Exploring the wild forest Part Two
The wild forest explained
In Part One, I wrote about the squirrel, the woodpecker and about bats and birds. This time around we are going to look at trees. They give you medicine and direction.
Lets go south where it’s summer
The Yukon forest is home to many critters: birds roosting and eating berries and fresh shoots, rodents eating bark, predators marking their territory. We are doing the same: building a home from the bush’s bounty, collecting medicine and food, and mounting a door bell to mark our territory (imagine a carved woodpecker attached to a board at the side of the door: a visitor will “announce” themself by pulling on the cord attached to the “pecker”). That would definitely look funny out in the bush, with no one around for 200 kilometres.
Trees are good for another thing: they let you know about where you are in the big scheme of things. They show you approximately where the direction north is (a tree’s northern side doesn’t get as much sunshine as its south side). Go out and look at the trees: the north sides might look wet or mossy or have snow clinging to them. The south sides might have more pitch oozing from them.
Spruce sap to the rescue
They say most everything from a tree is good for your respiratory system—sounds probable. Sometimes, while snowshoeing through the bush, I will stop and pick off a bit of spruce sap that is running down the bark of a tree. I chew it like I would gum. The taste could be described as earthy, bitter, sharp, medicinal and spruce-needle-flavoury. Dry sap is brittle and will turn into a gummy-like substance, slowly; the fresher, softer pitch is sticky at first but will, with gentle chewing (or keeping it on the roof of your mouth), become like gum. I spit it out when I’ve had enough chewing going on.
In The Boreal Herbal, by Beverley Grey, she describes using spruce sap for many ailments. Here’s an example: a dog had a nasty cut on its nose; hence, Beverley pasted spruce pitch on it. The wound healed fast and didn’t leave a scar.
Often I look at trees and wonder what they’ve seen in their 200-year lifespan, standing in this one same place. Tree sap is water mixed with sugar and minerals. When the temperature plunges really quickly, the water in this medium freezes and will expand up to nine percent. The pressure from the liquid forces the tree’s wooden fibres apart and therefore the tree can split, with a crack and a pop.
Trees ripped in half
Trees are so hardy that even when split nearly in half, their purpose is to keep growing, however that might look like (this could be a tree-human analogy to take away for further contemplation). There will be green branches, maybe some funny-looking ones, growing out and upwards towards the light and daring the next lightning strike or bitter cold snap to just do that again.
Now what makes lightning strike this tree but not that tree? The amount of water inside a trunk is a determining factor. Once hit with that lightning rod, the water will instantly turn to steam and expand violently. This pressure can explode a trunk or cleave it from top to bottom. The tree then shows vertical cracks; sometimes even bark is blown off in strips.
Frost cracks in tree trunks are from a freeze-thaw event where a tree experiences rapid temperature drops—extreme temperature differences, if you will. The sun might warm one side of a tree trunk while nighttime does the opposite. Those are the “rifle shots” you hear in the black of night. The tension that temperature differences force onto a tree are, eventually, too much for the conifer. The outer wood contracts faster than the inner wood does. It’s that loud cracking sound that, alas, usually happens on the southwest side of the tree. These frost ribs are the tree’s scars.
What do heavy snowfall and windstorms do?
Heavy snow or freezing rain accumulate on branches and can force large limbs or even a trunk to be split apart. That’s when you see broken-off limbs nearby, or when the split begins at a tree’s fork.
Have you ever seen twisted trees? They have often been contorted by strong windstorms. This usually happens to a weaker tree that is still “thin” or that has two main trunks (a fork): the wood is not as strong as that of a solid one-trunked tree. Or it could be that the ground is always wet. Then the trunk will be divided right down the middle. Weak forks, on their own, can naturally split under their own weight. Internal rot can distort a tree, as well. The trees most affected are ones that have more water-rich sap. Here in the Yukon, those would be aspen, poplar, pine and spruce.
Next time you’re walking your pup, you might notice a new and special (to you) tree. Maybe it’s a spruce with antifungal, antimicrobial, antiseptic, analgesic and disinfectant properties!
Sonja Seeber, Yukon trapper
