I just finished deleting 151 "comments" from the previous blog entry. The usual drug and porn pushing web-lice, only now some of them try to disguise what they are doing by writing what appear to be legitimate comments, though of course they still contain the links to the drug sites.
Sorry, anyone who might have wanted to comment on an entry! It's just too much trouble to keep the web-lice off the site when comments are open. I'll continue to try to leave comments open on new entries for a short time, but it may have to be pretty short, and I'll close them as soon as the lice turn up. (I wish I knew how to make a spammer's computer monitor explode in his face!)
[...] To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,
To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,
It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible.
--Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"
We are now in that dreary and nameless Yukon season between autumn and winter. I think of autumn as over and done with when the leaves fall; winter for me begins with the first serious snowfall that sticks and remains on the ground. Between them lie heavy cloud, snow in the mountains, rain elsewhere, and eventually, bare hard frozen ground. I know it well, though there is no name for it.
The wild swans are getting the hell out. A chevron of fifty flew over my shack yesterday morning, wa-honking continuously to warn the fools on the ground that they should be doing likewise.
Passing through the annexe dogyard behind Isa's cabin a few days ago, I stopped to look over the population there. I got a shock. Where a couple of months ago I still saw unformed puppies, I now see TWO NEW 8-DOG TEAMS that weren't there a year ago! Dogs like the O-litter's Orlov, Olaf and Olga have shot up and attained adult proportions, though they are still months short of being official yearlings. The boys and girls of the F-litter who looked so unformed through the summer now look like grown dogs. The U-litter threesome that were staked there as puppies not long ago are now robust thirty-pound youngsters who will obviously be running with the rest this winter.
And sure enough, Isa has started moving one or two, like beautiful light-silver saddleback Gorki, into the main yard; and today two of Lizzy's callow puppies, not yet even four months old, have nevertheless been staked out. They were starting to fight seriously in the puppy runs, starting the dominance stuff about three weeks early! Of course, Volk and Valianka, the ones who got staked, are howling dolefully, doing the "poor pitiful puppy" act. All the same, they have hardly tangled at all, and already on their second day they look like they're getting used to the stakeout. And the puppy runs have been more peaceable without the two main combatants.
Today the equinoctial gales have howled unremittingly. Most of the leaves are gone from most of the aspens, but some of the late-turners still have a full load of brilliant gold. This afternoon the Yukon sun has that lovely, delicate, old-gold colour. There has been ice in the dogs' water buckets most mornings for the last week or so. This morning the mountains of the Miners' Range were thick and white with fresh snow. As the length of day and night balance temporarily, the year turns on its axis. Winter's coming.