Canada II (original) (raw)

Typed in similar circumstances to the above entry: I have to eat soon after waking or be siezed with a day's sick-feeling, so I'm coming to enjoy my quiet First Breakfast before the house is awake, watching the light creep in and turn the tall pines from a high mysterious silhouette to a stand of sun-freckled green fronted by birches. I've seen bluejays and turkeys from afar, and some redstart-like thing that moves like a thrush, but the lump of suet set outhas so far failed to attract anything close enough for identifyable inspection.

There was some roadkill awhile back my mum said was a porcupine, but it was pretty flat and her friends didn't stop, so I can't really say I've seen one of those (the sheer amount of splat precluded confusing it with a hedgehog, though, so what the Willamette student from last year was going on about with his 'porcupines all over the streets' in Austria I don't know). Anyway, since last blogging I have briefly visited the Badlands, a weird undulating formation of orange and green clayish ground, failed to make friends with some geese - it was suggested to me that they were Québécquois fois, and would not deign to respond to 'onk onk onk' in English - and spent an afternoon in the bizarrely guard- and postcardless Royal Ontario Museum.

The nearest I got to capturing the actual colouration of the excrescence of weirdness that is the local badlands.

This is actually a Quetzalcoatlus; the scale of the beastie doesn't come across at all...suffice to say, maybe, that the head/beak is longer than I am.

That is Sitting Bull's actual hat. I was all of the thickness of a glass case away from his actual hat.

Amusingly, from seeing pictures of it I recognised the general's scalp-tasselled warrior shirt from the other end of the aisle and was going 'eee' even before I saw they had his hat, too. Apparently he gave them to his Mountie counterpart, along with a non-feather-ruffling carrying case.

They also had a bunch of Carry The Kettle's stuff, too, and a highly informative silent film illustrating that Nanook of the North actually existed (unfortunately there was no sign of Noggin The Nog). He could kill a ton-odd of fearsomely pointy walrus with just a wood/bone harpoon and line.

Demonstration of Bear Cult among the Cree. Bear Cult simultaneously fascinates me and creeps me out in a Lovecraftian fashion. What they're doing there in eastern North America is exactly the same as they were doing in Finland, Japan, and perhaps most importantly, Siberia.

...by now the house is starting to wake up, so I have forgotten anything else I meant to witter about. More when possible.