yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Into the Snow Storm: Checking for Predators | Life Below Zero


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

♪ I turn on all of my lights here. Other than the brush right there, I'm driving in a milk bottle. If this gets any worse, I'm done. So, what I'm gonna do is try to pick my way back, following my tracks. The wind and the snow is just filling them in as rapidly as I'm making them. This was just a few minutes ago, and they're already half full. I maybe have an hour, I'm gonna lose all my trail.

I only needed half of a day to get up to the coast, get my water, and run back home. But this winter is what it is, nature is what it is, and it said nope. Here you go. Hold my beer. I'm gonna hit her with it now. I think one of the educational things I'm getting this year from the whole planet, as much as I hate failure, it's not failure. It's the ability to recognize when you need to back down.

I've been full-blown charging through my life since I was tiny, and I think I need a few of these lessons to go let's back out of this before it's too late. I am glad I turned around when I did. There's so much drifting going on here. I'm getting turned around a little. I can see my barrel, so I know I'm at the end of the runway here. Um, I think I am anyways. Yeah, here I am. There. My garden is there. Lights are there.

Oh, wow, what the heck is that?

SUE: Oh, it's my fox. (bleep). Scared myself. What has he got? Oh, all right. This is uh... this is the remnants of a caribou I got a while back. Now I got a couple of foxes here. I don't have a lot of caribou left. I actually want to get out. They're acting really weird. That's a pretty big print there. Those are pretty big prints. This is the caribou I got. I don't know, a little while ago. And when I laid it here, it was all flat.

But I can see right here, something has snapped the vertebrae there. I've got a big hole down here. I've got a big hole on that side. Feel around. I've got bright red blood in there. Yeah, I don't want to get too involved in that. What does that? A wolverine will get on the underside of the kill, and like this is, snap it and pull it under, snap it and pull it under. Bury it, pee all over it.

Now look at the snow. Look at how much I'm getting. This is all brand new. That right there is recent. I don't want to spend my time in the dark, in a storm, trying to figure out who's eating at my table uninvited. But Kavik is mine. So, I want to know who's roaming around in it. And if it's a big top predator, I've got to know that. But right now, I can't do much. My hands are getting bright red. My temp is really dropping, the snow is coming in hard.

I want to get home. And as long as I can see, get out here and see who's in my yard. Who's awake and doing something. Cause right now, I'm betting it's bigger than a fox.

More Articles

View All
TIL: You Can Smell Through Your Skin | Today I Learned
[Music] Your nose isn’t the only thing that can smell things. You can smell through your skin, and that was a big surprise on one of our expeditions. I dive into a lot of these underwater caves, what we call blue holes. Maybe at about 30 ft, you hit these…
How the Kushites Took Over Egypt | Flooded Tombs of the Nile
[tense music] Nuri is one of the most intensive concentrations of pyramids anywhere in the world, across any culture and civilization. [upbeat music] In Sudan, in fact, there are more pyramids than in Egypt. And this is something that people don’t think …
How the Mojave Desert Compares to Mars | National Geographic
Exploration is a compulsory human trait. We’re the only animal on the planet driven so deeply by curiosity. From the surface of the Earth, the ocean floor, to space. Humans have an insatiable desire for adventure and exploration. These days we’ve been tu…
How Engineers Hack Cameras to Photograph and Study Sharks and Lions | National Geographic
[Music] [Music] Crittercam was an animal-born imaging device. It’s basically a camera plus a bunch of sensors for collecting scientific data as well as point-of-view imagery. This was the first HD Crittercam we actually made. We built that camera in like …
When Watersports Become Dangerous | Science of Stupid: Ridiculous Fails
Some things just don’t go together– oil and water, gas and matches, tequila and fireworks. So you can imagine my concern when I heard about a combination of kayaking and surfing. Then I saw this and thought perhaps I’m worrying about nothing. And then I …
Memories Make Us Who We Are | Breakthrough
Steve believes our identities are built on memory. [Music] When you think about memory, it is the thing that threads and unifies our overall sense of being. So, without it, we become stuck in time, right? And we lose our [Music] identity. But how reliab…