The Ghost of the Woods

People sometimes call the elk the ghost of the woods, and it is difficult to imagine a more fitting nickname. Elk weigh several hundred pounds, yet they can slip through a forest soundlessly. They may appear in the half-light of dawn or prance from a bank of morning fog as if materializing from another world. Then, just as suddenly, a dozen might vanish without notice. A few silent strides into the timber, and creatures taller than most horses simply dissolve among the trees and shadows. Tawny hides blend with the colors of bark and dried grass, while their keen noses and sharp ears detect us long before we can detect them.

Elk have certainly lived up to their moniker at my cabin. I have owned the property for 26 years this month and have never personally spotted an elk there. I have seen them near my place. I have found their tracks and pellets. But the elk have eluded me entirely.

Yesterday, in a new twist, when I cleared my game camera photographs, I found a dozen images of elk near my cabin. Some were captured in darkness. Others appeared in broad daylight, caught in a single image before melting back into the woods.

Elk in the Dark

Elk in the Daylight

—Mitchell Hegman

Easier

My life would be easier if I could use more of my own options for spelling and grammar.

—Mitchell Hegman

Happy 250th Birthday, America!

Happy 250^th Birthday, America. It seems like just yesterday I was celebrating your 200^th.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Prodigal Chipmunk

Yesterday, I live-trapped two more chipmunks in our never-ending scheme to reduce the looting of Desiree's flowers and exotic (at least to our prairie) vegetables planted around our house. I noticed the second caught critter ping-ponging around inside the trap at midday.

"Jeez," I said when I picked up the trap, "you need to chill before you have a mini chipmunk heart attack. I am just going to drive you down the road and let you go."

After picking up the trap, I headed back into the house as a shortcut to the garage. "Tell you what," I said to the trapped critter, "I'll turn you into the prodigal chipmunk and give you a big adventure."

With that said, I gave it a quick tour of the dining room and kitchen, explaining things. "We call that a table. Those are chairs. Check out the LED lights. Nice, right?" When we got to my laptop, I hovered the trap near the screen. "That's a computer. You're not likely to see one of those again."

A few minutes later, we found ourselves over a mile down the road, where I released the prodigal chipmunk into a knot of tall sagebrush. "Just consider this," I said as the chipmunk vanished into the tangles. "The latest theories suggest we may all be nothing more than minor players in a grand simulation."

The Prodigal Chipmunk

—Mitchell Hegman

From Which Came the Earth

The Maya imagined that before there were mountains to climb or fields to till, before dry land lay beneath the first person's feet, there existed only an endless sea. Upon these restless primordial waters drifted a vast crocodilian creature. This ancient beast was not merely an inhabitant of the deep but was, in the end, the very stuff from which our earthen world would emerge. The creator gods subdued this monster and divided its great form into the features of the Earth itself. From its flanks came the forests. From its back emerged the mountain chains.

In this scenario, the Rocky Mountain basin in which I live might have been a small crease someplace on the back of this primeval beast.

I'm not opposed to this idea.

Mayan Ruins

—Mitchell Hegman

Flunking Another Test

Welp, I flunked another basic human intelligence test. This one involves the process of grinding your own coffee. The idea behind grinding coffee is fairly straightforward: you drop whole pre-roasted beans into a grinder, press a button, and the grinder reduces the beans to grounds that collect in a receiving vessel below.

Thing is, there are no honest shortcuts here. You can’t grind coffee if you forget to drop in the beans. You get nothing if you neglect to press the button. And you produce a grand mess if you forget to place the receiving vessel below the grinder.

So, as you might have surmised from the photograph I shared, I neglected to place the vessel below the grinder before I pressed the button and fluttered off to find some potato chips, which I should not be eating. The photograph features what I found when I returned to the task at hand.

My Coffee Mess

—Mitchell Hegman

America (An Explanation)

Let me tell you about America. To begin, we have an inordinate number of actors, realtors, car salesmen, and oilmen. We also have a few cowboys. One of the cowboys once stepped inside a café where I was eating breakfast and teased our good-looking waitress. That occurred in a town named Wisdom. Wisdom is just down the road, a statement that has a nice, distinct ring to it. Wisdom, Montana, and West Yellowstone, Montana, seem perpetually to compete to provide America's coldest temperature during the daily winter weather reports.

America: the nation.

America is a great military force. Some of our forces are presently hovering over a country called Iran, which, coincidentally, has a few oilmen and lots of oil.

We, I mean America, again, also landed men on the moon and returned them home. On a smaller scale, we sometimes carefully cut women open and insert fake boobs in them. Long before this stuff, some of our soldiers chased Indian men, women, and children across mostly barren plains. Just up the road a spell (as they like to say here) is the Big Hole National Battlefield. At that location, in August of 1877, the Nez Perce fought against the 7th Infantry Regiment.

In other words, they fought against America.

As an American, I like birds.

—Mitchell Hegman