November is deer hunting season. When you live a rural lifestyle, in my neck of the woods at least, you grow most of your vegetables in a garden, gather a lot of your fruit in the bush, collect a good portion of your fish from a stream or lake and hunt for most of your meat and fowl in the woods. Anything less and you are missing out on what a rural lifestyle in the Cariboo-Chilcotin has to offer; you might just as well be living in the city. Each hunting and gathering endeavour has a month assigned to it. November is deer hunting.

This morning I awoke to the sound of a jackhammer. I thought at first I was snoozing inside a construction zone but after a few shakes of my head I realized it was our old friend Flicker. Flicker is a rather large common flicker (Colaptes auratus) who drops by from time to time to rattle our cage, literally. This morning he was doing a particularly good job of it. I threw my legs over the side of the bed and stalked out of the bedroom to peer through the kitchen window and watch him. He was standing on the board on which our bird feeder is mounted and bashing his beak against the board for all he was worth (flickers are in the woodpecker family). The board is attached to our metal deck railing and so he was setting up a vibration through it and the deck and the whole wall of the house. The wall of the house acted like a huge amplifier. The racket was so loud that the windows were rattling. But it wasn't the noise that got to me.

“Do ya think there is any gold at the end of that rainbow, Dad?” Chelsea was smirking as she leaned over the back of the […]

I stumbled over a friend at a local trout fishing hole the other day. We share shopping privileges at a local Cariboo-Chilcotin cow town and normally only get to visit at funerals and on town day. It was a treat to chat without the usual pressures. Noticing my relaxed demeanor, Randy immediately tried to steal one of my fishing secrets. Because of it, he almost came to a delightful end.

I could sense his presence long before I could see him. The spring sunshine had a cast to it that seemed to make my binoculars crystal clear. Feeling his presence, I slowly glassed the meadow all around me, then the forested edge and finally the steep hill behind the small marsh to the east. There were birds everywhere, but I sensed something more than birds. Letting the field glasses dangle around my neck, I sat back on my heels in the cover of some willow scrub at the meadow's edge.

Today is my day off and it snowed this morning, almost a foot in some places. Disgusted, I went to work. After lunch the snow stopped and I decided to leave the office and see if I could salvage the remains of the day. I went home, grabbed my fi eld glasses, my rambling rifle and the rest of my field kit.

“I found someone!” I said.

“They're here, and they sure are hungry!” Linda said, as I arrived home for supper.

Burrrrrrr! Where did that cold come from?” I was just in from a foray into the frozen expanses of our lakefront lot to a steaming hot cup of Linda's coffee. “It's -30 Celsius out there! How can a winter that has been so unseasonably warm turn on us like this … and so close to spring too?”

It was a special spot embedded in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. It was a hot spring nestled in a cliff on the edge of Sheep Creek. My Dad and I lived in a shack without running water, so we went there every Sunday for our weekly bath. Even when it was 35 below (Celsius) and the snow was three feet deep, the hot spring maintained lush green vegetation and warmth for a few metres around, an oasis in the icy desert of winter.

It is Advent! Everyone in the Webber household who lives on the shores of Lac La Hache is hoping for fire and ice. Fire and ice is a tradition that goes all the way back to my own childhood, and in some form or other, back to most rural Canadian childhoods, I expect. When I was a kid, about the beginning of Advent, if the local slough could get a good freeze on it before any snow came, it became a sea of glass. Every kid in the lumber camp would work his or her tail off scrounging wood and dragging it onto the ice. Anything that would burn and wasn't nailed down was fair game, which once caused an outhouse to mysteriously disappear. All of the wood was stacked to form a huge bonfire. At night, whole families would gather for the ritual of fire and ice. The bonfire was lit, skates were strapped on, and soon blades were flashing and sizzling on the virgin ice. You could skate around on the edge of the dark for miles. It was the most liberating experience I have ever had in my life. All the time, the pillar of fire was both a beacon and warmth. All the time, the pillar of fire guided us with its blaze, warmed our very beings and was the centre for hot chocolate fellowship. The pillar of fire provided for our freedom on ice. It was absolutely wonderful.

Very late last night, as I was driving home from house church at Sheridan Lake, I saw something I have never seen before and reckon will never see again.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like bald eagles as a species, I just don't care for their personalities. They tend to be eaglemaniacs. Let me give you a case in point.

Those logging trucks are going to choke me to death,” Linda said. “It has been so hot for so long that I don’t think there is a drop of moisture anywhere. And the dust, not to mention the non-stop roar of trucks from 4:30 in the morning till dark. We need to move out of this campsite right now!”

Where's Mom, Dad?” Chelsea had just poked her head into the 4×4 pickup that served as my summer office. She had a look of puzzled concern on her face.

When I was about seven I befriended a huge brilliantly colored black and orange caterpillar. It looked like a lively fat jujube with hair. Grandma told me it would change into a butterfly. I could just imagine how big, beautiful and brilliantly coloured a butterfly it would be. With Grandma's help and the aid of a gallon pickle jar, I soon had a terrarium with the caterpillar suitably ensconced. Grandma talked me into keeping the thing in our screened porch instead of the bedroom I shared with my teenage aunt, who if memory serves me correctly, wasn't that keen on bugs and spiders.

Mom, stop the truck!” yelled Chelsea.

It was a dark, wet and lonely night. The taillights winked at us from the creek bottom deep in the canyon as we wound our way along the road above. There was no road down there. It didn't look good. I was terrified, but as we eventually drove our pickup truck along the Salmo-Creston highway to a point directly above those little twinkling lights, I knew I was going to have to go down there and look. I stopped, got out of the pickup and weakly asked Linda to pray. I could see the skid marks on the pavement. I gingerly clawed my way down the deep canyon. The trail of destruction left by whatever had gone over the edge was awful. I could see the red taillights and eventually I was able to scale the cliff down to what was left of a pickup truck. The body of a teenage girl lay in the shallow water of the creek, some of her clothes and both of her shoes torn off from impact. A teenage boy was holding another male teenager beside the truck. The boy was dead in the arms of his weeping brother, who had a broken hip. The two dead bodies in the beam of my flashlight unnerved me, but oddly they did not freak me out. In fact, they seemed to capture my attention. Eventually the weeping and groaning of the lone survivor shocked me into action. I found some articles of clothing, covered the bodies as best I could, especially their faces, and went to work trying to help the survivor. Thank God an ambulance arrived sometime after that to take charge.

Last summer while camping at Horn Lake in the Chilcotin, I dragged myself out of bed at dawn to go and photograph Whitesaddle and Blackhorn mountains. This pair of spectacular peaks tower to 3,000 metres above sea level. The early morning sun spotlighted the peaks perfectly and the lake was absolutely calm leaving a stunning mirror image on its surface.

Last year for Lent I wrote about a little tit-bird that ended up causing me to eat a large crow. In said article I waxed eloquent about how we westerners, unlike the lowly easterner who has to rely on a hairy-tailed rodent to tell them when spring will occur, have a much better way to recognize the end of winter. I wrote how we westerners have the lovely little western wood-pewee who sings its plaintiff little "peee-weee song at the first harbinger of spring." Said article spawned two letters to the editor. One letter, published the following month, indicated a person irked at the implied put down of uppity Upper Canadians that I had attempted as a fringe benefit in the article, a charge to which I should probably plead guilty.