I’d had the most mellow evening I could ever want. However, my night’s sleep didn’t fare well. My injury (which I will not specify but has absolutely nothing to do with covid so nobody in medical fields would care anyway) kept me up. I was comfortable on my cot but the ache kept me awake. Not “eyes wide and screaming in pain” awake, just “you aint getting a lot of REM tonight” awake.
Then the coyotes started a rave outside my tent. I’ve always had the theory that there’s wolf territory and coyote territory. Where wolves prowl coyotes stay quiet. This was wolf territory, but the coyotes were howling like maniacs.
When that passed I drifted off… gently… quietly…
YOWWWLWLWWYLWLLL
More damn coyotes. Like a million of ‘em and they were out there with Bigfoot who drank my beer and they were just tearing it up out there. It was like a rugby team on PCBs.
So much for quiet forests.
I was near a lake. Maybe a half mile off or less. It’s the fall migration (I guess) because the damn birds got all pissed off by the coyotes. They started squawking like my hens when there’s a raccoon in the feed bin. I don’t really know what I was hearing. It sounded like six million Canadian geese and a hundred coyotes were having their own version of Burning Man.
I did get some sleep, eventually. It wasn’t as much as I’d have liked. Life is like that. Sometimes Bigfoot screws up the settings on your shortwave and the damn geese won’t shut up.
Sometime in the night, after the geese wore out and the coyotes packed it in, my injury flared up and I had to go to the truck to find ibuprofen. A grouse was drumming. I took that as a good sign. I’d bag a few grouse on the morrow!
More to follow.
