Dawson City, December: Klondike Osteobiographies: Captain Dick's Spook, the conscientious raven + other solstice stories

Play and read below.

The solstice fire I attended this year was in Sunnydale. The fire was fueled by burning a barn that had been picked up by a tornado and flattened in the past year, and it got so hot it burned up some of the fur on my hood.

Dawson has more New Brunswickers than I can shake a stick at. I'm the entire way across the country, within a day's drive of the arctic circle and, lo and behold! As I join a solstice fire way the hell out in Sunnydale (a remote, off the grid community which I'm not even sure is on the map), I'm informed by the first guy I meet that he's from Fredericton, knows me, knows my kid and my kid's father and dated so-and-so that I know. Throughout the night, I continue to meet more New Brunswickers who have all ditched the east coast for the wilderness of the far-flung Yukon outback. I'm pretty sure there were about five or six of us at this little gathering, and they don't account for the entirety of the New Brunswick contingent that I've met here. So, my solstice? Finding home away from home in a cold, remote place. Warms the insides better than whiskey. I'm slowly being sucked in to this vortex, but that's apparently what Dawson does.

Caveman Bill told me another story as we chatted around the solstice fire. This one's about Spook, one of Captain Dick's old horses, that Caveman Bill had to retrieve out of the snow and ice. Captain Dick is of sourtoe cocktail fame, but apparently back in the day, he had three horses: Spook, Coco and Black (three shades of black?). Well, back then, says Bill, there had been no such thing as the Humane Society (or SPCA) and there were always a pack of half-wild dogs running loose around Dawson. One night, during a deep freeze of about -50˚, Spook got loose. The wild dog pack sniffed this out and started chasing and nipping and pestering Spook, and ran him until he sweat so hard and so much in that -50˚ weather that he froze himself to death, steaming ice vapour off his body, and dropped over solid, on the spot. Well, Caveman Bill was "hired" by Captain Dick and his wife to go take a chainsaw and get Spook out of the ice. So, Bill tells me he sawed that horse up like a loaf of bread, separating him into pieces that he sold off to local folks to feed their dogs with, and even ate some himself (that was his payment for the job). I told him that horse meat is a specialty item in grocery stores in Quebec, so that was high livin'. Anyway, Dawson has an unfortunate history from its early gold prospector days of horses dropping dead around here. I'm not 100% sure I'll use this story of Bill's for my project or not, but I just might. What's great about it, other than the fact that it's tied to the local geography, is that it's a story I don't think a lot of people know, which is true of most of the stories I've collected for this project. Bill is an excellent storyteller, too.
I also used my time at the solstice fire as a chance to record the sound of a roaring blaze, which I think I might tie in to the story about the Saint of Dawson, Father Judge, who built the first church here and then watched it burn down not much later.

Me and a zoom recorder laying on the river ice.

Earlier in the day, I went down to the still-open part of the Klondike River and recorded some river ambience for my latest story, the one about the shoulder blades and Otter Woman, one of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in myths. That audio piece is now done, so I've completed three osteobiographies. I have three bone matrices done, including Little Charlotte's hand, a shoulder blade and a dog leg. I'm working on a skull now to go with the story of Moosehide Slide, another Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in myth. The story of Moosehide Slide is a story that everyone knows around here, and was my first bone story when entering Dawson, told to me by Dan. However, I've collected other tidbits to go along with that story, told to me by Jody at the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in Heritage Centre, and by Caveman Bill. So, I'm going to narrate a fuller compilation of their three stories. I need the Father Judge story to get more interesting for me--I need an additional bit of info from somewhere, beyond what is already out there on public record. I'm sure it will come.

To finish for today, let me tell you about an interaction I had this afternoon with a conscientious raven. Out in front of Bonanza Market, close to the corner of 2nd and Princess Streets, there is a certain twisted, naked tree that always has a scattering of ravens in its branches, watching down. I'd been noticing the ravens all day, feeling they were cooking up a plot of some kind and I wanted in on it. So, I pulled a piece of fresh cranberry muffin out of my bag. One of the ravens saw this and gave a chortle-kind of signal to the other ravens and a half dozen or so flew down to the road in front of me. I squatted with my hand out, muffin bits offered. None were brave enough to get that close, except for one big fluffy one, his neck feathers all ruffled out like a black tux. He'd hop over, then back off a few hops. He kept doing this, and finally I said, "It's ok, I'm your friend." I thought he was scared but alas, he was infinitely wiser than me. Knowing himself better than I, he hopped over again, looked me in the eye, then tap-tap-tapped his sharp spike of a beak down on the icy road in front of me, hammering at the ice, and then looked up at me again to see if I got the message. He was telling me very plainly that his razor beak was way too sharp to grab something out of my soft hand, and that I should just throw it down for him. I immediately understood, and tossed it to him. I thought it an extremely kind gesture on his part. Walking back to Macaulay House afterwards, my partner said to me, "You realize that the raven was telling you his beak was too sharp..."