Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Deep in Alaska,

hundreds of miles from anywhere...

SUE: It is not for the meek. It's not for the timid.

If you question your own abilities, be somewhere else.

...the clock is ticking.

AGNES: We have to really prepare ourselves for the cold winter.

NARRATOR: Temperatures are dropping.

ERIK: This is a seriously harsh environment.

NARRATOR: And daylight is disappearing.

SUE: Winter's barrelling down on me

like a freight train.

NARRATOR: On this season of Life Below Zero...

SUE: There was a bear sighting just a few hundred yards away.

Everybody feels it's gonna be an extremely aggressive bear year.

GLENN: This is very hungry country where I am.

There's a reason why I'm the only person within many miles of here.

Whoa!

If I fell down, it would be a slow, painful death.

Whoa!

ANDY: A lot of people die every year in Alaska going through the ice.

Ah, shit. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

This time of the year, it doesn't matter what you feel like,

you still gotta get up and get the job done.

Whoa! We got a live one.

CHIP: We are hunters, not farmers.

We chase it down and kill it, or we get nothing at all.

You can break down, freeze to death, you can crash,

but you gotta get out there and earn it.

ERIK: It's hard when you're cold and you're shaking.

If it was easy, it really wouldn't be fun.

SUE: My name is Susan Aikens,

and I live 197 miles above the Arctic Circle,

just a few miles from the Arctic Ocean.

I live by myself out here at a place called Kavik River Camp.

Population, one.

The meat that I hunt directly means I live or I die.

I still don't have enough to get me through the winter.

Gonna go a ways up river and set up a tent and see what I can get.

The goal is I need to fill my freezer,

to put it in my belly, so I don't die this winter.

Weather in the Arctic is absolutely unpredictable.

Every sign says big, bad winter again.

So I have to be prepared for snow, cold, pretty much the whole gamut.

It's the changing of the guard.

Summer and the bounty of that summer is going to go away.

The caribou migrate out. They're gone.

The bears go to bed, they're gone.

Most of the birds migrate out, they're gone.

So if I'm gonna get meat, I've gotta get it now.

I'm hoping to leave with an empty sled and come back with a full one.

Night-time is back, northern lights are back,

it's just a quick slide now into the fun that we call winter.

NARRATOR: To stock up for the impending winter,

Sue heads toward where the Kavik River meets several valleys,

a prime spot to source food.

SUE: There's your ptarmigans.

Oh, I see some ptarmigans way out there.

I think I'll just have to get close and see where they're hiding.

Where there's one, there's usually more.

I do have one, let me go find him.

All right, well...

At least we got one for dinner.

Thank you, little birdie.

This is a good first step in filling my freezer.

But I'm gonna need to do a whole lot more hunting to survive this winter.

ANDY: I have ideas for how I want my life to be

and you can make the life you want when you live out in the bush like this.

There's nobody telling you what to do or what not to do.

I'm Andy Bassich. I live here at Calico Bluff.

Ever since I was a young boy I kind of had this gut feeling

that I wanted to live out in the woods.

When I moved up here, I didn't know anybody,

didn't know anything about Alaska,

but there were something, some deep drive inside of me

that put a calling to me to come out here and live here.

KATE: My name is Kate Rorke.

There are no roads to where I live.

No close neighbours,

just a whole lot of wildlife and 20 sled dogs.

ANDY: In Alaska we call it subsistence living.

Years ago they would have called it a frontier life,

living out in the woods and being self-sufficient as much as possible.

For us, in the upper Yukon,

we go from summer to winter very, very quickly here.

Fall times are very short

and there's a lot to do in the fall,

with harvesting gardens, hunting moose, and catching fish

for both ourselves and the dogs.

And we only have about three weeks to do that.

KATE: It's a major hurry now to get the wheel across the river

so that we can get the good fish

and get them as fresh as we can to put up for ourselves.

NARRATOR: Andy and Kate rely on their home-made fish wheel

in order to secure food from the river,

but getting it in the water is a gruelling task.

ANDY: It's a big job putting a fish wheel in.

Especially when it's just one or two people.

Quite frankly, everything that has to do with fish wheels is heavy.

It takes a lot of self-motivation to live out in the bush.

You've gotta be able to push yourself.

If you're a person that when the going gets tough,

you just, kind of, sit down and wait it out,

you're not gonna do very well out here

because that resource will either go by

or your opportunity will be missed.

We're the last community in Alaska before these fish go into Canada.

So we're at the end of the line, basically.

So even though a run comes in really strong,

if it's fish like crazy down in the middle and lower river,

there may not be a lot of fish in this run that make it up to here.

We know when they're expected to come,

but we don't know what the numbers are gonna be.

KATE: So right now every minute counts at getting that wheel in the water.

So the quicker we get it in the water,

the more luck we're gonna have at getting some fish

to put up for ourselves.

CHIP: I didn't come here to hide from anything.

I didn't come here to find myself.

I just took the skills I have

and I focused it into the proper way

a man should make a living for his children.

Whoa.

AGNES: That's one big leg.

-Yee! -Yup, the meat here don't come in

pretty little plastic packages.

It comes wrapped in skin.

We have to skin it,

we have to take the muscle groups apart

and separate the bones.

There.

CHIP: It's a lot of work all right, but it's well worth it.

It's really clean food.

It's beyond organic.

I'm Edward Hailstone, my friends and family call me Chip.

I live with five of my daughters and my wife here

in Noorvik, Alaska, along Kobuk River.

And I live a subsistence lifestyle.

We hunt.

We fish. We gather.

And we do it as a team.

My name is Agnes Hailstone. I was born in Noorvik, raised here.

I've been here pretty much all my life.

My daughters were born here and hopefully they'll do the same.

CHIP: So, I'm thinking

this place needs a cache. We need a place to put this up and to hang it in.

-Yeah. -The best thing to do is just

-build a little something here. -Just build here?

Yeah, we could use it this winter until we're done with it,

so the caribou we get here will go in the cache.

-Yeah, it'd take at least 10 logs per wall. -AGNES: Yep.

And it's gonna take beams for the floor, beams for the roofing.

-So I'm probably looking at, like, 50, 60 logs. -AGNES: Okay.

NARRATOR: With dark winter approaching,

the Hailstones will soon partake in their most crucial hunt of the season.

In preparation, they must replace their old meat rack

with a new cache that can store larger quantities of meat.

CHIP: When we're gathering wood,

we have to go at least five miles away from this town.

-Look at that! -AGNES: Even skinny ones... Oh, wow, we scored!

Even those little ones will do fine for the top, yeah?

CHIP: They should.

AGNES: Wood have so many purposes,

especially when we live up here in the extreme cold

and it's always good to have extra laying around,

because even your neighbours is gonna run out of fuel

and they'll end up having to rely on wood.

(CHAINSAW WHIRRING)

They all say he who chops his own wood heats himself up twice.

CHIP: So, I'm throwing these logs out in the river

and she can bring the boat right up to them, add a loop or two to them,

and then go to the next one, and go to the next one.

We're doing something that's terribly efficient and terribly useful.

And the benefits out of this is everything from heat to buildings,

and then back to heating that building.

Looks like the wife is coming down, catching up with the logs,

and looks like, um,

all the ones I've tossed in there along the bank here

are ready to get picked up here pretty soon.

She's adding rope and tying them in a bunch.

I think she's doing a good job.

I was gonna go over there with the wife, and go jump in the boat,

and maybe start manoeuvring her a little faster.

Here's the next bunch, right?

Okay. Take this out and attach it to that one.

AGNES: Right on. We're not leaving any behind.

They're all following.

This enough for now. This is a good load.

So this is all ahead, full steam right now.

-(AGNES LAUGHS) -But it's been a good day.

I've got a good load of wood.

I can sort this stuff out

and get started making something.

In traditional days, this is exactly what they would do to get their firewood.

They'd go at the end of the year when it's all nice and dry like this,

and they'd float them on down the river this time of year

in rafts like we're doing here, and that would be that.

And get through the freeze up when you can't go out and gather,

when the ice is too thin.

GLENN: I live out here because I really enjoy this lifestyle.

I enjoy the autonomy it affords.

I enjoy the competence it demands.

I like the connection to nature I feel when I live the way I do here.

My name's Glenn Villeneuve.

I live 200 miles north of Fairbanks in the Brooks Range of Alaska.

I'm a 60-mile walk from the nearest road.

My nearest neighbour lives... I don't know how far away.

I picked this place because nobody else was utilising the resources here.

It was a place where I could go hunt, trap, fish,

live as close to the land as I wanted to.

And it's the place I consider home.

It's early in the morning. It's just barely starting to get light,

and this is the first day that I've decided that I wanna look for a moose.

With almost nothing else to eat,

I can get by for six months on a moose.

Okay. That has a razor sharp edge on it now.

That'll shave hair right off of my arm.

When you're eating very little carbohydrate, like I often am out here,

I have to get about three quarters of my calories from fat.

Mmm.

Fat's hard to find.

A lot of animals don't have enough fat to go with the meat.

The really critical thing is to get a moose with a lot of fat on it.

This is the time of year when the moose are mating and bull moose stop eating.

And every day that passes,

the longer it takes me to get a moose,

the leaner that moose is likely to be.

This magazine holds four rounds,

but if everything goes right,

it's only gonna take one to kill a moose.

When I pull the trigger and that moose drops,

that's six months food right there.

(WHISPERING) I have to be really careful not to make noise.

More often than not I've detected moose

by ear rather than by seeing them.

A lot of times, it takes 10 days to find a moose

before I get a good shot at one.

So I just have to be patient and pace myself.

Keep my energy going so that I can get a moose

and I'd have energy left to get the moose home.

I just heard a moose.

I just heard a moose over this way.

I gotta get across this wet area

before I can start calling.

Once I get on the other side of the water,

I'll try to get him on good ground.

If I kill him in this wet spot,

it would be a disaster trying to get him out of here.

Hunting on foot I can't cover nearly as much territory

as if I had a motorboat,

or I was in an area where I was using a four-wheeler.

I see a big moose.

I can't tell if it's a cow or bull.

I can't see the head yet. I can't see the antlers.

It's a cow and a bull. I can only shoot bulls.

If I can get that bull, it's gonna be worth dragging it down from here,

but I can't go much further.

(MIMICS MOOSE CALL)

They keep moving further away from me into the forest,

further and further away from the lake.

And I really need to get them close to the lake so I can get him home.

The bull's right behind the cow. I can't shoot right now.

It moved.

It takes days walking around to find a moose.

Then you gotta get close enough to it.

I'm just getting way too far away from the lake.

If I had to move a moose from here all the way down,

I'd have my hands full. It would take me a few days probably to get it home.

So I've pretty much given up on this one.

It's a beautiful moose. That's too bad.

It's just a beautiful bull.

Every year that I've been out here, I've always gotten a moose.

And it's always scary

because there's always the chance I don't get one.

And if I don't get a moose,

it would be really hard for me to live out here.

SUE: I live dynamically close to my environment.

It's right up my backside and I'm crawling on top of it.

So we better be able to get along,

say "sorry" when we do something wrong,

and "thank you" when it goes right.

I've been riding the ridge a little bit so I can get a good look over.

Now I wanna just drop in and follow it and see what I see.

See if there's a good, little campy spot.

See if I like the setup. Am I seeing sign?

If not, I'll go towards the river.

All's you can do is check it out, and throw the dart, and hope for the best.

NARRATOR: With winter on the horizon,

Sue Aikens is on a quest to secure food for the long months ahead.

SUE: I got a nice little valley that might funnel some animals in.

They can come down this valley,

down that valley,

up this one, or down that one.

I mean, it's as good a shot as any. I say I set up camp.

When it gets dark out here,

you definitely feel vulnerable.

Expect it to be a pretty brutal year with the bears.

NARRATOR: Living by herself, hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital,

Sue must protect herself from the region's many apex predators.

SUE: This is going to be some bear fencing.

I'll get it to go around a few times

and then you hook up the battery to it and some leads,

and zap!

A little bear tries to make a snack out of Suzie, he's gonna get macked.

Sometimes all's you need is a couple of seconds to get yourself ready.

ANDY: Alaskans are very unique people.

We're all very independent, especially people living out in the bush.

We're all very inventive,

tough, hardy souls

that wanna take care of themselves.

NARRATOR: Andy and Kate must get their fish wheel in the water,

or risk missing their opportunity for salmon.

-ANDY: Let's flip this over so that the boards are up. -Yep.

When fall hits, it's the crunch time.

And we've gotta get everything done before that snow flies.

There's no time to stop. There's no time to rest.

There's hardly time to take a breath.

It's always very nerve-racking for me putting the fish wheel in.

The last thing I want is,

the day I wanna go fishing, to break my wheel putting it in

and then spend three or four days trying to fix something.

All right. Ready to go fishing now!

The fall chum have a very short cycle of really up

and really down. And when they're up, they're up really good.

When they're down, they crash, there's nothing.

Son of a bitch!

That's turning too fast.

Whoo, baby, there's a lot of current there.

We have to bring it in quite a bit.

That's turning almost too fast.

Let's bring it in some.

I feel like the current's a lot faster here this year than it was last year.

So we don't have to have as long of a spar.

We don't have to have as long of a lead.

Generally, I like somewhere between five and six rotations a minute.

So one full rotation about every 10 seconds.

That keeps one basket of the wheel in the water fishing almost all of the time.

What we want is we want those baskets to be coming down

and just barely digging a hole into the gravel.

And that makes a place to where the fish can't go underneath the wheel.

So if it can slowly dig a hole for itself,

that increases the efficiency of the wheel dramatically.

That's about where we want it.

KATE: Whoo-hoo!

Seems to be turning really good

and touching bottom and not going too fast.

So it looks like we found our spot.

ANDY: Here, fishy, fishy, fishy!

It's a crapshoot. We have no idea what's going on

other than I know there are fish coming up. How many?

I guess tomorrow morning will tell.

There we go!

-First fish! -Looks like a nice one!

I'm very excited we got our fish wheel in,

and it's going and it's catching,

and it went in as smooth as silk.

ANDY: Tomorrow it would be great if we had maybe 100 fish.

That will be a really good start for us.

CHIP: I live out here for the freedom of doing things my way

and the way that I feel like doing 'em,

when I feel like doing 'em.

No hours, no bosses, that's what it's all about.

This has always been the best way to move a lot of firewood in one shot.

Hell of a lot easier than dragging it on a sled

just six or seven pieces at a time.

(AGNES SPEAKING)

Yeah, there's no getting stuck, there's no being frozen,

there's no breaking your equipment. Much easier.

We have really small trees up here because it's the Arctic

and they have a real short growing season.

And we have real long winters and then we have real deep cold.

Even though it's hard work, I enjoy doing this

because I can see heat,

and then we can also build things with them.

-Homeward now, huh? -(AGNES SPEAKING)

CHIP: Raw materials to us is part of the essence of subsistence.

It's getting stuff yourself.

Getting materials from the land, the things you need.

It's always important to have a cache in places that you wanna frequent.

You do need to have places to keep your things dry.

You need to keep yourself dry sometimes.

So as an emergency back-up I could walk inside the cache

and say, "Well, I need to sleep here on the floor."

And that's happened more than once.

I got a V-notch on the top

and on the bottom, I have it notched like that.

So when they rest, they'll rest like that upon each other.

I'm gonna split this one in half so that it has a flat half,

that will meet my flat floor and my flat beams

so I can stack the logs up on top of it.

Now it can all disassemble

and I can take it in pieces other places

and I can reassemble it.

Living a subsistence lifestyle is basically working for yourself.

And what we're doing is we're going out, we're getting materials,

raw materials, and we put it all together to make a living.

You know, we have it down for ourselves.

Nobody wakes us up in the morning and tells us what to do,

or where to go, or how to get there.

We've learned over the years, throughout my life,

just experiences themselves have amounted to this.

This is actually excellent.

(CHAINSAW WHIRRING)

(WHIRRING STOPS)

Fucking shit, threw its chain.

These things happen. It's part of having any machinery.

This isn't a recreational use.

It's like our snow machines or our chainsaws,

we don't just recreationally use these

so we can have a little bit of wood at the cabin, you know,

for the two weeks out of the year that we use it.

Damn it, we are using these things all the time,

and we're constantly in a state of repair.

NARRATOR: With caribou season just days away,

Chip must hurry to complete his cache in order to store meat

from the upcoming harvest.

CHIP: Instead of just trying to use a chainsaw to make a rounded cut,

I'm going down to the depth I want it to be,

then I'm making my cross cuts.

That takes out the pieces a lot easier.

Now that one fits.

From here on, it's pretty much just cut, and notch, and stack,

and I'll have my walls.

ANDY: We live out here to live a certain lifestyle,

to be connected to the land, to get the resources from the land.

And that's what's important to me.

You untie and I'll drive.

We're gonna go check the wheel for a second day,

see what we get. We're hoping it's not too many fish.

We still wanna put up a few more fish for ourselves.

It's very time-consuming to cut them for human consumption

to do it right.

Scoring them.

There's a lot of work that goes into brining them,

getting them ready to go into the smoker.

If we get females, we'll probably smoke some eggs

so we have some caviar.

All of that takes a lot of time,

so 100, 150 fish would be great,

it could be really bad news if we pull up and the boxes are overflowing with fish.

'Cause I don't want to have to deal with 400 fish.

It'd be really nice to deal with maybe 100 fish.

We can focus on cutting, and drying,

and smoking some of the fish that we want.

And it won't take me long to put up 100 fish for the dogs.

That's nothing for us.

I guess we're gonna find out here real quick.

Uh-oh.

We're probably close to 300.

It looks like we got our work cut out for us today.

Definitely would much rather have a few less fish,

but better too much than none.

(ANDY SPEAKING)

(CHUCKLES) I think from here on out it's gonna be slam bam.

We got a lot of fish today.

Kind of like an Easter egg hunt.

You show up with your wheel and you see how many eggs you got in the basket.

That's the way every day is out here.

We've got 200 fish.

They probably average right around seven pounds apiece.

That's not a half bad looking fish right there.

Huh.

Keeper.

ANDY: All in all, things are going pretty good.

It's a little more work than I really wanted to do today.

By the time I cut these fish and then clean the fish for ourselves,

I think I'm gonna be a sore little puppy by the end of the evening.

I'm not complaining. I'd much rather have the fish than not have the fish.

It's all about a economy

of your time and energy out here.

There's so much to do,

it's really important that what you spend your time on

is done efficiently and cost effectively.

That's why I've always been a fish wheel fisherman.

For us, it's a really efficient way to put up food.

KATE: Okay, well, you've got 30 done.

You have about 160 to go.

(CHUCKLES)

GLENN: For me,

living involves hunting and killing in order to live.

It's the natural cycle.

Part of the cycle of life and death,

and I'm participating in it every day out here.

(WHISPERING) It's my fifth day hunting moose now,

and I'm over in an area

that I know is a good spot

for a moose at this time of year.

I'm gonna move down in here carefully this morning

and see if I can find a bull moose.

Living up here in the Arctic in the winter,

it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of food.

I eat a lot. I eat about three pounds of meat every day.

Meat and fat. That's what sustains me in the cold weather.

(GLENN SPEAKING)

(MIMICS MOOSE CALL)

Here he comes.

See, he's waving his antlers at me just like this.

He thinks I'm a moose right now.

He's coming to fight me. Look, he's got a cow over there.

He doesn't want me mating with that cow.

He wants that cow for himself.

He's gonna go out in that open field, I hope.

I just gotta get lined up for the shot.

(GUNSHOT)

I got him.

I got him. He's down.

That's a nice looking bull, too.

There goes the cow that was with him.

She's out of here now. She's in oestrous. She's mooing and mooing.

She's wanting to get bred and

he thinks that I'm another bull coming to take his cow.

He doesn't want that. So he came over here to fight.

He was over here to chase me off.

This is the fifth day looking for a moose.

I've walked about 25 miles looking for this moose around the lake.

It's dead.

If I had very little else to eat,

just this moose here would feed me for almost six months.

It's really an important moment for me to get a moose like this.

It was a lot of work,

but I got him and I got six months food right here.

It's a good moment for me. I would rather live this way

by hunting than by buying my food in a store.

That's the way I live out here. It's the natural cycle.

CHIP: We never had no big dreams for big houses.

We treat this like a camp.

It's a place where we can take shelter, we can eat, we can see our family.

It's pretty nice.

It's coming together. It's good.

I just got a few more logs to add here.

Maybe four more on here.

NARRATOR: In order to store and preserve the meat

from the Hailstone's upcoming caribou hunt,

Chip is putting the finishing touches on the family's new cache.

The roof will be cross-beamed like this.

And I'll put up several of them

and then probably run a pole underneath 'em for support,

and then I'll put plywood.

The only thing I'm lacking is sheets of plywood.

NARRATOR: In Noorvik, the Hailstones rely on trading within the community

to support their subsistence lifestyle.

We're almost quite done with our cache

but we need a few plyboards. So I'm just gonna walk around.

My neighbour have some plyboards here

and I might have something that he would like.

And so I was just gonna go ask him

if he'd like to trade or if I could buy some of his plyboards.

-Yeah, good to see you again. -Yep.

I noticed you have a lot of plyboards.

Yep. This would be perfect.

Wow, these are nice. Are you willing to trade?

What would you have to trade for these?

I got 10 gallons of gas.

-10 gallons of gas. -Yeah.

-Okay, good deal. Awesome. -Yeah, good deal right there.

-These are perfect. -Good. Yep.

AGNES: Score.

Those boards are like $120 apiece boards right there,

and for four of them, and he's not using them,

and he needs gas and I need boards.

So it's a good trade for the both of us.

I'm gonna go tell him the boards I traded for his gas.

And I have to go ask him for his gas now.

SUE: It's a calculated risk every time you step out the door.

There's no guarantees in anything.

The only guarantee is it's a limited time engagement.

So why not pack it full of experiences?

Got a big rain system coming in

and that will just damage the hunting.

My visibility goes down to nil

and the animals are just gonna find some hole and hunker down.

I'm looking for anything

that's gonna provide meat that's legal.

They're all on the menu.

But I need to get there, get closer, and get the good visual.

There they are.

Where are they going?

They call them ghosts of the tundra.

And what that means is they're using the geographic features,

the dips and swales,

and they'll travel around in them,

and then all of a sudden they're on high ground.

So for the human eye, you're looking and,

"Oh, where'd they come from?" They're just standing out in the middle of the field.

What you don't know is that there's a little dip they travelled.

And then you go, "Oh, okay," you reach for your gun and, "Where'd they go?"

They're gone.

Now I'm gonna do the same thing that they do.

I'm trying to keep the geographical feature

in between the two of us.

So I'm turning the tables on it.

They use it to hide and pop up and down,

I'm using it to hide and pop up and down.

(BREATHING HEAVILY)

This is the game trail.

Bear. We've got bear and caribou.

I know they came through this way.

Shit. Okay. Shh.

All right, I see one.

Okay, she just made me.

I can't really get...

Looks to be 200-300 yards.

I've gotta take myself out of the brush.

Okay, okay, okay, okay.

All right. Come on, come on, baby, come on, baby.

(GUNSHOT)

One down.

I picked it right.

There was bear tracks, wolf tracks, caribou tracks, moose tracks.

This is definitely the confluence where you're funnelling.

Now time to go see what I got.

I've gotta go retrieve the meat

before some of the predators decide to relieve me of the responsibility.

I've got a big old storm coming in.

The forecast is, keep dropping in temperature and snow.

This time of year I can get three foot of snow

in no time flat.

Winter is breathing down my neck.

Right now it's going slate grey, which this time of year means snow.

I can trap myself out here, so I wanna get this done quickly.

Very first caribou that I got, I was maybe 12 or so.

Different things happened in my younger life

and left me kind of raising myself

and being alone out in the wilderness of Alaska.

Bus driver handed me a gun and said,

"You don't learn to shoot, you're not gonna be here. Figure it out."

I got a handful of bullets,

I was pretty hungry. I was pretty cold.

Here comes this animal and I first thought of Santa,

you know, and I was pretty star-struck,

and then my belly rumbled.

I took it down,

and it was a harsh reality.

It's, kind of, a full circle moment.

Thank you.

Taking the first life, and being grateful,

and not being hungry any more,

to being better at it,

still being grateful that I won't be hungry this winter.

I've been down here a little while working on this.

There's no predator within 10 miles that doesn't know it's here,

so they're gonna be coming in.

So I wanna get out.

Temperature went down, it's come up again.

Just looks really unpredictable.

I know I'm in bear territory and I'm gonna add snow, fog,

and everything else in on it, it's not a particularly safe, secure feeling.

For me to stay here, it's really gotta pay off.

I'm not seeing the numbers of caribou that say,

"Yeah, take another day."

What if I get stuck out here a week and can't get in?

It's time to wrap this portion of the trip up.

You know, live to hunt another day.

CHIP: This is a place that you can take your kids

and say, "Hey, look, this is how to have a good time.

"This is a place where there's days of high adventure.

"And a lot of other people are jealous."

I think I got that one on straight.

I notched the tops and then joined them together,

and then I put a cross piece into each one

just to hold them in place 'cause I'm working by myself.

I'm almost done.

AGNES: Wow! CHIP: You liking that?

Gee whiz! That's a lot since I left earlier. Cool!

The caribous are starting to move so it's real important

that we get this cache done today.

Because if we don't get this cache done,

then we're not gonna have a place to store our meats.

CHIP: We got four sheets of plywood over here

that my wife traded the neighbour for,

and I'm gonna put them up on the roof.

What isn't forgotten and what's still very viable

is gathering stuff for yourself, building stuff for yourself.

This stuff is never outdated

no matter what my technology would be.

If I was cutting these logs with laser beams,

I'd still end up with a log cache.

Someday the girls will come and look at this and say,

-"Hey, look, this is how my mum and dad did it." -CHIP: Yep.

-I'm sure you'll get all the credit. -(AGNES LAUGHS)

AGNES: This is so cool.

CHIP: I used basically what I could go out and go gather

to keep it the cheapest.

My wife traded gasoline off for sheets of plywood,

and I bought a couple pounds of nails for, like, 10 bucks.

I would say, in the end, it probably cost us less than $100.

And of course, about three days of my time.

I'm gonna have to put you a step here.

Here you go, woman.

It's all yours.

AGNES: You used 35 logs.

-CHIP: Cool. -And only six of them are halves.

And it's real easy for me to go in and out of there.

It's your size.

So that should help things.

Hey, babe, how do you like it?

It's awesome. You could go in and peek.

(GIGGLES)

CHIP: Who knows, Mary, someday it might even be yours.

We might be old, and gone, and dead

and you might be an old lady

and telling your kids, "My dad built that."

Go ahead, have fun.

(QUTAN SPEAKING)

(GIRLS SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)

CAROL: Try and go on this one.

MARY: Got to go like this, Qutan. Put your arms the other way.

CAROL: Qutan?

CHIP: This right here could last long enough

that my daughters could be using this when they grow up.

CAROL: Oh, I joke. QUTAN: So close!

I just gotta go work, and take the kids,

and go upriver and spend a couple days doing our caribou hunt.

And then come back and go fill it up.

CHIP: Is that a perfect door?

-Is that big enough to get through? -CAROL: Yeah.

Sun's just about down and I'm tired.

-Me too. -It's time to give it up.

-Love you, Mum. -Love you.

Love you. Have fun.

-Thank you. -Yeah.

-It's all good. -You're awesome.

-So are you. That's why I make 'em. -Saw dusty and awesome.