Winter

It was already December but still no snow on the ground. I started to take down birches that I put in a big pile. Later on in early spring I was going to cut and chop them into firewood. It was quite many birches and the work took some days, during the work it started to snow, and this time the snow would last the whole winter.

The Lake was now frozen and the ice were enough thick to walk on.

I tried some ice fishing but did not get anything, it was to early. Luckily we had preserved a lot of perch fillets with salt. We had alternated fish and coarse salt in buckets. When we wanted to use the fish we had to desalinate by putting it in freshwater a couple of hours two or preferably three times. Salinity must be ten percent or higher, otherwise the fish come in fermentation. In Sweden its a traditional preserving technique to let the fish come in fermentation with diligence. Some day I want to try that.

I started to prepare some logs that was going to be used for a log hut and a storage house. I used my broad axe to prepare the logs it was a time consuming work.

More and more snow fell. Now it was time to bring out the skis, we had nice wooden skis at the farm. We were often out on ski tours. 

The water in the spring did ot freeze but we had to shovel a path to the spring, since it was difficult to walk through the thick layer of snow when carrying buckets of water. One day when I was going to fetch water, the snow around the spring were all dirty, someone had taken a bath in the spring and thrown arund a lot of mud on the white snow. I find a footprint and could say that it was the wolverine (Gulo gulo) that had made such a big mess. I could not get water now but the next day the mud had sunk to the bottom of the spring and the water were once again clean and fresh.

In the middle of January I tried to ice fish again and now the perches had awaken and I got plenty. I also went by skis up to the trout lake an tried to ice fish for trout, but got nothing, may be it was too early for the trouts.

In February I started to take down spruces that were growing along the old road. The spruces shaded and acidified the wet meadows where the road passed. I think I took down over 50 spruces of different sizes. I debarked most of them, but some were only good enough for firewood.