In the wild and wholly North, things have a way of working themselves out. When you're living in a one acre clearing in a cabin north of the 60th parallel and the next village is 37 miles away and you're a nine year old girl, you are somewhat at the mercy of the elements.
What elements am I talking about? Not the deep patches of snow or the torrential stream that doesn't freeze over evenly, or the last three of your father's sled dogs.
No, the dogs like you because you feed them moose meat or cariboo, which you have shot yourself. No the elements that cause you trouble are the following: (1)You must be careful about the wolverines. There's a little known fact about wolverines - if you track a wolverine, the wolverine will circle back and track you
Now a wolverine is a big weasel. You don't want a big weasel on your tail. Because weasels don't fight fair - never have and never will. The notion of "fairness" really doesn't occur to wolverines. And if you ever sat down beside a wolverines ha ha, and took 3 hours to explain fairness to him ( if you could get a wolverine to sit still for 10 seconds, which you couldn't)
chances are you'd see the wolverine roll around on his back and laugh.
Problem is, wolverines don't seem to laugh. Otters seem to laugh when they're sliding down wet rocks and splashing into lake water. They seem to do a hell of a lot of chattering together, which seems like laughter to me. There's a pack of them down from my cabin.
When wolverines fight, they go straight for the balls. And they're really quick and they're
low - about thigh level to a Kodiak bear. A wolverine will consistently drive a Kodiak bear away from a kill the bear has made. These 1000 pound bears want to protect their balls just like any other sensible male, aware that his "man"hood is dangling 3 inches below his groin - detachable and free. The wolverine keeps making quick snaps and thrust with his powerful neck, and the Kodiak bear ( or grisley bear) runs away.
Wolverines also have a nasty habit of pissing all over their food and then burying the food, leaving in there for a week, and coming back and eating it when it's extra tasty. Wolverine piss smells as strongly as a spray from a skunk. If you start to irritate a wolverine, he'll break into your cabin, tear the place apart, smash everything, steal your food and piss all over the remains. Grown men have been known to abandon their homes. Some northern tribes believe the wolverine is the devil. Enough said.
Polar bears are a whole different ball game, sweet as they look on Coca Cola commercials, it's a mistake to approach one in the wild, because you are on the polar bear's food
chain. It's a mistake you'll only make once. I have never seen a polar bear and a wolverine engage.
And I'm not sure I want to.
Back to the story. The second element (2) the nine year old girl has to worry about is the northern lights. When you're far enough north, the northern lights make a sound: they seem to sing to you. And if they form a circle pattern and thrust down at you rhythmically and repeatedly; you can get lost in them - effectively you become hypnotized, if you're sober, If you're not sober, if you eat those funny red-capped mushrooms that seem to grow near evergreen trees, and then you stare at the northern lights... you may not get up for days....**
And then you have to worry about the third (3) element of danger in your environment: if you lie still for too long: you'll be raped by your insane uncle, who has sniffed too much gasoline.
Nancy was raped by her insane uncle every day for two years, from when she was nine til when she was eleven. And she lay still for it because if she didn't, her uncle would rape her younger brother. Then she took matters into her own hands and when uncle came at her one more time, she stabbed him 189 times in the face and the chest and the groin.
Then she fed uncle to the sled dogs.
Problem solved. No investigation required.
Three years later a visitor was abusing her mother, so she shot him right between the eyes with a 303 rifle.
Same problem, same solution.
The dogs got fed.
In this case, I am assured that Nancy is orgasmic, and I believe her. Her illness is really
not of a repressive nature, because she found her own solution. She was a victim, but she didn't stay a victim for three decades.
Her neurosis manifests in a very common way - common to women who have been abused at a young age. She flaunts her sexuality, in order to taunt and tease and piss off everyone.
She's actually still quite angry and she is sexually obsessed. So she'll walk down Main Street with her breasts exposed, which is not really a problem. But she is judged by a lot of Christians, especially when she stands outside the chapel door exposing her teats during one of those boring
Anglo Saxon hymns.
The pastor tends to call the cops, because "she is causing impure thoughts!"
Not in me!
The police can't really hold her anyway, because it's no longer illegal in Canada
to walk around sunning your breasts.
In my opinion, all they can really charge her with is, "Causing a disturbance." But she doesn't really make any noise.The police think the situation is funny, and you have to agree with them. The root causes aren't funny, but the present manifestation.
I have to admire her courage. She found her own solution to a difficult situation, and she's not really crazy, though she sometimes pretends she is.
I had a problem yesterday, when the mother of my eight year old daughter showed up and Nancy was sitting topless in my living room. Things got quite noisy. I pleaded for she and my daughter to stay, and said there was really no problem. But pleading doesn't work in this world. Nor will it work in the next.
Diagnosis? Nancy has "pain-in-the-ass" syndrome. She can be a real pain in the ass!
But I like difficult people... I must.
** By the way, the Lapplanders have a system for mushroom-eating, passed down to them by their ancestors. They discovered, through the wisdom of the ages, that their reindeers loved to eat the red capped mushrooms with white flecks. (Read a children's fairy tale and you'll see one, or read about the early Christians...) ( amanita muscaria )
Some of these guys are a little too close to their herds, and I can only suspect
that their ancestors were closer still. They observed their reindeer eating the mushrooms. And because, I can only surmise
reindeer piss was part of their regular diet - an early morning drink perhaps, before they had booze or coffee. And these "poor" primitive people started getting extremely high. When they went out in a sled pulled by reindeers, their sled started to fly across the night sky (so high they were). They started a myth about a fat holy man with a big sack (for gathering mushrooms), who'd wander around evergreen trees where the mushrooms grew. And he dressed in red and white, like the mushrooms.
And he'd get high and his sled would fly, and he'd laugh: Ho! Ho! Ho! And so we get this lovely story, more fact than fiction, usually told around the winter solstice: all as a result of: reindeer piss!
Mock nothing! Everything may serve.
Case 4. Respectfully submitted.
