A Wild November Springs From the Shadows

It has been a dry Autumn, with only a few hours of desultory rain to dampen the dust. I spent a week back in the field this week, giving up my night supervisor job to the appropriately-named Papa Bear, who has to be one of the most nurturing male twenty-somethings I know. He did a fine job too.

This week was the first week this season that really felt like Autumn. Daytime temperatures were brisk, and I wore some sort of second layer all week. We had nearly 200 kids from 5 different Catholic private schools this week, 21 of whom were under my personal supervision during the hikes. There weren't many animals out and about this week, but there is an impressively mangled deer carcass near one of the trails, all that remains after several nights of feeding by a mother Mountain Lion and her cubs. A ranger clued me into its location last week. It was covered in Yellowjackets and other insects, and soon will disappear back into the dirt to cycle its way back into the vegetation. Some of the kids held their noses while looking at it, and one girl accidentally trod on what I think was the remains of its stomach. I asked her to move over without telling her why. I didn't think she'd want to know she'd been standing on a stomach.

The other bit of excitement involved a boy who fell down a steep hill during the solo hike. He had picked up a walking stick (which is against the rules) and lost it off the side of the trail, and then decided he could get it back. By the time I got back down to where he was, he was clinging to a tree about 15 feet down a hill that was so steep that it had aspirations to be a cliff. To make matters worse, it was composed of loose, crumbly dirt. I slid down and almost overshot the tree myself. My cabin leader was already there, keeping the boy relatively calm, and eventually we all managed to regain the trail above. This is the first time in my nine years of employment there that somebody has managed to fall off that particular trail. The trail, by the way, is wide enough to admit cars. The boy and his twin brother were dramatically grateful.

On the way back, we saw a whole flock of turkeys.

The other news since my last brief post is that we've given away our rooster, Doodle. He now resides at a boys' ranch up in the East Bay. Hopefully he can crow to his heart's content there. The chickens don't seem to miss him, and I'm sure the neighbors don't.

Halloween came and went. The kids at camp had a Halloween party, but I came home to carve pumpkins and hand out candy. Several neighborhoods-worth of kids came by to relieve us of our sweets, and also of part of Jeanine's Halloween decoration (with some balloons, she turned our recycling bin into a monster, but by the end of the night it was missing its arms, one horn, and two teeth). While all of this was going on, Jeanine and I watched Gates of Hell, although I lost count of how many times I had to pause it so candy could be handed out.

Now, it's November. How did this happen?