bars.

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more hares! they’re everywhere!

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Yesterday Debbie told me that a haggard woodsman at the post office had told her that he saw grizzly tracks down by the river. So today in the warm evening light I walked down there with my camera, past the families out grilling in their yards, all the young men out on their four wheelers, zipping this way and that. It’s all a little too intimate here- houses all crammed together within a few cluttered blocks, every other one abandoned, and nobody even says hi. I was, and continue to be, the only person I have ever seen walking. Down at the river the water was gone, and I realized it’s not a river at all, just a slough that fills up with water during breakup, and now breakup is over so the thing is just a long stretch of mud and grass and jumbled rocks. I start to poke around, walking up the silty bank. I saw dog tracks, footprints, an old fire circle- and just as I turned to head back, there they were.

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After a while the battery on my camera died, and I got creeped out and went home. There’s a key in this last one, for scale.

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And speaking of big shy things- can you spot the tallest peak in North America? Even though Denali is hundreds of miles from the village, it sometimes jumps out at you on the horizon like this. You might have to click on the picture (I think maybe that will enlarge it?) to see the giant mountain.