Here on the Last Frontier we are gearing up for the long winter ahead. The days have gotten much shorter. It doesn’t get light until 8 AM and darkness comes again around 7:45 PM. While part of me dreads the short days of the winter, I’m already excited about the sleep. When it gets dark at 4 PM and doesn’t get light until 10 AM our children sleep a nice long night and we all do a little bit of hibernating. It always feels good to rest after a busy summer.
Andy has been busy cutting and splitting wood and we have to start a fire in the wood stove every morning now to keep the chill off. It’s cozy to see the flames leaping through the glass front.
We didn’t get a moose this year, but we got more than enough salmon so we exchanged some for beef. The freezer is full of Alaskan berries, (cranberries, raspberries, blueberries, currants) salmon, beef, halibut, and lately, spruce grouse. Andy has shot 4 so far and they are excellent eating. They are small, think bantam chicken only much, much more dumb. They let you walk as close as 15 feet away before flying into a tree where you can still easily shoot them.
Just this morning, as we cleaned up from breakfast, Andy saw a spruce grouse on the lane. He grabbed his gun and we all got to watch from the windows as he shot it. Now that’s my kind of hunting!
At dusk, three days after moose season closed, a big bull moose walked calm as you please through our yard. We hope he’ll be back during season next year.
