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.

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.