Alone for a month

We had now made the decision to bring some animals to the farm. My comrades went to the south to get some animals and I stayed at the farm together with my dog.

I was alone for nearly one month (May). There was a lot of work to do, I chopped more firewood, built a compost, and prepared the gardens, fished, finished the chicken house and built rabbit cages.

Now and then I needed to get some supplies from the store in the nearby town (35 km away). I went by bicycle with my dog. Once on the way back from town I cycled up a step part of the dirt road and was quit tired, I looked up and saw something standing in the middle of the road about 100 meters away. I first thought it was a moose (Alces alces) and looked down again and continued to push the bicycle up the step road, but then I looked up again and saw that this was no moose, it was a robust creature it was a bear (Ursus artctos). I stopped and my dog also stopped , and then all three of us were just standing there looking at each other. My dog realized that this was no animal to chase but she started to walk towards the bear so I said to her STOP, and again all three of us were just standing there. Eventually I realized that I could not move forward so I turned around and cycled some kilometers in wrong direction but then I thought it was silly I did not want to go back to town and the bear was probably gone now so I went back and when I returned to the spot where the bear had been it was gone so I continued. When I passed that spot I heard something in the bushes close to the road and the bear had been hiding there and now it run quickly into the forest. From the back the bear looked like a big fury ball bouncing away into the forest.

It was now late May the gardens were prepared with hoe. I had sown carrots (Daucus carota sativus) , parsnips (Pastinaca sativa ), red beets (Beta vulgaris), broadbeans (Vicia faba) , peas (Pisum sativum), swedes (Brassica napus), turnips (Brassica rapa ssp. rapa), jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus) and reddish (Raphanus sativus var. sativus ). The potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) would be put into the soil later since my experience of Lapland says that frost nights is very like before midsummer and the potatoes are very sensitive when they have started to sprout. The size of the garden was about 500 square meters.

Almost all snow had melted away and there was no ice down at the lake anymore.