Yellow is the Colour of My New Shack Floor

It’s more than two weeks since we bade farewell to Iceland. Our fortnight just south of the Arctic Circle looks choice in the rear view mirror but Boularderie Island’s diversions have us living in the present.

It had been two years since we laid eyes on Boston pals Dennis and Nancy but only two minutes for riotous, familiar connexion to restore itself. We rode the bikes in a generous (rare this summer) rain squall, took a short hike to a lifer destination, Gun Creek Falls, by the New Harris Road, and did as tourists do in touristy Baddeck.

Apart from customary barred owl duets, yipping choruses of coyote squads have become a regular feature of the cabin’s night-time soundscape. Cape Breton coyotes are atypically large and aggressive. A couple of years ago a pack attacked and killed a young woman in the national park. The animals are in the news again this morning in the wake of aggression at nearby Cape Dauphin. We are given to understand that the beasts are not purely coyotes at all, but coyote-wolf hybrids. That struck me as an acceptable circumstance if it resulted from natural processes, but I’m now told by a usually reliable source that the animals are not natural at all but were selectively bred by the provincial lands-and-forests department as a kindness to a multi-national lumber corporation keen to ‘control’ deer populations in its Cape Breton timber holdings. As a result of Cousin David MacDonald’s graphic account of the effectiveness of a pack’s hunting-and-killing methods I’m inclined to ensure that we are accompanied by stout hardwood walking sticks on our morning walks around Dalem Lake.

Other faunal changes attract my notice too. In 41 years here at Bigador I had never seen a pickerel frog, a handsome leaper adorned with splashy rectangular spotting on his coppery brown back. Suddenly they are everywhere, jumping prodigiously across our path, getting themselves flattened on the roadway by inattentive night-time drivers. Nor had I ever seen the striking star-nosed mole, larger than other moles, with feet that remind me of an armadillo’s and a most remarkable starfish-like snout: I counted 22 nose-tentacles on the one we found freshly dead on Bob Nagel’s road the other day. Now I hear the neighbour’s cat has brought home two more of the strange beasties. Other habitués of the old farm are conspicuous these days not by unprecedented appearance, but sudden disappearance. In past years varying hares routinely entertained us as they grazed contemplatively on the grass in front of the cabin. Now they are gone, victims of what – hunters? Marauding coyotes? Who can say?

The summer of 2012 is as extremely different from its 2011 predecessor as it possible to imagine: one hot sunny day after another. The old swimming hole below the shack went entirely unused a year ago. Now it provides a welcome mid-afternoon respite from the swelter.

Never at Big Bras d’Or is there a need to complain about having nothing to do. Apart from Nature’s abundant distractions, there is no end of pastimes and projects to be seized. The thrum of the generator regularly violates the stillness. Construction tools, paint brushes and rollers are taken frequently in hand. On our way through Quebec in June we stopped at Wilfred Laurier National Historic Site to see its representation of the boyhood home of Canada’s great Liberal prime minister, the gentleman who graces our five-dollar bill. A distinctive feature of the old Laurier house is its floor, painted sunnily yellow. I decided I just had to have a yellow floor of my own. Now I do: the original cabin plancher now beams brightly jaune.

While I was at that I remedied a 41-year-old irritant. Back in ’71, the year I built the cabin, my only wealth was a young back and plenty of energy. After dismantling the derelict house that once stood further up the way I used the proceeds to frame the cabin. By the end of the floor construction phase I was down to the dregs, a pair of long, ugly, irregular, too-thick boards. With nothing else available I used them, with the result that the finished plywood-surfaced floor always featured a high ridge along its centre spine.

Now I’m happy to report the spinal ridge is gone: I sectioned out a 13’x2’ section of floor right to the joists ; its replacement is beautifully level – and spectacularly yellow. If you’re planning on paying a visit in the next while ensure you bring your sunglasses: no matter how cloudy it might be out-of-doors you’ll need them once you step inside.