Living Primitively

I´ve been posting this on the Into the Woods blog a little while ago and thought some people who read this blog may also be interested in it…

It was spring – the maple sap was just beginning to flow and the white blanket of snow had disappeared from the ground. I had done some research about the styles of skin boats used by various Native peoples in the northern hemisphere and consulted a few people who knew a thing or two about that subject. I decided to construct a small canoe that would be ideal for exploring the small creeks and streams of this area, similar to the solo canoes made of fiberglass that my campmates and I use. Consequently, the dimensions are fairly similar, with a length of about 10 feet and the widest part being about two and a half feet wide (I can´t provide exact measurements since we don´t have any measuring devices at camp).

The frame was to consist of seven long saplings forming the sides and bottom of the canoe, with the keel/bottom pole connecting all the other poles at either end of the canoe. Hardwoods twist less when they´re drying than softwoods, and since I was looking for straight, flexible and preferrably light materials my choice of wood was limited to a few species…so let´s continue to

Part I: Assembly

On a fine cold spring morning, I ventured out by canoe to harvest the frame materials: I selected a dozen straight maple saplings for the main frame and about six dozen hazelnut shoots for the rib pieces. The first task was now to peel the bark off all the gathered materials for more rot resistance. Over the next days I slowly assembled the main frame, inserting wooden spreaders and support poles where necessary in order to give the canoe its intended shape. I ended up carving down and flattening most of the frame saplings and all of the rib pieces to achieve more evenly bend, and since the materials were green, no steaming or other treatment was necessary.

Lashing the rib pieces to the frame required a fair amount of rawhide, since each of the 60+ ribs was tied to seven frame saplings, with the rawhide being streched as much as possible prior to tying it off to prevent loose lashings. In order to more securely lock the individual ribs in place, I wrapped rawhide along three of the frame saplings, connecting each rib to the neighboring ones. Still, the lashings allow for a little bit of movement and flexibility, which makes the canoe more shock-resistant. Say you´re bumping against a rock: The impact gets dispersed throughout the frame rather than being focused on the point of impact (which might cause a break) as is the case with e.g. nailed frames.

The raw frame was now finished, and I applied several coats of oil & a little bit of pitch in order to preserve the wood and make the rawhide lashings more water-resistant. Besides its preserving qualities, the pitch also helps to keep rodents and other animals from chewing on the frame to get at the fat…

Now came the skin cover. Ideally one large hide would suffice to cover the frame – no sewing required, and besides that, every seam is a potential weak spot too. With no such hides being available to me at that point, I pieced several smaller hides together – one small buffalo hide and four deer hides proved to be sufficient.

In my research about skin boats I came across a waterproof stich that several Inuit tribes used for their kayaks and umiaks. It´s a rather time-consuming affair since the stiches do not go through the entire hide, but instead enter and exit from the same side.

Once the cover was finished, I folded it over the sides of the canoe and started cutting one side to match the shape of the canoe. The cut side was now ready to be lashed to the frame, and after a few ties were in place (starting in the center of the canoe) I repeated the same process on the other side. I was working my way towards the front and back of the canoe on either side, making sure the skin cover had no wrinkles and was tight (but not too tight as the rawhide shrinks and tightens on its own as it dries).

With the skins on but still wet I decided to go for a test ride, and after stiching up a minor hole, there was almost no leaking. Since it was a hot and sunny day it didn´t take long for the skin cover to fully dry – time for the last step, the oiling & pitching of the canoe.

Et voila – canoe finished! Or so I thought…which brings me to

Part II: Lessons

The cover was dry alright, but the shrinking action had opened up the seams too which meant the seams weren´t really waterproof anymore. What I realized then was that Inuit people usually pre-soak their boats prior to using them – this way the hide swells up around the seam and allows for no more water to come through. I decided to try another approach – pitching the seams similar to how it is done on birchbark canoes. Adding some powdered charcoal to melted pitch to help it set & harden, I covered the seams on both the inside and outside of the canoe with the mix.

As for the cover itself, it turned out that my first application of oil and pitch was leaning a little heavy on the pitch side – it kept being sticky even ater drying and therefore quickly adhere to anything it was touching -leaves, grasses, sticks…Scraping off the excess pitch and re-oiling the frame (with less pitch) seemed to remedy that.

Now…ready for the maiden voyage. There was some minor leakage and the sides of the canoe were a little lower than I had originally intended as the frame was warping somewhat during the drying process. Other than that, it seemed to work pretty well and it proved to be stable even on a windy lake. On another test ride, a stick protuding from a submerged tree trunk scraped along the bottom and got hung up at the seam, causing some leakage. Tamarack offered a practical suggestion for this particular issue – adding a keel pole to the bottom of the canoe, to protect the skin cover and seams from scraping on objects. And I can say, after going up and down creeks, through alder thickets and over beaver dams, that the keel pole truly works!

Keel pole on the upturned canoe

Something else I discovered on a longer canoe trip was that the skins do eventually absorb water (through prolonged rain or just being in the water, which, by the way, doesn´t mean that it´s leaking). And when this happens, the canoe gets a lot heavier – so heavy indeed that portaging become a lot more labor-intensive. I haven´t been able to find a way around that yet – maybe that´s just the way with skin boats (unless you use a modern varnish)…

Some lessons come the hard way, such as when I was re-pitching the seams after the aforementioned canoe trip. The next day I discovered that there were a number of holes along the seams. How cou that be, after just pitching it, and no prior holes? Closer examination left no doubt about it – the last application of pitch was so hot that it had melted through the hides! The lesson here seems obvious – make sure that the pitch has cooled down enough so it won´t damage the skin cover. I now test the pitch with my inger to make sure it´s not too hot. After weighing my options, I ended up cutting out the affected parts which gave me the oportunity to practice patching the boat.

Now, after having elaborated on all the “hang-ups”, I´d like to add that the skin boat is indeed a great pleasure to paddle…there´s a sense of connection and satisfaction that is unique to something crafted by one´s hands and the materials nature provides…

Resources

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the process, the canoe or anything related (just leave a comment and I´ll eventually get it, though it may take a while). I´d like to thank all the people who´ve been providing valuable information and suggestions, particularily Tamarack Song. Some books and websites were also particularily helpful, some of which I´m listing here for those who want to do more research about the subject:

- Skin Boats and Bark Canoes by E.T. Adney and H.I. Chappelle

- The Aleutian Kayak by Wolfgang Brinck

- http://www.bushcraft.ridgeonnet.com/building%20a%20canoe.htm

When I was a kid some friends and I usually tapped some birches every spring and drank. I find it very good, with a slightly sweet and sour taste. Water is not always good at that time of year anyway, so drinking sap is an excellent substitute.

What we formerly did was to drill a hole into the tree and hammer in a wooden stick with a groove in, so the sap would collect and run into a bucket also hanging from this peg.

I wanted to try a more primitive method of tapping this time. I made two cuts with the axe and put a straw in the middle to guide the sap into a bucket

The season for sap starts when there is rarely frost in the nights anymore until the time when the ground starts drying up after the snow is gone. Quality is best at first, getting more harshly flavoured later.

When you’re done with tapping (I tapped this tree for weeks, giving several litres per day) you can take out the straw and pound the wound flat and it will probably heal up to a lesser or greater degree. I don’t recommend using this method where birches are rare, since it’s potentially more destructive than the drilling method, of which can easily be plugged after you are done tapping.

This is the prototype I am making of a new portable trap, inspired by Ainu and Eskimo traps. It has the potential of becoming very powerful, scaled up or down to suit any kind of animal. I don’t want to tell you how it works, as that should be pretty evident. It can be used in combination with snare, but my plan for this one is to have spikes underneath to keep the animal from getting away. It should however be strong enough to kill them outright.

Regards

Torjus

Very rarely I take photos of the wildlife I see. But a while ago I got a few opportunities when my camera was virtually already in my hands.

This kit beaver was feeding in the margins of a pool in the river. It took a while before it noticed me and I got pretty close.

This common European viper was highly energized from laying in the sun through the morning. They usually make themselves home on dry ground and rocky areas, but are usually not found in relatively fresh clearcuts because of the many ant nests usually found there for the first 10-20 years. Ants will gang up on and kill any viper they come over and consume it in their nest. This is the only venomous snake in Norway and although the bite is not usually lethal to healthy adults, I keep a respectful distance.

And finally a Norway lemming, a common prey of the formerly mentioned snake in years of abundance. An animal subject to enormous fluctuation in population and generally very important to the ecology of the mountains. This is appearantly the second lemming year in a row, something which I have never heard of before.

Regards

Torjus

Since I got help clearing away all the windfelled trees around the house of my smallholding I have started working on the forest garden I wish to establish there.

I’ll tell you a bit about my goals in general with my forest gardening, why the previous forest garden I started is not doing particularily well and what changes I have done to this one.

My goal with forest gardening is to create a system that requires very little energy to maintain and expand, giving a fair variety of plants to add to the wild diet, sheer calories being more important than nutritive foods, which are already present. Per hectare productivity is less interesting to me, since the size of the area available is not a limiting factor. Because of this, it is at least as important to me to improve habitat for game species. I will try to focus plant species around locations where I’d otherwise be during harvesting time exploiting other resources like game and fish.

No native species will be eradicated, only their proportional occurence changed.

My strategy for achieving this is:

• Clearcutting small patches of spruce forest, planting in oaks, siberian pine and hazel. These produce lots of calories in the long run and provides plenty of food for wildlife species that are desirable to me (like squirrels). Oaks also improves the soil greatly.
• Planting hardy, preferably native and easily propagatable plants. For instance: The local varieties of sour, sweet cherry and plum sucker freely and can be divided with success at most times. Same is true with the local Ribes species.
• Give very little attention to the herbaceous layer, since there already is a number of very good plants growing wild in the area and which may spread if the soil improves. Will mainly introduce comfrey and nitrogen fixers.
• Burning the ground (meadows and some forest types) to shift the species mix and rejuvenate the vegetation. As of yet my experiments with burning vegetation seems to favour plants which are quite productive, such as valerian (seeds) and angelica (greens and root). But I’ll know for sure in a few months.
• Graft domestic apple on wild rowan shoots and plums/cherries onto bird cherry. It is too early to tell whether my experiments this spring were successful. I am also competely inexperienced in grafting, so I will not write off these combinations even if the grafts this year seem not to take.
• Spreading plants marginalised by centuries of overgrazing and senseless management. For example elm, maple, linden and ash. These are all favourable to wildlife and improves soil conditions more than the currently dominating spruce.

In my previous forest garden I thinned a predominately birch dominated forest to bring in more light to the cherries, plums, currants and herbs I planted below. I thinned the forest too little and the cherries have died from the competition. The plums and the currants look alright and will probably survive if I thin the trees out yet a little more. The young hazel bush that was already there has however benefited from my activity.

In the site of the smallholding itself quite a number of very good food species are already existant, but their proportion is not so useful and their interaction is more one of competition rather than mutual support.

The fallen spruces on the site has acidified the soil and provided excellent habitat for rampant spreading of wild raspberry and hops. This has killed one of the 5 existing sour cherries and significantly damaged two others. The situation has been taken care of now, through removing the felled trees and the branches and sheet mulching the area were the problem was the greatest. To improve the recovery of the surviving currants and cherries, sheep manure and shell sand was spread on the ground before the sheets were laid on. A few raspberry and hop plants were left to survive, the dead cherry was left for the hops to climb on.

Highly beneficial plants for human use already on the site:

• Sour cherry
• Red currant
• Blueberry
• Grey willow
• White birch
• Wild strawberry
• Wild raspberry
• Hops
• Angelica

Plants I have introduced to the site:

• Siberian pine (has sprouted, but further growth will not be appearant for a year or two)
• Sweet cherry
• Lovage
• Rhubarb
• Blue lupine (yet to see whether it has sprouted)
• White clover (yet to see whether it has sprouted)
• Stinging nettle
• Potato
• Quamash (yet to see whether it has sprouted)
• Burdock (yet to see whether it has sprouted)
• Comfrey (yet to see whether it has sprouted)

Although it isn’t strictly necessary and since I have manure available I have planted in a very tradtional way. I make a hole several times the size of the roots of the tree, both depth and width. Then I packed a thick layer of manure in the bottom, made a packed layer of earth above there and then planted the tree the regular way. Then I watered the soil to complete saturation in order to take out any air pockets. This method will appearantly ensure good rooting and early growth.

I was informed by my father that the traditional way of planting potatoes in the area was to spade up the turf and plant the potatoes underneath the turf. Being somewhat worried about a potential weed problem with this method I did some modifications. I turned the turf upside down and piled some half rotten branches, manure and shell sand underneath, then watered heavily as with planting the trees. On the surface I sowed the seeds of white clover to hopefully work as a living, nitrogen fixing mulch. The propagation beds were done in the same way.

It is worth noting that I haven’t been to the site for over 3 weeks now, so I have no idea how things are developing right now. I’ll update on it further when I get back home.

I´m getting things ready to head out into the woods. For probably most of this coming summer I´ll be immersed in the woods with a small group of people. That also means that I won´t be posting here, since there will be no computers available. If you´re interested in reading about the immersion, there´ll be a blog about it at

http://teachingdrum.org/intothewoods/

which will be updated sporadically with writings, pictures or sound recordings thanks to some people who will transcribe and post the material for us primitives.

The lakes around here still have a layer of ice, soon they will look like this…

It´s been great sharing here, and I´ll probably continue doing so once I get back from the immersion in the fall.

Enjoy the spring/summer!

Thomas