By Reg Collingwood
Wintering the Horses
Then Shawn left, and I was there alone. January 11th, 12th, and 13th went to 68 below, then 72 below. The warmest time of the day was 35 below. I’d be out snowshoeing to get the horses in the meadow across the river with my eyelashes stuck shut. The horse I kept with me was Steel. The rest would go up the mountainside and paw into the slopes for grass.
On the 15th of January, a pack of wolves that came out of the Ross River was bugging two of the horses, Strawberry and Slim. I could hear their bells. They bit Slim several times on the back leg and ripped his tail out. He wasn’t a robust horse, hence the name Slim. The next morning, I shot one of the black wolves on the hillside off the ranch with a 7mm. I had a little dog named Bobby, and he would just shake when the wolves were around.
There were a lot of wolves around. I would go out and snowshoe and pull a toboggan with salt feed out to the meadows and gather the horses up. We found 12 of them at Johnny Holmes’ camp; he had used the horses and turned them loose at Stikine, which was bad practice. Charlie Abou had been there trapping and had gone back to Iskut with the moose meat, but left me a quarter. It was frozen, so I chipped away at it with an axe.
We used to play rummy. We stayed in a little cabin with a potbelly stove because it was easier to heat. We made smokies and pancakes with frozen blueberries. We had a little snowmobile that wasn’t very powerful.