A Snake Skeleton

While walking along our country road, I spotted something off-color in the nearby sagebrush and bunchgrass that drew my attention. As is perpetually my habit, I drifted over for a closer inspection.

Well, you don’t see that every day.

At the base of a sandy anthill, I found the skeleton of a snake, likely a bullsnake, its countless vertebrae and ribs laid out like cursive writing that had been hacked to pieces.

A macabre end for a life that most other critters, many humans included, don’t appreciate. Snakes live a tough life. For one thing, fear of snakes is nearly universal. Also, consider how they are forever wed to gravity, with neither wings nor legs to free them for even an instant. And here in Montana, they must hide away for half the year in hibernation.

I could not even begin to guess what events delivered the snake to this end.

I suppose my neighbor Kevin and I are odd in preferring to have bullsnakes around. They do a lot to keep the mouse population in check. Just the other day, he called me to tell me he'd spotted a five-footer at the lakeshore. "We'll need to tell everyone they may see it and they need to leave it alone," I cautioned.

In our way of thinking, a dead bullsnake is of no value.

Snake Skeleton

—Mitchell Hegman

The Mighty Mo

The Missouri River is both beautiful and restless.

Most rivers in North America have their directions firmly sorted out. They head south, east, or west with little hesitation. The Missouri, however, begins in the Rocky Mountains at Three Forks, Montana, promptly turns north for a considerable distance, then thinks better of it, swings east across the Great Plains, and finally hooks south to join the Mississippi River on its long journey to the Gulf of Mexico.

The "Mighty Mo," as we sometimes call it, is the longest river in the United States, stretching about 2,341 miles. The river officially begins where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers converge. A drop of water beginning its journey at Three Forks will travel nearly 3,700 miles before it reaches saltwater.

My life has been spent traipsing along the handsome upper reaches of the river, from the headwaters to Great Falls. Yesterday, Desiree and I drove the frontage road along the stretch of river between Ulm and Wolf Creek. It turns out this is her favorite drive in all of Montana. She loves the winding waterway, the mountains marching alongside, the bridges, the towering riverside cliffs drinking from the eddied water, the lavish homes perched on ledges above, and the swirls of birds filling the skies.

We stopped at several places to fill our smartphone cameras with images.

The Open River and Mountains Beyond

Fishermen Amid the Cliffs

—Mitchell Hegman

The Ant Thing

I have no quarrel with ants. They don't eat my apples, tunnel through Desiree's flower garden, or leave bear-sized footprints around the cabin. They simply go about their business with a seriousness that would make a tax auditor proud.

I've occasionally watched one struggling across the driveway with something impossibly large balanced over its head. A pine needle. Half a grasshopper. A crumb of unknown origin. The little brute seems entirely unconcerned that its burden outweighs it many times over.

Consider.

If an ant were the size of a human, it could lift a pickup truck. It could carry a small car on its back or drag a loaded moving van. It could bite through wood, climb the side of a skyscraper without hesitation, and, if its speed scaled with its stride, race down the interstate at well over 100 miles per hour. An ant, in a single leap, could clear an entire football field. It could tumble from a towering height, stand up, dust itself off, and continue on its way.

We should probably count ourselves lucky that ants never scaled up to such a size. There would be no live-trapping them and hauling them out to the woods. At that point, I'd probably just move.

—Mitchell Hegman

Something Horace Said

Horace (65 to 8 BC) wrote as Rome shed its republic and became an empire under Augustus.

Amid political upheaval, he found wisdom in moderation, friendship, and the passing day.

His compact observations have echoed across two thousand years of human experience.

Following are three of his quotes:

—   “It is your concern when your neighbor's wall is on fire.”

—   “Seize the day, and put the least possible trust in tomorrow.”

—   “One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.”

—Mitchell Hegman

In the Bag

We must save the apples.

"We" in this instance is 95% Desiree and 5% me. The issue is worms attacking our apples. I am not in favor of spraying insecticides and would actually allow the worms to have their way with a few apples. As an alley kid from East Helena, Montana, I've never been opposed to working my way around the worm in an apple.

The classic wormy apple, by the way, owes its reputation to the codling moth. After hatching, its cream-colored caterpillar bores into the apple like a miniature miner, heading straight for the seed-filled core. If you've found a worm in a Montana apple, you've almost certainly met one. Given this, the damage is usually confined to the core.

But my island girl prefers purity in her apples. Our particular variety is the Golden Delicious. They are sweet late in the season, but I prefer them in the last stages of green, with a dash of salt. I converted Desiree to this preference last year with our first harvest.

To save this year's apples, she procured some net bags that can be secured around individual fruits. Although she may be a little late pulling the trigger, she started bagging the apples yesterday.

I must admit, there is a certain weird charm to the bagged tree. It's something akin to decorating a tree for Christmas. The effort makes it feel a little special. I am posting two photographs so you can get a feel for it.

Desiree Tying Bags Around the Apples

Apples in Bags

—Mitchell Hegman

The Sapphire Thing

Montana is America's sapphire state, home to the nation's only major deposits of gem-quality sapphires. Most are found in four classic localities: Yogo Gulch, Rock Creek, Dry Cottonwood Creek, and the Missouri River gravels northeast of Helena. The Missouri River deposits quite literally extend through the property on which I constructed my house. Given my feral obsession with rocks and my proximity to precious gems, I am regularly compelled to purchase bags of sapphire pay gravel from one or another of the nearby mining operations so I can glean a few stones.

Just yesterday, we poked through a bag of gravel processed from the Spokane Bar Sapphire Mine.

Good stuff.

We found several larger sapphires I like to think of as "tink-tinks" because of the distinctive sound they make when dropped into a holding bottle. Most of the gems ranged from green to blue. The largest, though not of perfect quality, I would estimate to be around 4 carats. I'm sharing a photograph of the gems we found.

Looking for Sapphires

Our Precious Finds

—Mitchell Hegman

Return of the Voles

The voles have invaded Desiree's flower garden again.

Though they are often mistaken for mice, they live very different lives. While mice are quick to invade and take advantage of the luxuries of our homes, voles are creatures of meadows, fields, and forest edges. They spend most of their time hidden beneath dense grasses, scuttling through narrow runways they weave through the vegetation and retreating to shallow burrows where they nest and store food. Their diet consists mainly of grasses, roots, seeds, bulbs, and the bark of young trees, which can make them unwelcome visitors in gardens and orchards. Although a vole may occasionally wander into a garage or shed by accident, they rarely take up residence inside houses.

If you spot a small rodent scampering across your kitchen floor, it's almost certainly a mouse rather than a vole. A vole is easy to recognize by its compact body, blunt nose, tiny ears that nearly disappear into its fur, and its short tail, which is only about a third the length of its body.

Yesterday, I live-trapped two voles from the garden and carted them down the road for release in the place we nicknamed Voleville in honor of previous releases there. I'm sharing two photographs of one of the captured voles. The second includes a Cold Smoke beer for an accurate reference of its size.

A Trapped Vole

Vole Next to a Cold Smoke Beer

—Mitchell Hegman