What was that blood curdling scream Hon? You look ghastly, like you have just seen a ghost." Linda chuckled, peering at me over her reading glasses in that schoolmarmish way that turns on the schoolboy in me every time. The problem was I was so shocked by the trauma that I really didn't appreciate it very much.
Linda, will ya look at what that fool fossil from the Jurassic period is trying to do now. That bird thinks he is a delicate flying dove instead of a lumbering Pterodactyl." I was standing at our living room window pointing with disbelief.
Horn Lake is my favorite place in the entire world. It is three hours to the west from the nearest village of Williams Lake. It forms the headwater of the west branch of the Homathko River or Mosley Creek on the very western edge of the dry interior Chilcotin Plateau. It is 80 kilometres from the Pacific Ocean where the Homathko empties into the deep fiord of Butte Inlet whose entrance is just north of Desolation Sound and guarded by Quadra and Cortez Islands. Once thought to be the best option for a rail-linked seaport with the rest of Canada, the Chilcotin-Homathko-Butte Inlet alternative lost out to the much longer and more difficult route through the Fraser Canyon and the much lesser natural harbour of Vancouver in Canada's most famous political scandal called the C.P.R. The results were that the rough gravel road now ends just beyond Horn Lake and access to Butte Inlet is still by water or ancient Indian trail.
The old girl came out onto the power line about a thousand metres down wind from me. She just sort of popped out of the brush and was suddenly there in my binoculars. She was not alone. Her young cub of six months was comically gamboling along beside her as she ambled determinedly, in typical black bear fashion, down the edge of the power line towards me.
"Daddy, Daddy, you will never guess what Mom and I saw." Chelsea was bouncing up and down on the dock as I was paddling in from fly-fishing. It looked like she was so excited that she was going to do a two-and-a-half gainer right into the drink. I thought to myself, "Great! Some stupid ole bear stumbled into camp while I was gone." This meant now I was going to have to convince Linda that we should stay at this camp and maybe even have to dispatch a problem bear. The truth is, I am lousy at convincing Linda of anything and I don't like shooting bears just because they begin to hang around camp.
"Boy did I ever get a surprise!" exclaimed Linda as she opened the door of our little travel trailer.
It sure is awful darn cold!" exclaimed Linda as she opened the door of our little travel trailer.
"We are going to have to get Jim to fell that big Lodgepole Pine tree before it demolishes our house," Linda said in bed over coffee one early morning.
You might say I am rather fond of the Aspen tree (Populus tremuliodes). I like its slippery smooth silvery bark. I like its small heart shaped leaf, delicate, suspended on a flat petiole that lets every individual leaf tremble at the insinuation of a spring breeze. I like its soft creamy wood that yields to a sharp pocketknife like Edam cheese. I like its blazing yellow color that transforms the failing light of Autumn, its fragile black lace silhouette on the white hills of winter, its downy catkin fluff coating the spring roads like dance wax snow and its mist of Aspen syrup that sugar coats my truck on warm summer nights. I like everything about the Aspen tree. But most of all I like the way the Aspen grows.
"Dad! Mom just flushed the toilet and it's filling up the basement bathtub again. The sink is gurgling like it just had its throat cut too." There was panic in our 13-year-old daughter's voice so I knew better than to make one of my lame attempts at pastoral jocularity.
It's February 2 and I know spring is just around the corner. No, it is not what that Yankee rodent Punxsutawney Phil nor that Ontario hairy-tailed rat Wiarton Willie saw today. Who could possibly predict weather on the basis of what a myopic, eastern earth rat saw or didn't see on February 2? They would probably lie about it anyway. Out west, we rely on the one sure thing that there is to predict spring: the Western Wood-Pewee (Contopus sordidulus), a small, grey bird.
"There is something on the ice!" Halden said, his eyes peering across the lake. This phrase is a delightful call to binoculars in our house, something looked forward to and cherished the several times a week that it happens. Soon several pairs of binocular clad eyes were trained on the lake.