I wish you could smell the curry in the old trapper’s cabin. The store-bought curry with chopped garlic and ginger, onions and potatoes, chicken and fresh green beans, and Geisha canned coconut milk. In the spring and summer and fall with the door of the shack open, it carries round the clearing to where the thick spruce and fir hold it. In the winter it is inside thick and rich and if you are lucky there is the smell of Jasmine rice.
I could introduce you to the smell of the burning wood. The spruce and fir like campfires in your youth. The poplar light as air. The birch a smell of warmth.
In the yard you can smell the smoking green alder twigs under the tripod which the deer hide shrouds smoking for days for final curing and coloring and waterproofing. Unfortunately, if the green alder twigs dry and light you might smell the smell of singed deer hair, or the flames licking the leather hide underneath with the smell something between plastic and petroleum burning.
Occasionally in the long evenings in late fall and winter there is the smell of paraffin lamp oil when I refill the oil lamps – four or five for our one-room trapper’s cabin. Or the smell of Coleman white gas when I refill the Coleman lanterns – two used for working in the clearing in the evenings, only one used for going into the dark woods in search of empty air and the smell of the cold woods. The smell of 3-in-1 Oil on my fingers for soaking the stuck cap nut on the top of the lantern, which develops soot. When the cap nut comes loose and the top comes off I clean the glass shields with Windex. There is the smell of Windex, too, when I clean the oil lamp globes.
But inside, too, there is the harsh smell of vinegar. A beaver hide is soaking proximate to the wood stove in a brine solution of a gallon-and-a-half of vinegar, and three pounds of salt, and just enough warm brackish well-water to dissolve the salt.
No, you cannot come, because I think there is the smell of dog – or dogs – the general smell of which, on the bed, and from under the bed, I cannot smell. But each dog, to me, has her smell. Peppy of wood smoke and snow. Foxy of straw and hay and rotten road kill. Daphne of strawberries. “You taste like strawberries, “ Sawyer said to Kate on Hydra Island, “Lost.” Daphne of strawberries and honeysuckle and puppy breath.
All of this masks the smell of mice and dead mice or mice urine. The smell of other pelts amateurishly tanned – skunk and coon and fox and mink – hanging from the walls. The smell of the bachelor. Utensils and pans and pots unwashed.
The sorriest smell is that of myself, and when I go out in the winter night to urinate, I cannot smell myself, nor anything else, but the cold and expanse of the northern sky directly over our clearing and beyond the tall, tall trees. Then I turn and go back inside and the world comes to life again.
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