I think this was the first snow during this winter.

Our small greenhouse is waiting for the summer. No change for tomatoes to grow now 😀

A crow sitting nearby spruce…

A chubby crow…

Rays of light and the glitter of Northern Mother Nature.

Night settles over the snowy countryside.

The Big Dipper came to say hi 🙂

So, about the hare highways. As the first snow covered the countryside, I decided to make trails for animals. I took a freaking heavy stone, put it in a sledge, and sweated a lot as I dragged the stone all around the nearby fields. At this exact spot, I spent the first evening with my bow and waited the hares to come into my sight. The abandoned barn gave me a good cover, but the hares didn’t never came here.

Shit, I almost dropped my stone in the ditch 😀 Once I seriously needed to lower my arms below the water level to pick it up, which wasn’t nice at all 😛

The making of snow trails wasn’t useless at all, as a few days later the tracks were full of foot prints of hare! The biggest problem is timing, what is the appropriate time for stalking. Is it evening, middle night, or maybe morning? The hare hunting season is now over, but during the next winter I need to experiment more with this hunting technique. Maybe I need to use a trail camera and try to learn the schedule of the hare 🙂

Here is one spot where the hare entered the trail, and made almost 90 degree angle in propagation 😀

I also saw marks of a fox chacing a vole. At one spot, the vole trail disappears and only the fox trail carries further.

Once the snow melt, and the environment became a little bit duller. Anyhow, our neighbor let us use his authentic, chimneyless smoke sauna! Oh boy, it was quite interesting and relaxing experience 🙂

There were approximately 1100 kg of stove rocks, and the sauna itself was also huge! There was a lid over the stove, which was elevated before throwing the water. We needed to be careful not to fry ourselves by releasing too much heat from the stove at once 😀 After the sauna, the shampoo became black from the soot which was attached to our hairs and skin from the steam 😀 Notice the sausage by the way. It was quickly well done in those extremely hot steams of the enormous stove 🙂 Our neighbor said that once the smoke sauna is heated up, it is warm at least for two days!