Cottage Wildlife July 2018

What The Heck Am I Reading Now? - Summer 2018 Medicine Walk

Very worthwhile. I've reserved other books by this same author from the library. This is my own journey of reconciliation. I need to try and understand the way things are, the way things were, and the way things ought to be. I need to hear these stories and understand the struggles and injustice that were done. I need to see and learn the value of the indigenous culture which I have only been given little bits of.

What the Heck Am I Reading Now? Summer 2018 - I Married the Klondike

This book is a Thrift Store find. I picked it up at the Owen Sound Salvation Army Thrift Shop. Brenda, Olivia, and I popped in there last week. It was a good visit. We picked up a few nick knacks including a Pyrex pie plate for me to get crazy with when fresh fruit or chicken comes along.

Laura Beatrice Berton is the mother of famed Canadian journalist, writer, and historian Pierre Berton. In Pierre's introduction we learn that he hiked up the Chilkoot Pass with two of his seven children in 1971, and then the next year he published a book called Drifting Home along with a number of special features in McLean's magazine in which he drifted from down the Yukon River to Dawson City with his wife and all seven of his children to re-live the journey he had taken as a boy.

Pierre Berton was born in Whitehorse and grew up in Dawson City. His mother, while always a writer, did not at first think that the life and times of Dawson City in the early 1900s was anything worth writing about. But of course it was. The pioneers of the gold rush from 1896 - 1898 were still around, and the city had kept all of its culture and trappings while the population declined from 8000 at its peak to 800 in 1932 when the family left. Berton arrived in 1906 and the city was already in decline. 

Lots of stories of the lives of courageous men and women who basically carved out a life based on a dream. Tales of survival, adventure, raising kids in the sparest of conditions, wilderness boating on wild rivers, and cultural anomalies in an isolated city that was cut off in the winter from all supply lines.

What the Heck Am I Reading Now? Summer 2018 - The Last Neanderthal

Interesting as a thought experiment, about how a female neanderthal would live in the years of the species' decline just before extinction. Neanderthals are a thing, scientifically speaking. Not made up. Human DNA has a large chunk of chromosomes that are the same as neanderthal DNA. Which indicates that humans and neanderthals are two separate species originating from a common ancestor, but that they also co-existed on earth and that they inter-bred.

The book illustrates the idea of how a human child could be found, adopted, and raised by a neanderthal family, and tries to explore how the neanderthals were different. Their bodies were more in-tune with the environment in terms of smell and sensing what was going on in the air. The author creates a theory that the family unit sleeps and dreams together and exchanges information from their ancestors through dreams. The body of knowledge of the family unit is the life force that keeps them going.

The young human who has been adopted by the family ends up running away when he sees the landscape pointing to his homeland. It is across the prairie where the neanderthals would never go. The boy tries to explain to the woman that she needs to follow him to survive and give birth to her baby, but she can't make herself go. 

The buries herself in an underground den to survive the winter. She gives birth to a baby which doesn't survive. She keeps a bone from the baby's fore-arm and wears it around her waist.

The modern connection is the woman archeologist who has discovered two skeletons in a cave in France. They are a neanderthal and a human, obviously buried facing each other, or perhaps they died in that position of looking into each other's eyes. A small human arm bone is found beside the skeleton of the neanderthal woman.

We are left to image how this might have come to be, and the book tells an interesting and informative story to help us along the way. It also helps illuminate and describe the feelings and physical forces that take over when a woman is pregnant, and how the demands of being pregnant and producing a baby, giving birth, caring for it, all fall on the woman no matter what walk of life she is from. There is that place of commonality for every woman, even across the line separating neanderthal females and human females.

Interesting. I would recommend it.