Wednesday - Dec. 20 - The wooliest dog

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Good morning!

Before the pandemic hit, I would host an annual poker game around my birthday. It worked and was fun, in part, because pretty much none of the people I invited played poker on a regular, or even semi-regular, basis. They only played once a year, when we’d gather and then try to remember that a flush beats a straight so those little symbols on the cards really do matter.

Last weekend, we finally resumed the game in a last-minute, scaled-down version. Only one of us had played since the last event many years ago, and the most competent of our bunch had an early bedtime and a lack of patience, all of which evened the tables. The result was a great evening (even if the winner didn’t deserve to have his overconfidence justified) and a reminder to actually follow through and do the things you wish you did more often.

– Tyler

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Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 Click here for links to road cameras across the Fraser Valley, including those for the Coquihalla, Highway 7, Hope-Princeton, Fraser Canyon, and Highway 1 in Langley and Abbotsford.

NEWS

The story behind the story of the wooly dog

There was a time when the Indigenous women of the Pacific Northwest’s coastal regions paddled their canoes to small, rocky islands once a day or so to care for packs of small white-furred dogs. The dogs would greet them, yelping and pawing as they implored their keepers for food. The women, in turn, would pet the dogs and dispense a stew of fish and marine mammal bits—not scraps, but quality food.

Once the dogs (most of them perhaps females, probably in heat) had eaten their fill, the women might linger awhile to sing to them and brush their long white fur. The dogs—and their fur—were the women’s source of wealth, and the women kept watch to ensure that no village cur crept onto the islands to taint the breed.

Back in their village longhouses, the women transformed that fur into yarn, spinning it and mixing it with the wool of mountain goats and adding plant fibres and goose down to make the thread strong and warm. They beat the yarn with white diatomaceous earth to deter insects and mildew. They dyed some of the yarn red with alder bark, tinted it a light yellow with lichen, and produced blue and black threads using minerals or huckleberries. The rest—an ivory-hued yarn—they set aside. Then the women set up their looms and began to weave, turning out twill-patterned blankets of various sizes, some with elaborate and colourful geometric designs, others with simple stripes. The dogs did more than provide fur. They were also part of village life: sometimes, a favourite wooly dog would keep a weaver company.

The dogs went extinct more than a century ago. But one vital trace was preserved—the hide of a dog named Mutton that was born more than 160 years ago in the Fraser Valley and which loved to chase sheep.

Last week, the wooly dog made international news when scientists revealed that they had sequenced the dog’s DNA and found it showed dogs had been raised domestically in this area for thousands of years. That study has its origins, in part, in a 2021 story in Hakai Magazine.

• You can read the original piece, courtesy of our friends at Hakai, here. You can read last week’s Hakai story on the new study and DNA revelations here.

Related

Need to Know

🚂 A train travelling through Hope lost air in its brakes and ground to a halt in the centre of town, blocking two roads [Hope Standard]

🗳 Transportation authorities will soon release documents related to their investigation into the fire that burned down Lytton [The Tyee]

🚓 Two men, including one from Abbotsford, have been charged after searches of four homes in the valley turned up an array of guns and drugs [VIA]

🐟 A project to restore habitat at Gill Bar near Chilliwack will be led by the Stó:lo Service Agency [Agassiz-Harrison Observer]

🚑 A pedestrian in Langley was seriously injured when they were struck by a truck while trying to cross a road [CityNews]

🚔 A deadly police shooting in Abbotsford has prompted more calls for non-police responses to mental health emergencies [CTV]

👉 The Chilliwack School Board has again reprimanded one of its trustee members [Chilliwack Progress]

🗳 The province says a new ‘watershed security strategy’ is expected next year, but previous initiatives have been slow to prompt real change [CKPG/Canadian Press]

👏 A new Langley charity handed out hundreds of free toys to kids in need [Langley Advance Times]

🗳 If BC United can’t win in the Fraser Valley, they can’t win anywhere, a local professor says [Abbotsford News]

🏘 The City of Mission is pausing its new secondary suite program after a wave of negative feedback [Mission Record]

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The Agenda

Township won’t get trucks needed to clear sidewalks of snow until spring

Langley Township is not as ready for winter as it wanted to be.

After the barrage of snow and ice that last winter provided throughout the Fraser Valley, the township spruced up their plans to keep sidewalks and bus stations clear for pedestrians.

Council approved $2.1 million of one-time funding to buy equipment specializing in spreading salt on and clearing snow from sidewalks and bus bays. Staff ordered the gear, but only two-thirds of it arrived in time for this year’s winter maintenance season.

The township purchased five small tractors for working on narrow sidewalks, five walk-behind snow-blowers, and seven flat-deck trailers to tote them around on. These were all delivered by November.

But the seven Ford F-550 trucks bought to haul salt, plow bus bays, and—importantly—tow all the trailers full of sidewalk-sized, specialized snow-clearing and salt-spreading gear around on, won’t arrive until spring. Supply chain issues have caused the delays, municipal staff say.

The township also bought two larger tractors to work on wider sidewalks, which also have not arrived.

Contingency plans to rent trucks and “utilize readily available manual equipment, such as snow shovels” are in the works. Staff have asked for $230,000 to rent equipment (in a normal year, $70,000 is expected to be spent on rentals). Even with the extra expenses, the new sidewalk snow and ice policy will not be firing on all cylinders this winter.

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🗓 Things to do

AHL hockey: The Ontario Reign play the Abbotsford Canucks today and tomorrow at Abbotsford Centre. Tickets online.

Drag show: Townhall Langley hosts A Carrie Little Christmas Drag Show Dec. 22. Tickets online.

Brewery music: Tyla Jomes performs at Old Yale Brewing in Chilliwack as part of its Back Porch Music series.

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