Self-Assessment

I’ve got orthotic shoe inserts to placate my feet and crowns on my teeth to hold them together, but the middle of me is holding out pretty well, although it is expanding a bit.

—Mitchell Hegman

Problem #1 and #2

Problem #1: Those damned ravens keep landing in a tree near my back door to “grunk” and “caw” at me.

Problem #2: The stuff they are saying to me is starting to make sense, and I agree. The mice have been total ass-wipes this summer, and I need to leave more raven treats on the top of my fence posts.

—Mitchell Hegman

Without Words

In our love we grow soft and quiet. Our cheeks silk. Our elbows soft and delicious as marshmallow. Our hands rose petals. Our voices have trickled down to clear rainwater and soaked back inside us.

It’s not that words have failed us.

We simply don’t need them.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Ants Are Building Topsoil

I got stuck staring at a red ant pile.

When you’re Mitch Hegman, these things happen.

But I wasn’t thinking about the ants. I got to thinking about dirt. Topsoil, according to the touchy folks at the local plant nursery.

We tend to think of topsoil as something that has always been there, just hanging out and waiting for something exciting to happen. But topsoil is not quite as passive as it looks. It is continually being built, moved, mixed, and modified by some remarkably small construction crews. Ants are among the most industrious of these soil engineers. They excavate their nests, haul soil ingredients from below to the surface, mix mineral particles, create passageways for air and water, and carry bits of organic material into their underground colonies.

The red ants I observed have created a huge mound of mostly organic material, two feet tall and nearly twice that in width.

In either scenario, ants redistribute nutrients and alter the structure of the soil around them. Scientists call this activity bioturbation, which is a rather impressive word for what amounts to ants digging holes and moving dirt around.

My kind of work.

Red Ants at Work

—Mitchell Hegman

Eating Pain for Dinner

A surprising number of us crave a healthy dose of pain for dinner. I’m talking about adding hot peppers to our dishes. While some may claim hot peppers are adding a “taste” of heat to dinner, from a physiological standpoint, capsaicin, the chemical compound responsible for the heat, binds to a specific protein on your nerve endings called the TRPV1 receptor, creating pain.

While this reaction to capsaicin is essentially a false alarm on a receptor that is supposed to trigger at real temperatures above 106°F, the pain feels absolutely genuine.

Again, hot is not flavor; it’s pain. And, sincerely, I don’t enjoy eating pain. I prefer my tacos merely warm and a good old mild comfort food such as macaroni and cheese. Apparently, I’m just not wired for fire.

Desiree’s Peppers

—Mitchell Hegman

An Early Blush

I know quite a few Midwesterners who have transplanted themselves here in Montana. They don’t seem terribly confused and have adapted well. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the buckeye tree (of Midwestern origins) Desiree and I planted in front of our house. Even though fall is not scheduled to arrive until September 22, the muddled, out-of-its-element tree pulled the pin, as the saying goes, and turned autumn red this week.

Apparently, buckeye trees are known for being somewhat rash when charged with prepping for fall. Still, it’s pretty weird to see the blush of colors when the apples on a nearby tree have yet to fully ripen and our first frost is not yet knocking at the door.

Buckeye Tree

Apple Tree

—Mitchell Hegman

Yesterday and Today

There was a tattered woman, too.

She wore shawls with so many colors

they were like a season in themselves,

or a remembrance of curious times and old money.

 

Each day, she strode to the post office,

and glided echoless down the marbled walls.

 

Perhaps she didn't believe in time,

or distrusted randomness and dreams.

 

Each day she posted a scented letter to herself

and picked up the letter from the day previous,

 

smelling,

oh, engulfed in the roseate sweetness

and certainty of yesterday.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Bullsnake at the Door

In case you’ve ever wondered what a bullsnake would look like on the front stoop of your house, I’m sharing a photograph of one on mine as an example. I first spotted the snake when it poked its head inside after I opened the garage door to walk outside.

I’m hoping this snake is a good mouser. I could use the help.

—Mitchell Hegman

Dumb Ideas

Following is a list of my dumb ideas (not in any particular order):

• Building a wooden ramp for jumping my Stingray bicycle without the use of nails or screws to hold it together.
• Transplanting a cactus without gloves.
• Keeping a pet tarantula in a terrarium with an unweighted screen on top of it.
• Using an extra dash of accelerant to start a fire.
• Keeping a pet tarantula.
• Dressing myself in the dark.
• Not watching the movie E.T. until fifteen years after its debut.
• Dressing myself.
• Throwing out my life-sized cardboard cutout of Salma Hayek.
• Checking to see if a fence was electrified by touching it.

—Mitchell Hegman

You Can’t Hide from Me, Yellowjacket

At the moment, I don’t have a particular beef if you are a yellowjacket. And I’ve more or less forgiven a pair of them for that time they stung me when I startled them by hammering on a fascia board near their nest under the eave of my lake storage shed.

While I have no immediate issue of concern with yellowjackets, I remain wary. And just yesterday, I found one attempting to hide under a sunflower alongside my back deck. I don’t know what this solitary yellowjacket was up to, but I want all yellowjackets to know I am wise to their ways, and I’m posting a photograph to prove it.

Hiding Yellowjacket

—Mitchell Hegman

Custom Metal

 I thought I was done with the cabin after finishing the kitchen on the main floor, but I soon realized I have plenty of finish work I can do on the basement level. A couple of weeks ago, to that end, I ordered some metal panels and custom trim pieces to accommodate the odd structure of the daylight wall there. The framing became complicated where the foam blocks and concrete met the dimensional lumber framing. The end result, in simple terms, is an unholy stack of corners.

Posted are two photographs showing my progress after about ten hours of work. I really like the clean, bright look of the metal. Additionally, I managed to wrestle all this sharp-edged material into place with only three minor cuts to my person, none of which required a visit to Doctor Desiree.

The Daylight Basement Wall

Corner Details

—Mitchell Hegman

A Walking Mohawk

While poking around in the meadows near my cabin, I found a walking mohawk. Not a Mohawk people. I mean, I found a mohawk haircut climbing up the stem of a desiccated angelica plant.

This is not something I see every day, so I captured a photograph with my smartphone and marched off to the next weird thing.

Once I got back into service, I submitted my photo to my Google Lens app to identify the mohawk. Apparently, I captured the image of the caterpillar stage of a banded tussock moth.

The Walking Mohawk

—Mitchell Hegman

Raided in the Night

Between sundown and sunrise, all manner of critters emerge in the notch valleys of the Northern Rockies to go about making their living. This includes predators, scavengers, and all the hapless nibblers in the timberlands and open parks.

Strange things can happen in the darkness. My cabin and all that surrounds it are not immune to either the associated wonders or treacheries.

I mentioned how I battled with weeds on Sunday. In doing so, I filled one trash bag with spotted knapweed and another with thistle. I lugged the two bags back from the wilds and pitched them alongside the cabin.

When I woke the following morning, the bags had been dragged off to near the fire pit, and something had torn them open for inspection.

Definitely not the work of a mouse. At the same time, I don’t suspect the raid was the work of a bear. A bear would have shredded the bags to bits and made a big mess on the spot. Other than what happened to the bags, I didn’t see any other clues.

I would hazard a guess at what critter is responsible.

I hauled the bags back to the cabin and then double-bagged them for a trip to my trash bin at home.

My Bags Back at the Cabin

—Mitchell Hegman

The Rogue Shirt

My shirt went rogue on me yesterday.

Early in the morning, I stepped outside my cabin in the cool mountain air wearing a long-sleeve button-up over a t-shirt. I immediately hiked out to pull and bag a small patch of knapweed I found about 100 yards from the cabin. Following that, I walked around the lower ten acres of my parcel to survey for other weeds.

Somewhere during this hour-plus excursion, conditions warmed and my button-up shirt went rogue and abandoned me. You might think I would have paid more attention to my shirt, but I tend to hyper-focus when it comes to warring with invasive weeds on my property.

Much later in the day, I wanted a long-sleeved shirt for another excursion. After ransacking the cabin to find the shirt, it dawned on me that I wore it earlier in the day on my weed mission. Before long, I found myself retracing my steps from the morning. Sure enough, at the heavily forested edge of my property, I found my shirt sprawled out in the boughs of a tree and sunning itself.

My Rogue Shirt

—Mitchell Hegman

The Banded Woolly Bear

Yesterday afternoon, we spotted a couple banded woolly bears in a willow near the cabin. These are particular favorites of mine. A banded woolly bear is the caterpillar stage of the Isabella Tiger Moth. Here in Montana, the caterpillars emerge from eggs in late summer and early fall. They remain active and feed on broadleaf plants until cold weather sets in. When the weather begins to cool, the woolly bears seek out protected places in the understory: under deadfall, under leaves, or in root tangles. The woolly bears overwinter by curling into a coil and more or less freezing solid. Even the heart of the caterpillar stops beating. In the spring, the caterpillar emerges and pupates before becoming a moth.

Interestingly, in the Arctic, due to the short growing season for vegetation, the woolly bear must feed for several summers and freeze again each winter before becoming a moth.

Folklore holds that the thickness of the dark middle color band is a predictor of winter. If the dark band is thin, the winter will be severe; if the band is thick, the winter will be mild. The middle band, as a matter of fact, grows wider as the caterpillar ages.

I’ve written about them in two previous blogs, but don’t mind sharing again.

Banded Woolly Bear

            Isabella Tiger Moth (Wikipedia)

—Mitchell Hegman

The Angels Rest

Ho. Let us stop for the night. The better angels, the burning ones, have agreed to ascend to the treetops and watch over us. The lesser angels will tend to the animals and then care for the cherubs.

Those from the third sphere will remain close to the ground. The archangels will stand watch at the edges of the camp, while the ordinary angels will see to the small things: distributing blankets, brushing and calming the restless horses, and feeding sticks to the fires.

And the cherubs? They have been told to stay out of trouble, although no one expects them to listen. So let us sleep. The angels have their duties, the animals will soon be bedded, and the stars have been set free to wander through the night.

—Mitchell Hegman

Cross Traffic

While driving into town, I somewhat misjudged my distance and pulled out onto a road in front of an oncoming car. Fortunately, the woman driving the other car had her smartphone up in front of her face and didn’t even notice me.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Broccoli Incident

I make salads. Desiree, owing to her vastly superior capabilities, covers all the other prep and cooking on either side of that.

I like to chop up all kinds of stuff to add to my salads. Nuts, sweet onion, olives, cabbage, and broccoli are commonly added to a base of kale, lettuce, spinach, and arugula.

Welp, yesterday I had a broccoli incident. Apparently, I got a little too frisky while chopping. As my buddy Kenny used to put it: “I was going at it like a one-armed man killing snakes.” Somehow, even while wearing glasses, a speck of broccoli flicked up into my right eye.

To be perfectly honest, it only sort of hurt, but if someone had been around, I would have played it up a bit. In the end, I merely rubbed my eye, and the broccoli vanished.

I would like my broccoli incident to serve as a cautionary tale. I’m not suggesting we need to start wearing safety glasses when chopping broccoli. But that particular broccoli clearly chose violence. And there may be others.

—Mitchell Hegman 

Self-Assessment

Looking back now, I realize I should have remained looking ahead.

—Mitchell Hegman

Road Closure

I will admit to being a bit “slow on the uptake,” as the saying goes. Sometimes, I need to be told directly it’s time to go. If someone is trying to explain how to construct something, a sketch or two may be required to drag me fully onboard.

While taking a drive through the mountains yesterday, we found a road closure that must have had people like me in mind. The instant I saw the road, I was pretty certain they didn’t want me driving on it.

I’m sharing a photograph of the road so you can judge for yourself.

Closed Road

—Mitchell Hegman

Ghost of the Eastern Seaboard

The Stanfields are a Canadian rock band based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They blend a hard rock style with elements of traditional Atlantic Canadian folk music. The Stanfields released their debut album Vanguard of the Young & Reckless in 2010.

Today I am sharing Ghost of the Eastern Seaboard, a particular favorite of mine.

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8GyDzzA5j4

—Mitchell Hegman

Friendships

Literally, there have been many billions of friendships formed on this planet over the years. But when you shake it down, mine are the only ones that mattered.

—Mitchell Hegman

Softwood

You’ve likely heard that thing about using the internet to self-diagnose an ailment from which you might be suffering. You’ll find an answer alright, but it will be the worst-case scenario. You have something unpronounceable and cured only by drinking castor oil and eating lots of liver.

Unfortunately, a similar strain of bad news awaits if you search to find what you should and shouldn’t burn in your trusty woodstove. The “interweb” is going to tell you that burning softwood is bad. As the story goes, when you drill down (maybe up in this case), softwoods produce a lot of smoke and chimney-clogging creosote. Also, log per log, softwoods produce fewer BTUs than hardwoods.

Here’s the thing. All needle-bearing conifers are softwoods. This includes the pines, firs, and cedars out West where I live. I could accurately write that this effectively includes pretty much everything available in my region of the Rocky Mountains.

We don’t have oaks and walnuts proliferating at our back door. We’ve planted ourselves amongst the pines and firs and must make do. In fact, I spent considerable time this spring and summer cutting and chopping a reserve supply of lodgepole pine and fir for my stove.

Those of us who have not known better have been successfully burning softwoods for hundreds of years. A little damper control. A finely marbled steak. A well-aged single malt Scotch. And a stack of split pine. That’s all we need to laze through winter.

My Softwood Reserve for the Coming Winter

—Mitchell Hegman

Penelope and Her Purple Toenails

Penelope didn’t like daisies or oranges or button-up shirts.

She was seven and had her reasons.

Penelope was right-handed by nature, something her mother referred to as “wrong-handed.” Imagining she might please her mother, she painted her toenails purple with her left hand. And her mother might have been pleased had she looked beyond the purple smears on the floor.

How could you figure adults, she wondered. Adults used words differently.

The same words. Different meanings.

When her mother said “I’ll think about it,” it meant “no.” “Soon” meant “now.” “A little” meant “a lot.”

And before Penelope painted her nails, her mother swore purple was her favorite color and she would be happy if everything was purple.

—Mitchell Hegman

More Reasons to be Thankful

I’m thankful wings are not standard-issued equipment on spiders.

I’m thankful that my feet still reach the ground.

I’m thankful that mosquitoes are small enough to swat.

I’m thankful that gravity generally continues to work in my favor.

I’m thankful that fish don’t have hands.

I’m thankful that apple trees don’t slap me when I’m picking apples.

I’m thankful singing karaoke is optional, not required.

I’m thankful I’ve already proven two wrongs don’t make a right.

—Mitchell Hegman

Smoked Fish

Something near three weeks ago, smoke rolled into Montana from fires in Washington and Oregon. The smoke not only persisted; it thickened with contributions from wildfires in Canada and then right here in Montana. At the same time, extremely hot temperatures settled upon us.

Early in August, my car logged a temperature of 105°F, matching our all-time record high.

Yesterday, while driving through another hot afternoon of ever-thickening smoke, I said to Desiree, “Honey, I can’t even see the mountains for all the smoke. I think if we get another week of this, we’re going to be smoked fish.”

—Mitchell Hegman

The Reasons I Don’t Cook

I am capable of warming up leftovers or pitching hotdogs in boiling water, but full-fledged prepping and cooking a meal is asking a bit much of me. To begin, throwing both adjustments to time and temperature considerations at me in a single process is optimistic at best and more likely perilous. And then when you throw cups, qt., tsp., tbsp. in my lap or suddenly flip over to mL, I’m likely to forgo eating or simply drink down a couple of raw eggs.

Cooking is hard.

I am always wanting to shake rather than stir, and I don’t want to flip anything. I also struggle with being forced to let this cool or that rise. And my idea of chopping is a bit too “western” for a lot of stuff. With hotdogs, I boil them until they split and call it good.

Nonetheless, when Desiree is preparing several dishes at once, I sometimes offer to help. “I’m fine,” she’ll sing. If I grab a knife or make a bold move in the kitchen, she’ll wince and say, “Jeez, I think I just saw something outside the window.”

“Something?”

“Yeah… a weird thing flew by. Maybe you should go out there and look around.”

“Okay, I’ll go look. That’s a good idea.”

Thankfully, Desiree is a great cook. It’s also surprising how often she spots weird stuff outside the window when she’s cooking.

Desiree Prepping

—Mitchell Hegman

Hope (On the Easy Side)

It doesn’t take much to trigger hope within me. The other day, for instance, I witnessed a spider-killing wasp hunting along the foundation of my house. That’s enough to buoy me for a spell. Adding to my hope is the fact that they prefer going after big spiders.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Neighbor Crossing Through

The game camera I have posted in the meadow just south of my cabin picked up one of my neighbors crossing through just yesterday morning. A rather chunky-looking black bear, this one.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Worriers Club

Welcome to the second annual gathering of the Prairie Edge Worriers Club. For those of you worried about getting interrupted by heavy rain, it seems the Rocky Mountains have whittled down the storm front and left it limping along.

To begin, we would like to welcome the red ants representing Hill Number Three. They have recently expressed concern about a sudden spike in radio-frequency radiation from nearby cell towers. Some have linked this to a reduction in mandible size.

For those of you worried about an early onset to winter, the chickadees have stashed extra seeds in several northside ponderosa pines.

In descending order, the mule deer wish to express concern about an ear mite infestation, the loss of access to Desiree Hegman’s perennials, and the general unease that pervades the local population during waking hours.

The lower-end bumblebees continue to worry about a worker-bee shortage, and the click beetles worry about landing upside down.

For those with nothing to fret about, red-legged grasshoppers invite everyone to join them in a discussion about long-term drought.

In closing, have a great day.

—Mitchell Hegman 

Abraham Lincoln at the Coffee Shop

Abraham Lincoln stopped at a small coffee shop to grab an espresso. After a few oblique glances, the barista, a young woman with a ring in her nose, recognized her customer.

"I know you," she said. "You're the guy on the penny."

"Heads it is," replied Mr. Lincoln, nodding. "I'd fancied to land my profile on the nickel, but George Washington swooped in on that. I suppose he is a mite more handsome. And deserving."

"You look better in person, if that matters," the barista noted. "You have an aura of kindness about you. Are you into crystals?"

Lincoln considered for a moment. "I'm afraid crystals have largely evaded me. I do enjoy Aesop's Fables, though, and recently I've been taken by Bob Dylan's music. I enjoy his weave of narrative and song. And I appreciate that his voice has not fully come in from the wilderness. It's honest."

As Abraham Lincoln was talking, the young woman made change and handed it over.

"How weird is it to get paid with pennies?" she asked.

"At first, it made me uncomfortable. Now, the oddity of it walks directly through me untouched," Lincoln admitted.

"When things got weird for me, I got a nose ring. That's what I did."

"Interesting. I will keep that in mind."

Ten minutes later, Abraham Lincoln found himself rolling down the sidewalk with a newly minted penny in his pocket and a coffee in hand.

—Mitchell Hegman

Conglomerate

Conglomerate is the natural geological presentation of concrete. Long before we figured out how to mix cement with gravel, nature was doing much the same thing. Rivers rounded stones into smooth pebbles, layers of sediment buried them, and mineral-rich groundwater slowly cemented everything together into solid rock. The process took thousands to millions of years rather than an afternoon with a concrete truck and an ample supply of beer, but the result is surprisingly familiar.

One of the first "keeper" rocks in my collection is a time-worn conglomerate specimen I collected no more than 100 yards from the spot where my house presently stands.

I was 6 or 7 years old the day I found this treasure. Honestly, it still ranks as one of the most thrilling finds of my life. I gasped when I first spotted the rock amid a few nondescript stones. It was a perfect representation of nature's concrete and an ancient story told in stone.

"Look at this!" I said after trotting back to find my father and show him my discovery.

Though I proved a disappointment to my father when I revealed a propensity to pick up random stones rather than a baseball, he did his best to share my enthusiasm.

The conglomerate specimen has been on display on a shelf somewhere near me ever since. Every time I pick up the stone, I feel a certain earthy energy in the weight of it. It is of immeasurable value to me.

The photograph below is that very rock.

Conglomerate Specimen

—Mitchell Hegman

The Slide

I woke from a dream in which death was, literally, a long slide. Two women with indistinct facial features and I were stationed at the top of the slide so we could shove people off when their time arrived. As was bound to happen, someone I knew, an apprentice I once taught and liked immensely, appeared beside us.

When the time came, I helped push her down the slide without question.

I woke immediately after this and now sit on my sofa in the pre-dawn, wondering why my brain does this to me.

—Mitchell Hegman

Four

I watched a program on television last night featuring a woman who pronounced the number four as "fo-were." For me, something like that is the equivalent of having a tire blow out while driving down the highway.

It's the end of all forward progress. I need to pull over before severe damage is done.

For the rest of the program, I kept repeating fo-were every time the woman appeared. Today, in the fresh light of morning, I don't even recall where I was headed with the show.

But henceforth, fo-were shall be the new four.

—Mitchell Hegman

105 Degrees

Late Saturday afternoon, while driving from Helena to East Helena, my car registered a temperature of 105°F. That’s about 40 degrees higher than my preferred maximum temperature. It also ties the official all-time record high temperature for Helena.

When my car recorded that temperature, I had serious concerns that I might melt into a white-haired puddle. I insisted that Desiree capture an image of the numeric display on the console of the car so she could share my manner of demise with future generations.

You know that thing about all of us returning to dust?

Welp, apparently, I am getting an early run at that, too. When you look at the photograph of the temperature on my car’s display, you’ll see a lot of dust.

—Mitchell Hegman

Willing

I’m willing to eat daisies, cut boards with a dull handsaw, and rebrand myself as retired. But I’m not willing to live with a humanoid robot, paint the walls in my house hot pink, or eat a hot pepper.

—Mitchell Hegman

From What I Gather

Under certain conditions, sound carries itself remarkably intact across the lake. In the latest installment of this, I heard a pair of young “ladies” talking. From what I gather, there are a lot of “fuckers” on that side of the water.

—Mitchell Hegman

My Canadian Friends

Back in the days when I listened to AM radio while driving, a phenomenon called radio skip would occasionally deliver strange radio stations to me. Under just the right conditions, the ionosphere, a layer of electrically charged particles 60 to 250 miles overhead, becomes an invisible mirror that bends certain radio signals back toward Earth instead of letting them drift into space. A signal can leap hundreds or even thousands of miles in a single hop, allowing someone in Montana to suddenly hear a station from Texas or even Europe. No satellites. No relay towers. Just the Earth and its atmosphere briefly pulling off a long shot.

I sometimes found myself listening to radio stations from the far northern prairies of Canada while driving alone in the middle of the night.

We became friends.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Mouse Thing

There seems to be no end to the supply of mice living around my back deck and hot tub. I have captured and released something very near 50 of them in the last five weeks. If you are keeping track, that's a lot.

If I had my druthers, they would be living over at Billy's place, and a bunch (can we call them a herd?) of hummingbirds would surround my deck.

It's not because a mouse is particularly intimidating. In fact, if you met just one out in the yard, you'd probably find the tiny fellow rather endearing. Twitchy pink ears. Bright eyes. Busy whiskers.

This is no grizzly bear.

But ultimately, they are after my peanut butter cookies. And as you can judge by the number I have captured, they procreate like mad.

A female mouse reaches maturity in only six to eight weeks. Her gestation lasts a mere nineteen to twenty-one days, and she typically produces five to eight pups. Under favorable conditions, she can become pregnant again within a day after giving birth.

That schedule doesn't leave much room on her calendar for hobbies.

Suppose you start with one healthy pair of adult mice in the throes of rodent love. Three weeks later, six pups arrive. Three weeks after that, another six. Two months in, fourteen mice isn't exactly a furry apocalypse.

Then the daughters grow up.

About six to eight weeks after they're born, they begin having litters of their own. Suddenly, reproduction isn't happening one family at a time. It's happening several families at once.

By the end of the third month, you might have thirty or forty mice. By the fourth month, it's easy to top a hundred. Five months in, several hundred isn't out of the question. By six months, under ideal conditions with plenty of food, warmth, and shelter, the descendants of that single pair could number well over a thousand.

I don't have that many cookies. So, I trap and relocate.

—Mitchell Hegman

Making Faces

As my dented luck would have it, I stepped into a checkout line behind a young mother with a toddler seated in her cart just as the young boy started bawling with conviction. The mother did her best to placate her child while, at the same time, placing items on the belt.

After a minute or so, the boy noticed me. "What's going on, buddy?" I asked. Then I offered a smile and a few skewed faces. The boy immediately stopped crying and studied me with a countenance that a mechanic might wear when examining a handful of bolts left over after rebuilding an engine.

Before long, the kid was pointing at the soda and candy on display next to him and then looking back at me for my reaction.

We had a thing, and he was calm and quiet as his mother completed her transaction and bagged her groceries. She even thanked me for calming her son before pushing off with her cart.

I'm thinking I might try offering Desiree those same faces the next time she is miffed at me to see if I can deliver her to a new state of mind.

—Mitchell Hegman

Three Horses and One Mule

Even though I’ve lived in horse-infatuated Montana my entire life, you’d be surprised how impressive I find the sight of horses (and one mule) frisking about in a pasture with mountains as the backdrop. Desiree, of course, is impressed with elk and horses above most things, both of which have a proud, regal air about them. So yesterday, when three horses and a mule pranced up to a fence line to check us out, we stopped so Desiree could talk to the critters and capture them in a sun-washed portrait.

Three Horses and One Mule

—Mitchell Hegman

7000 Photographs

Something weird happened to one of my game cameras at the cabin.

Before we unpack the weird stuff, you need to understand that I have three game cameras posted near the cabin. The camera we are talking about is shooting images at around 550 kB in file size.

That’s fairly small. At that size, the 32 GB SD card in the device would readily hold something near 58,000 images. The camera is strapped somewhat haphazardly atop the four-foot stump of a giant fir we were forced to fell last year.

Here’s the weird part. When I stopped to pull the SD card before driving past it, I found the camera had been knocked askew and was directed mostly at the sky and nearby treetops.

So, consider this: we are talking about a camera triggered by motion. What has more motion than trees in the wind? Given this, I found over 7,000 images on the game camera, all captured in a bit under two weeks. The first dozen images were of a righteous herd of elk milling about in front of the camera. Apparently, one of the elk nosed the camera and oriented the business end skyward. All the thousands of other images were of empty sky.

I’m sharing one of the photographs, showing the elk flowing past the camera as darkness descends on the mountain valley.

Elk Captured at Night

—Mitchell Hegman

Logging In

Given my struggle with passwords and the fact that I am all thumbs with my smarter-than-me phone and other electronics, I often struggle when attempting to sign in to any of my various apps and accounts. Also, I have never had a TikTok account. So, imagine my surprise when I retrieved my phone from my pocket after poking about in Desiree’s flower garden and found a new email on an account I rarely use. The message read as follows: “You're receiving this email because you used Sign in with Google to sign in to TikTok on July 25 at 9:02 AM.”

My phone was in my pocket at 9:02.

Apparently, my butt logged in to TikTok without informing the rest of me.

Honestly, this is slightly distressing. What might be next? What if my butt started making moves on the stock market or diving into bitcoin investments?

—Mitchell Hegman

Cooling Down

It’s a full hour before the robins will bribe the sun with their quickest song. The sky remains as still as solid stone and colored Wedgwood blue. My back door is open, and I’ve flung open the windows like clams. Near the door and two windows, floor fans whir with firm insistence.

I’m sitting on my sofa under wan light, allowing the mountain air to rush in and lay cool hands on me. I close my eyes and think of the snowcapped peaks west of me, and of the monkey flowers I found nodding along the bounce-and-run Arrastra Creek on my last mountain drive.

I’ve never been fond of summer’s heat, and this hour before sunrise is entirely mine. I have this hour, and perhaps two more, to draw in cool air so I may face another scorching day. The cool air has a weight I desire.

—Mitchell Hegman