Driving a tractor and going snowshoeing

 Saturday was a very fulfilling day for me. I helped feed the cows and tried driving a tractor on the pasture in the morning. After the lunch break we went snowshoeing in a nearby natural park and we heard a lot of local stories about the park, animals and farming. We played a card game called “Dutch Blitz” after the dinner.
 Saturday morning we all got up around 9 in the morning. After a very nutritious breakfast, I, with Farhard, Hannah, and Twylla, followed Ken to see how to feed the cows. The cows were shy animals. They used their big eyes, staring at me nervously and cautiously at us. And they were always backing away as I tried to approach them. Ken got on the tractor and using it to spread hay around the pasture to feed the cows. On the way back, I got on the tractor and became the driver. The tractor was as cozy as a car, with a heater and radio in it. Ken said he would spend twelve hours in the tractor in summer time. So it was important to make the tractor comfortable to stay. After three minutes of driving the tractor, I got stuck in the snow. So unlucky! And Ken told me better to drive through the cow poop even though it was very bumpy. In fact, those poops were like frozen big pucks and they made a road to drive through. 

Then Nan and I went to help Ken build a “Quenssy” (Icehouse). This was a tough job, repeating the same action hundreds of times, digging and pulling out.  But we did accomplish something. We made the room bigger and even built a seat to sit on. The temperature within the icehouse was very nice, close to zero degrees without any wind shield. That is maybe why Eskimo people used to live in icehouses because they were really very cozy compared to the outside.

 
My gloves, socks, and pants were all wet when I finally got home. People staying in the room were playing card games together, very relaxing. After the lunch break, we first visited a local artist’s workshop.

 
He is a normal farmer like the others, but he has a hobby making snowshoes and violins. He had been doing it for decades, just for fun. He told us that usually nearby farmers and tourists would also bring hunted or dead animals to him, such as wolves, elks, and deer and he stuffs them. In the end, he even showed us his homemade violin and played a tune for us. What an interesting lifestyle!

After that we went snowshoeing. Snowshoes looked like big badminton rackets and they can spread human weight wide, so that humans can walk on the snow with ease. It was my first time doing it, and it was fun. Ken said, thanks to the Aboriginals, it’s them who invented the snowshoes. I guess back hundreds of years ago, snowshoeing might be one of the greatest inventions for Canadians. On the way back, we took a picture on Clear Lake, here it is.  Not far away from this position, we could see two tracks of footprints. Lindsey, the naturist of the park, told us they were left by grey wolves, who usually move about in a group especially in the winter. What’s more was that we found various kinds of footprints of local animals, such as snowshoe hares, beavers. Snowshoe hare is the size of a man’s fist, but their feet are as big as a man’s palm, which I found amazing.

 
A very interesting thing is how the naturists keep track of certain animals. Lindsey said they will rent a helicopter and shoot a net onto a specific animal, for instance an elk. The net works like a trap, the more the elk struggles, the tighter the net will get. After taming the elk, they would draw blood from it, tag it with a beeping device on the head and set it free in the end. The blood sample will be tested for contagious diseases, which is in order to prevent the raised economical animals from getting it. When some kind of disease is tested in the raised animals, farmers can’t sell them in the market or export them, so the testing is really important.  Here in the picture she was showing us the detecting device to locate tagged elks.
 
We played some card games after the dinner.  Today was really long, and I felt very tired. But this kind of experience is like once in life, and it was valuable to my understanding of Canadian culture.