Flying into Yellowknife you see how sparsely populated the north is – even this southern part of the north. There are small lakes everywhere, which seem to occupy about half the land but few signs of people. Even though it is the largest city in the NWT it seems smaller than it’s population of 20,000 and you can pretty well walk from any of the hotels to the old town and the new brew pub called the Woodyard which also has great food. The museum (Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre) is fabulous and also has a great cafe. The restaurants are fun and serve fresh fish from Great Slave Lake.
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Okay, this is how far our guest blogger made it on her description of Yellowknife and our southern NWT road trip. So instead, here are some waterfall photos:
Louise FallsAlexandra FallsMcNallie Creek FallsLady Evelyn FallsCameron River Ramparts WaterfallsCameron Falls
Faye and I got our hands on a bear pelt recently. We kind of inherited it. It’s a long story.
Here he is being dragged through the woods.
The easy part was skinning him.
Skin-master FayeSkin-master Maciek“Bearing” his chest…
Then we discovered the nightmare that is fleshing and tanning. First up, it’s gotta be done fast because:
if he starts rotting his hair will fall out, also
he’ll attract hungry beasts if you’re fleshing him outside, also
he’ll stink up your house if you’re fleshing him inside (which, being afraid of beasts and the cold, I did)
I quickly built myself a fleshing post, draped him over it and began cutting away fat and flesh.
Raw bear pelts are heavy. There’s a lot of fat on them. A lot of fat. A neighbour lent me his Ulu and I got to slicing.
Slicey slicey
You’ve gotta cut as close to the skin as possible, but not too close or you’ll cut through and get holes in your pelt.
SLICEY SLICEY SLICEY SLICEY!!!!!
Bears are not recommended as a first tanning project because they’re so damned fatty, and their skin is so thin and the fat permeates deep, deep into their skin.
The pelt after about 10 hours of fleshing, before I realised that I wasn’t even half way bloody done with the thing.
Even after 20 hours of fleshing there was still heaps more fat constantly appearing out of the skin itself.
Oh good lord, how long do I need to keep slicing?
No matter how much work I did, it never seemed any closer to being done. I’d clear an area of fat and then the next time I took it out there’d be more fat there again. Tougher fat, closer to the skin, more tightly bound, even harder to cut away. Plus, I’d never done this before or even seen a completed bear hide, so I had no idea what I was doing, whether I was doing a good job, whether I’d fucked it up at the start and was just wasting my time, whether it was already good enough and I should just be done with it, or should give up and throw it away, no idea what all my efforts would achieve and whether it was even worth pursuing. I started having flash backs to the Ph.D.
One fleshed and salted hide
Eventually I just decided enough was enough and bathed him in salt (to force out the water and stop any decomposition) and left him until the hardcore tanning chemicals I’d ordered online arrived.
Bathing the cute little fella in acid
To tan a fleshed hide, you need to first soak it in acid (pH around 2.0), then soak it in degreaser to get even more of that endless fat out, then soak it in super crazy harsh “will blind and kill you” chemicals (we used “PARA-TAN”, a complex of polymerized aluminum salts) that rip apart the collagen bonds in the skin and turn it into leather. Finally you apply an oil to it to make it dry all soft and nice.
Out drying in the sunshine after a having had a nice tan.
When the pelt is drying after being tanned and oiled, you’re meant to stretch and work it a bunch to make it even nicer and softer. I was so done with him by this stage though that I didn’t bother, and he still came out pretty good.
The backside of a recently tanned bear hide.
I gotta admit, while I was working on him I was pessimistic. I thought I’d mess it up, all the hair would fall out, the hide would disolve, it’d come out hard as a brick, or who knows what else would go wrong. But even I was pretty pleased with the result.
Bear hide’s alright; tanner’s delight!
Finally Faye did some finishing work on him, like cutting out his counter-intuitively hairless armpits, filling in some holes and cleaning up his edges.
Our new weirdly shaped rug. Anyone gotta any ideas for what we should name him?
There are some words and phrases that mean different things in common usage in the North than in the South. “Tanning” for instance.
tan1
tan/
verb
gerund or present participle: tanning
(of a pale-skinned person or their skin) become brown or browner after exposure to the sun.
convert (animal skin) into leather by soaking in a liquid containing tannic acid, or by the use of other chemicals.
Another one would be “Beaver Tail”. If I was offered a beaver tail in the South, I would expect a sugary pastry treat. Up here, I would more likely expect the literal tail of a large hairy rodent.
