moose decor
Originally posted December 29, 2007
It is mandatory for a log cabin to have at least one set of moose antlers as exterior decor. If there are many sets of antlers, they may be distributed whimsically, but if there is only the one moose available for mounting it must be set at the peak of the roof over the front entrance.
I’ve been taking more night-time shots because the window of opportunity is much larger. Daylight now is about five hours, but already, just one week past the solstice, the days seem noticeably longer.
Tonight I went for a walk and ended up with this moose, just across the street from here. This cabin is preserved as a tourist shrine because Robert Service lived in it for a couple of years, circa 1909 (another glimpse of it here in my blog). Robert Service’s enormously successful poetry collection, Songs of a Sourdough, was written before he ever set foot in the Klondike. While he lived in this cabin he wrote a novel about the Gold Rush called The Trail of ‘98 which also sold well and was made into a movie, but is described today as practically unreadable. Robert Service published highly fictional autobiographies and freely indulged in personal myth-making throughout his long and varied life, so much so that biographers today still have difficulty separating truth from fiction.
One of the best non-fiction gold rush books is Pierre Berton’s Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, and I’m not just saying that because I am at this moment (in 2007) living in “Berton House” and many of his source accounts are in the book case. This book was a surprise best seller in the 1970’s and really brought the idea of the north into the Canadian consciousness (Canadians tend to look south). The revised edition of 2001 is even better, and yes it is a startling story. Dawson City is still feeding off the energy of that Gold Rush, which only lasted a couple of years before the circus moved on to Nome, Alaska.
