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Our friend Tod joined Rebecca, Mirabelle and I for a hike along my Fell Run route. We began with the long traverse up to the ridgeline (why, oh why did I start the run like that?), and followed the path along the ridgetop, over the various obstacles, and finally to the ravine that leads back down into the valley bottom.

All along the way we encountered tracks. Do you know what they are?

The strange thing is that this is usually a solitary animal, and there were clear two animals romping through the snow, one with tracks much larger than the other. It’s a bit early for their mating season, but this was probably a male and female fisher who were doing some pre-mating season flirtation.

We also came across some strange felid tracks. They seemed too large for a domestic cat, and too small for a bobcat.

We’ve been out in these woods a few days each week through the whole winter, and these were the first fisher tracks we’ve seen. We’ll check back this week and see if they’re still around — what a fun visitor to have!

‘S’ decided she would like to do the Ice and Fire challenge, so it was into the water again. It was a fairly warm day, and we were both interested to discover that once we were out of the water, we were fairly warm. After we came out of the water, we walked back to an area of trees and ‘S’ started a fire for us with her flint and steel.

The icy dip came after one of the most memorable Metamorphosis adventures yet. ‘S’ and I had gone up to camp and done a ‘fire race’, where we both attempted to start a fire as quickly as possible. Since she’s pretty adept at fire-making, we imposed some limits, banning birchbark. These ‘woodland fires’ can be the most challenging to start, mainly due to the difficulty of finding decent tinder material, which must be very fine and wispy. This was matchless, of course.

Sitting around the fire once the ‘race’ was over, I brought out a plastic bag filled with the ‘camp biscuit’ recipe I’m trying to perfect. Instead of butter or oil, it uses ground Chia seed, which forms an oil-like gel with a bit of added water. All would have gone wonderfully if I hadn’t forgotten the tin pot. Hungry enough that we had to make biscuits, we coal-burnt a bowl in an old piece of what was probably ash wood, and using a heated rock to melt snow, began to harvest water. We couldn’t help but laugh hysterically as our ‘water’, which was black from the coal-burnt wood, was poured into our biscuit mix. Nevertheless, we soon had a sticky dough, which we wrapped around sticks. Not too much later, we were eating nicely browned biscuits. I thought they were fabulous, and after I hypnotized her and planted enough suggestions, ‘S’ thought it was ‘passable’ too. Oh well =)