Literally.
We have been poking around our cabin. There's all sorts of questionably sound structures near this otherwise beautiful stout and pretty 2-story log and cedar Alaskan dream house.
From the second floor bedroom you can see the shed. Its made of logs and a tin roof, and it's leaning like a guy at a party that needs a wall to prop himself up on in order to continue his drunken obnoxious monologue to anyone who'll listen.
But enough about my childhood.
One of the things we can see is this white metal box, a freezer like chest thing. It has a birch log on the top. Yesterday I came back from my morning trek to the outhouse and decided to open the thing up. It was heavy like a sarcophagus (I've never seen a sarcophagus let alone can spell it, but I imagined it was similar). Joe had commented at breakfast that it looked like "the caribou meat locker." Sure enough, at the bottom, amidst leaves and some plastic, was a hairy bone with a hoof. Moose? Caribou? Undoubtedly some rugged person bagged an animal one winter and some tenant before us got a haunch. Or two. Funny thing was it smelled mouldy rather than like the breath of the Death Angel. So, pretty ancient, pretty harmless.
I got used to seeing dead animal parts at Toolik this past summer when I went out in the field collecting plant specimens. You'd think I'd be used to this by now.
Except, this is our home. And there's some kind of dead hoofed thing in the meat locker.
We shall see if the winter cold and the lack of a car, or lack of wanting to leave the old cabin and the opportunity of receiving a share of one of our recent acquaintance's bounty this hunting season makes us a bit less weirded out by the presence of furry meat on the hoof just outside our living room.
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