The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Okay, so my current carry pistol came with a Swampfox red dot…

It’s one of the less expensive brands and it worked adequately. It stopped holding zero but that wasn’t the optic’s fault. Slamming back and forth destroyed the adapter plate’s cheap plastic zeroing lugs and an optic hand carved from solid platinum and personally blessed by GOD wouldn’t have held zero. My new adapter plate machined from an actual metallic substance will probably permanently fix that problem. BUT – over time the Swampfox did the same thing the Vortex Venom I put on the M69 did: the reflection (refraction? Don’t know) of the laser against the glass gradually became indistinct and fuzzy. It was okay in most light conditions but it was very fuzzy against a dark background and aiming up a hill toward the sun it wasn’t usable at all.

I wanted to try a closed-emitter optic, and bought a Holosun that, despite the manual’s promises, didn’t fit. So I sent that back and moped. That was also when I noticed the problem with the old adapter plate so it wasn’t a completely useless exercise. Remember that I’m a old hermit: This stuff is after my time and I’m learning as I go here.

Anyway: I got the new plate, learned that it would fit a Trijicon RMR and that they’re well spoken of. They’re stupid expensive, but I really wanted this to work. So…I girded my financial loins and did something ridiculous…

How’s that for presentation? Makes you think you’re getting something for your money, no? But when I opened the case, hopefully with an air of proper respect…

Well, that’s disappointing. You could at least put it on a little throne or something. Or display it upright? I wasn’t even sure it was a complete unit.

Turns out it was…

Took it out with a screwdriver to zero it. First shot at seven yards just to get it on paper, and…

Okay, that was encouraging. Turned out it didn’t need any tweaking at all.

So that seems to have worked. Let’s see if it wears any better than my other two much cheaper optics.

I went to town this morning with Neighbor L to get propane. Everything was fine when I left but when I got back I saw water running across the yard in front of the Lair. “[bad word]! [bad word]! [bad word]!” The most likely source of the break was right where I needed to go anyway to shut off the water…

…and happily I could stop the flow with my new-last-spring shut-off valve. Even more happily…

…once I cut away the insulation the break wasn’t hard to find. I had to dig anyway, because the surest way of keeping this from happening again was to cut off the upright underground and cap it. Which I was able to easily do…

I might never have the right gas fitting on hand but if it’s a 1/2″ white PVC fitting, I’ve got it. In multiples. So I think I set a record this afternoon for time spent repairing a plumbing leak.

But it wouldn’t have happened in the first place if I’d obeyed the angel on my shoulder this past Spring and installed one of those expensive freeze-“proof” hydrants instead of another PVC upright. I’m not as broke now as I was this time last year, so in Spring I’ll fix this right. In the meantime that upright isn’t of any use anyway – except in case of a hard-to-fix leak under the cabin where having a yard spigot is handy.

D has nearly spent as much time traveling by air in the past year as I did back in my globetrotting period. All by getting rushed to hospitals in the Big City.

His hip infection got bad again, and the hospital in the big town about 50 miles away wanted no part of him. So into the plane he went. Is this common? I’m kind of confused about it.

I got a phone call from Neighbor L this afternoon, saying that he was going to be in the City for a couple of weeks while they try to get it under control. We’ve heard that before. I genuinely don’t understand what’s going on with his condition. He can’t walk at all for constant pain, which has only gotten worse in the past months but nobody seems to know why. It has become a serious financial problem for this elder couple who thought they had plenty of money for a comfortable retirement when they moved out here and built their dream house in the desert together going on 20 years ago. He fell off his horse nearly fifteen months ago and it’s ruining both their lives.

I love this guy. He was one of the two capable men I met when I first moved here, always around when there were building projects to be done and he taught me a lot. He was there for my two Lair framing projects, always ready to help. I built the kitchen part of the Lair in his woodshop under his instruction. When I had my kidney stone emergency that left me practically writhing on the ground in pain he dropped what he was doing and (literally at one point) carried me to the local clinic. He’s like a foot taller than me, was far stronger than I ever was, and I was honored on the few occasions when he asked me to pitch in on some aspect of his big building project. To see him reduced to this is kind of painful. He deserves better.

Last post I mentioned the freakishly mild December just past, which was of course the cue for the forecast (and weather) to abruptly change to seasonal…

…which, while not surprising, is also not an improvement and I should have just quietly enjoyed what I had without bringing it up.

Today had to be bread day, and I knew that the moment I started the sky would close right up. The view from the porch…

…was not what the forecast called for – in fact we were supposed to have an inch of snow by now. Just because the overcast didn’t show up on time didn’t mean it wasn’t coming and I need full sun to run my oven. Unless I cheat…

…by taking the generator out of the cabin and into the powershed to substitute for the solar panels in charging the batteries. Which I’m increasingly prone to do in case of any doubt: The batteries turned five years old last August and, though still working fine for the depth of winter, are on borrowed time and I’d rather spend an hour’s worth of gasoline than abuse them.

I feel like I really ought to do something more permanent-looking, less obviously improvised, than just parking the Honda in the doorway but hey, it works.

At first it seemed like the right call…

…but then later the sky mostly cleared again so I could have gotten away with not bothering with the generator. What I should have done was heat up the cabin before letting the dough rise, because…

…this is what happens whenever I don’t get a good rise before baking the bread. And the only reason I can think of for why it didn’t rise well is that I didn’t bother lighting the woodstove and heating up the cabin first. It’s not the yeast, which is new and proved good before I made the dough. I should remember that next time: Heat up the room, then make the dough.

I had to go to D&L’s this afternoon to unload yet another ton of wood pellets, the third of the season so far. Tobie and I got in the Jeep and I was literally reaching for the start button when the phone rang.

Texts aren’t uncommon; phone calls almost always mean some immediate issue/emergency so I fumbled for the phone, tried to remember how to answer it, and learned that Neighbor L wanted to make sure that I brought my portable tire inflator. Which is always in the Jeep, so no extra effort needed.

Now, last time I helped unload and stack their wood pellets I noticed that I was having a very hard time hauling the little metal wagon back and forth. I attributed this to getting old and decrepit, it never occurred to me to wonder about the state of the wagon. But L had recently used the same wagon to pull a bunch of (very light) garbage bags to the barrels at the far side of the driveway and she had the same observation. Apparently being smarter than me, this caused her to wonder about the air pressure in the wagon’s tires – all of which were just barely inflated enough to avoid appearing actively flat when unloaded. So we spent a very few minutes filling all four tires from an indicated 0 psi, and the wagon suddenly rolled a great deal more easily. Technology: Is there no problem it can’t solve?

Speaking of heaters…

I have a hard time understanding why D&L are going through so many wood pellets this winter because so far it has been ridiculously mild. Seriously, all through December I think we had one 3-day stretch where the afternoons only went into the forties. Some nights wander vaguely into the high teens. It hasn’t snowed since early November. I have lit my woodstove exactly twice, briefly, so far all season.

I gaze fearfully about and emphasize loudly that I AM NOT COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS.

It will certainly change for the colder at some point. Probably with a great dramatic flourish. But the forecast so far only predicts more of the same. It’s kind of eerie.

Okay, so after a fairly rocky start that took a lot of breaking-in to get my Arex reliable with all sorts of ammo, the pistol and I have become friends. Except for one thing…

If, like me, you’re a boomer who hasn’t really kept up with changing trends in commercial firearms, you may be aware that micro red dot optics are now a thing you can put on the slide of a Browning-action handgun but not really up on the … details. And since these things cost the world the details can stress you out. Remember VHS vs. Betamax? Yeah, it’s like that.

One of the selling points of the second-gen Arex Delta is that it comes from the factory with an optic cut, which I imagine one day every handgun will have unless it’s sold as retro, if they don’t already. But the problem is that the optic manufacturers haven’t come to any agreement as to what the optic footprint will be: The size and bolt pattern and such are all over the place. So my Arex came equipped with five adapter plates to presumably cover all the likely bases.

Okay, I guess. I wasn’t crazy about needing to put a plate between the optic and the slide, but there it is. Come back in ten years and maybe all this will have been sorted out. But what really made me unhappy was the quality of these plates: You’d expect something other than cheap plastic. And the one I used, which has seen something over a thousand rounds now, wasn’t up to the task.

Happily, for every commercial problem a commercial solution will appear. And there’s a company called Calculated Kinetics which sells a machined plate specifically made to replace this particular plastic one, presumably because my Arex problem is not unique.

It was expensive, like $60 delivered. But I was really happy with how johnny-on-the-spot they were with delivery, and having now installed it I can testify that it precisely fits the pistol and the optic and is likely to be a whole lot more durable.

Buoyed by my recent success with roast meat, I decided to do something truly decadent…

Other than hamburger – and not a lot of that – I don’t remember the last time I tasted beef. Lots of chicken and pork, but this is literally the first chunk of cow I’ve bought in this century. Turned out to be kind of gristly inside, but whatever…

I didn’t turn it into shoeleather.

Did I have Tobie’s attention?

Yeah, I think I had Tobie’s attention. 🙂

It turned cloudy yesterday afternoon for the first in a long time, so to pull this off I really did have to lug the generator out to the powershed so as not to kill the batteries. Worth it.

I went to town yesterday, not expecting anything at the post office. But there were two separate packages!

This is a Michael Malice book I’ve wanted for several years but wouldn’t buy for myself because the chances of my working all the way through it were slim and when it first came out I didn’t have money for luxuries like that. It’s mostly a series of lectures, pamphlets and the like from late 19^th and early 20^th century anarchists, explaining their reasoning for what turned out to be very wrongheaded ideas. I’ve always been interested in the anarchists of that era because in my heart I’m an anarchist but in my head I’m anything but: My idea of the ideal society would have no overarching government at all but unfortunately it would have to be populated by ideal people and I haven’t met many of those. It’s not exactly a new observation – James Madison famously said, “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Since he didn’t know any angels, he was largely responsible for arranging the Constitution that the current government busies itself pissing all over.

But the fin de siècle anarchists lived in a sort of intellectual bubble in which they thought that if you could remove the shackles of traditional government from them, people everywhere would just naturally sort themselves into a sort of benevolent mutual-aid society. Curiously, virtually all of them seem to have assumed that that society would be communist – and that communism would be a good thing. They at least had the excuse that communism hadn’t ever been tried at that point on any scale bigger than a voluntary commune, and some of them lived long enough to get their errors smeared on their faces: Michael Malice likes to tell the story of how Emma Goldman, “Red Emma,” happily took a trip to newly-Bolshevik Russia for meetings with Lenin, came away horribly disabused of her naive assumptions, and then got called a traitor by British commies when she tried to tell the story of what she’d seen in the first actual communist state.

Anyway, that book has languished for years on my Amazon wish list and I probably never would have gotten around to buying it, But Big Brother saw it there and got it for me! Thanks, BB!

Also…

These are two water conditioners that a Generous Reader sent me, in hope that one of them might help me with the rather extreme calcium build-ups I get from the very hard well water. It will be a while before one of them gets installed, like not till Spring, but I know I’ll do it because I want to retrofit a ball valve in the line between the well and the tank anyway so it won’t take a special project. It’s supposed to cause the dissolved calcium in the water to “remain in aragonite talc form, passing through unnoticed.” I’m looking forward to seeing if it really works. Won’t do any harm even if it doesn’t, though it will probably serve to confuse the next generation of people to work on that water line. 🙂

Thanks, guys!

The other day I got an extremely rare personal visit to the Secret Lair. My longtime neighbors and friends S&L came putting up in their ATV, having texted ahead first so as to give me time to a)be home, and b)have home, dog and self presentable. I wasn’t the only one: They made the round of the Gulch, bringing a bit of cheer to all the loonies and loners who hadn’t previously expressed a desire not to be included on any such list.

They didn’t come empty-handed:

There was a whole little tub of hand-baked goodies, and a bottle of better-than-dollar-store wine. News from their other stops in the circuit. In general, I guess you could call it glad tidings.

Being the closest thing to normal people of anyone I know in the Gulch, S&L have extended family elsewhere and they set off yesterday to spend the holiday with them. But first they took the time to kindly touch base with those of their neighbors who, through choice or circumstance, don’t have any such place to be.

I can’t speak for anybody else – Personally I just don’t do holidays and am not pining away for lack of personal or family contact on any given one. But I’m not everybody, and I thought that was a really nice thing to do, is all.

Neighbor L asked me to come help with cleaning the pipe for their main pellet stove this morning. It turned out to be more technically challenging than I expected.

The stovepipe is 4″, and the sections have these very annoying tab-and-groove locking surfaces with which I’m mostly unfamiliar except to vaguely recall that other times when I encountered them they turned out to be, well, very annoying. Getting it apart was hard enough: Getting it back together was starting to look impossible.

I’ve mentioned before that D and L had long since divided their house’s maintenance needs into fairly rigid territories, and each kept the peace by carefully not infringing on his or her mate’s territory. They’re both kind of OCD in such matters, which can be entertaining to watch as long as I’m not stuck in the middle. Alas, the stovepipe is firmly in D’s territory, and he’s been badly hampered by some injuries and declining health, including a couple of recent TIAs which have done nothing to improve his ability to verbally communicate. He can’t walk at all, and only stubbornness has kept him from resorting to a wheelchair.

So L and I got the pipe apart and brushed out without any serious problems, but then were stumped as to how to put it back together. This was all in their big living room: D was in his chair watching the whole thing, no doubt in mounting frustration at not being able to brush me out of the way and just f*cking do it. He clearly understood where we were going wrong and kept trying to explain how to do it right. I, being stuck, was trying to seriously listen to his instruction but he wasn’t making a lot of sense. L, having lived with this for over a year now and not the most patient of souls at the best of times, was ignoring him when I was hoping she’d, you know, interpret.

Finally I either independently figured out what I’d been doing wrong or what he had been valiantly trying to tell me sank in, maybe a combination of the two, and it all went together like a child’s jigsaw puzzle. Happy smiles all around and the tension level in the room went down remarkably.

At least it wasn’t a pointless exercise: we got quite a lot of soot out of that pipe. I really thought pellet stoves burned cleaner than that.

I suspect anybody who gets electricity from solar panels and who lives in a place with actual winter probably pays a lot of attention to the solstice. I certainly do, and more so this year since Ian’s power system got its big downgrade in battery power.

In the Lair it matters but not as much. Day before yesterday I roasted pork, which took about an hour and a half, and I really should have started earlier in the day. My gas oven ironically requires a lot of juice, and in winter should really only be used in the middle of the day (or powered by a generator, which I also considered doing but was too lazy to drag it out of the cabin to the powershed.) But other than anomalous behavior like that, my small battery bank matches my very modest electricity needs. Let’s just say LED lighting was a bigger revolution in my life than it probably was in yours.

But Ian’s place has bigger amperage draws, with a water pressure pump, a refrigerator, and a washer and dryer. The fridge doesn’t actually draw much and I can choose when to use the washer (and have no need to use the dryer at all in winter) but that pump turned out to be a bit of a problem once I didn’t have the big battery bank for a cushion. So I took the pump off its 12/12 timer and just manually turn it on when I need water pressure, and then right back off again. Which is probably screwing up the water softener’s operation but it’s only for another couple of months.

So anyway, even though so far this winter has been freakishly mild – it’s sunny and 62^o at the moment – that’s why I’ve been counting the days till December 21, the shortest day in the year. In theory, assuming we don’t get a lot of cloudy weather* the electricity situation at Ian’s Cave can only gradually improve from this point on.

—-
*which of course at some point we certainly will, unless ‘climate change’ is working miracles. But that’s so unpredictable I can’t really plan for it except to let the laundry pile up until it passes.

Yesterday we went to town for water and groceries, and at the store I found a pound and a half hunk of pork that clawed at me through the bars and demanded I take it home.

I’m not the world’s greatest cook – or the world’s billionth-greatest cook – but roast pork is simple. And I got it almost perfect this time. My one failure was not stocking spare batteries for my meat thermometer; the inside could have been a bit more done but the bulk of it was falling apart at the touch of a fork and the crust and the spice rub was the best I’ve ever done. Tobie and I went through more than half last night. He did not refuse seconds.

Maybe it’s because I turned 70 this year and I’m officially old: I’ve spent the year tripping over how different old me is from young me.

Today’s revelation is about Christmas carols: when I was a child I loved the sound of them for reasons obvious and maybe not so much. Couldn’t imagine not doing so. When I was a young man and my immediate family issues were behind me except for the emotional backwash I was indifferent toward most of them. Maybe a little nostalgic.

But now I’m a smelly old grinch and I have to admit: I’m looking forward to New Years when the damned things traditionally go away. They’re like oversweet holiday taffy. Stuck to the sole of your shoe.

They’re certainly one more good reason to live alone in the boondocks where you get to pick your own musical accompaniment most of the time. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to work on getting Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree out of my head. Could be worse: could be The Little Drummer Boy…

For well over ten years I carried a .44 revolver, eventually upgrading to the pistol of my dreams, a S&W Model 69 .44 Magnum.

The M69 is, in my opinion, the (almost) perfect trail gun: Light enough to carry all the time without too much hassle but capable of chambering and safely firing the heaviest magnum loads (if necessary: You won’t like it but you can do it.) The one thing I didn’t like about it, and this always perplexed me because it otherwise seemed designed for trail use, was the tiny trigger guard that forbade use with even unlined gloves.

A couple of years ago I began rather sadly questioning the need to walk around all the time with 3 pounds of iron and an assortment of .44 loads. This place has gotten kind of boring, to be honest: All the interesting animals have gone away. I wasn’t going to go unarmed, that doesn’t suit me, but I got to thinking maybe it was time to downgrade to a general-purpose 9mm. A good pound lighter, 17-round mag, no need for speedloaders, good for anything but maybe bears – and nobody’s seen a bear around here since 2011. In April of this year, courtesy of my friend Ian, I finally acquired one. Arex Delta Gen II. Took some breaking-in but we finally became friends.

Then winter started sneaking up on me and the question arose: How does this thing work with gloves? And the answer was…

Yes, it’s unloaded. I’m not a moron.

And this morning, standing on the porch just prior to the first pee, I got my chance to try it for real. Tobie was bothered by this cottontail in the yard which wasn’t the least bit bothered by him. Tobie, bless his heart, didn’t just charge off after the rabbit. He wanted to, but obeyed his training and didn’t do it. But this stupid rabbit just stood there, unaware and/or uncaring about the disruption in procedure it was causing. I keep the magazine loaded with tragically expensive super ammo but the chamber has one round of cheap FMJ just for situations like this. Not even thinking about the glove situation until I’d done it, I drew and fired from the porch. And even though I was wearing a lightly-lined glove it didn’t cause any problem at all.

So that’s a problem that’s gone away. Couldn’t do it with a heavy glove, but the most common sort don’t get in my way.

Went out and cleaned up the mess after breakfast, carrying it out to the wash to make some coyote’s day. One of the things I always held against Elmer Keith, whose work on pistols I’ve read fairly extensively over the decades, is how casual he seemed about using live animals for target practice. I get it, we’re from different cultures but I don’t like killing things for sport. This rabbit had moved into my yard, though, and had to go or he’d always be upsetting my dog. Had the same problem with Little Bear, who never learned not to chase them when we were supposed to be doing other things, and sometimes I had to go around and clean them out of the yard with a .22. Maybe it’s time to do that, they seem to be getting common again.

I replaced the front brake pads a couple of months ago but always intended to wait till winter to attack the rear, both because the rear also needed a new tire and because I’ve seldom messed with multi-gear bikes before and all that ironmongery intimidates me.

Always had a problem visualizing windy things like belts and chains, so…

…I took a bunch of photographs before taking the wheel off in case I ended up having to unwind the chain or something. Turned out not to be necessary but you know what they say about how it’s better to have things you don’t need.

Anyway – the front brakes taught me that replacing pads was extremely simple, and it was. Until I tried to put the newly-shod rear wheel back on the bike without loosening the caliper. The rear pads were substantially more worn than the fronts, go figure, and it took the old man a minute or two to remember that I had adjusted the hell out of the rear brakes over more than five years and the caliper needed to be loosened, a lot, before the disk would fit between the new pads.

I have had a spare tire in storage since 2019, the same year I got the bike, so logistically the job couldn’t have been simpler. Intended to re-use the old tube until I inspected it…

Then decided…nah. I have a few spare tubes.

Got the machine back together, with no more hiccups once I remembered to loosen that brake caliper, tightened everything down, re-adjusted the caliper,

…stress-tested my nice cordless inflator…

…and took it outside for a brief test ride.

Ready for five more years!

Because the bike only sees pavement in town, I expect to have to do all this beside a dirt road at some point. So far, by some miracle, that hasn’t happened but it will. So I made a point of only doing all this with tools actually carried on the bike at all times. To my satisfaction, that worked quite well.

This is the year Uncle Joel officially got too old for this shit.

Next year I’m definitely looking into buying wood from those Mexican guys in town.

Actually it’s been such an amazingly mild December that I’m not even using wood right now. But that’s gonna change at some point. Probably in a dramatic fashion, knowing the weather around here.

I always had this image of the Concorde jets – they seemed huge in the pictures available at the time. But then I saw one when I was changing planes at De Gaulle airport…

And the subject came up at my kitchen table for some reason, some time later. I said to my wife, “You know, they’re surprisingly small.” And she asked, “Where did you see one?” And I stupidly answered, “At De Gaulle.”

And she rose up from her chair in righteous wrath and angrily demanded, “You’ve been to Paris?” As if I had somehow slighted her by not sneaking her aboard with my luggage.

And I said, “No, I’ve been to De Gaulle. On my way to yet another godforsaken desert hellhole to keep a roof over our heads. I’ve never actually seen Paris.”

And it barely got me through breakfast alive.

In his defense he was provoked.

There’s a heavy-duty carabiner on the end of Tobie’s heavy-duty rope, so that I can clip it to a heavy-duty loop of braided 550 cord that I slide over my heavy-duty belt – all against the moment when Tobie decides to launch after something while my attention is elsewhere.

It doesn’t happen often – Tobie is a lot less impulsive about such things, or maybe a lot less ecumenical about what he’ll surrender to his impulses over, than Little Bear was. THAT was a dog who needed a heavy-duty walking leash, that I didn’t ever dare take my hand off. But still – when Tobie does give in to the temptation to launch after something, he does it right. And this isn’t the first belt he’s broken.

The first time, he broke the plastic stiffener that’s sewn between nylon layers. I bought a more expensive version of the same idea: This time the stiffener held up but the ratchet teeth broke off. I had a hell of a time getting the belt off my pants. Now that I’m on Social Security I’m going to try the real thing, forgetting the chinese knockoffs. I like this style of belt but the cheap copies are the weak point in my “no you can’t chase that elk” strategy.

Yes, it was an elk. They’re suddenly all around us. Tobie went nuts yesterday over something I couldn’t see, and when I went outside with my rifle to save the day he had just been baying at an innocent elk in the wash. This morning when we got to the road at the top of the ridge there were tracks everywhere so I knew they were around and should have been paying more attention: One broke cover and Tobie saw it before I did. I was looking elsewhere and not holding the leash. Expensive mistake.

Terrapod asked…

Hey Joel, how is that Carhart winter coat holding up? Is it time for a new one yet?

My nice Redneck Cartier coat came to me in January 2017 after a rather convoluted drama, and I was delighted with it. This isn’t Minnesota and I’m retired from 8-5 work so even though it’s eight years old next month…

…it’s still in fine shape. A little faded from washing, a little frayed around the cuffs, but that just means I’ve loved it till it’s a little real. Not in need of replacement. And it’s coincidental that I should have seen Terrapod’s question this morning, because…

This very morning it got taken out of the closet for more than autumn inspection for the first time this winter.

I love this coat, and it’s the first real big-boy Carhartt coat I ever owned, made possible by a generous donation (by Terrapod, if I remember correctly), and the story of how I ended up with this particular one is, as previously implied, a little involved. Terrapod sent me one for Christmas 2016, and it arrived at my maildrop in the Big City just in time to miss the care package delivery so I didn’t get it here at the Gulch. But by wild coincidence that was the first time in six years I was going to the city to visit with Landlady so the coat was there when I got there. The coat was one of those tan jobs with the corduroy collar and quilted lining, size large, and it fit me like a tent. I really wanted this coat but looked up at Landlady and she just shook her head sadly.

Well, no problem, Terrapod had thoughtfully included the Tractor Supply receipt and those stores are all over this state, so a couple of days later I went to a Tractor Supply in hope of making an exchange. Unfortunately this particular city resides in a region where “winter” is just a way of saying “less hot,” and the store didn’t stock coats at all. Lots of Carhartt merch, but no actual coats. Now I was really bummed.

But on the way home at the end of the week, our route took us through the big town about 50 miles from the Gulch, which is in the upper part of the state at about 7000 feet and does contain a Tractor Supply, which surely stocked Carhartt coats. We stopped at the store on the way through.

It was the first week in January and very cold, snowy, windy. I struggled out with my coat still in its bag, clutching the receipt. I’m the poster boy for social awkwardness and had kind of been hoping Landlady would handle the ‘talking to strangers’ phase but she elected to stay in the warm car. Nevertheless the people in the store were very friendly and quite willing to let me exchange the too-big coat for whatever I could find on their rack. Ha! I should have been warned by “whatever I could find on the rack.” It was the week after Christmas after all. The racks were terminally picked-over.

I found some size large coats that were too big, some size medium coats that were too small, a few oddballs in obnoxious colors I didn’t want. And one single black chore coat with a sherpa lining that fit me like it was bespoke at Kingsman Tailors. The only thing that could possibly have improved it was if it came in green. I snatched it immediately: They logged the exchange at the counter and that was that.

And I’ve taken very good care of it ever since.

Two mornings ago Tobie woke me, very excited, to announce that something extremely important was happening outdoors and that I should get up immediately and let him out to investigate, defend against and/or consume, as the situation may demand. I told him to shut up and come back when it was light enough to see, then went back to sleep.

Surprisingly, the situation still obtained when I finally did get up and took him outside for a first pee. Across the wash, maybe 150 yards from the porch, the ground rises to a mud-flat with lots of brush and then to a bare rocky slope that steepens but never quite becomes a cliff, rising about 50 feet before it flattens out again. Up that slope there used to be a regular game trail, and it wasn’t unusual to see elk climbing it in single file. But starting nine years ago when the cattle took over, elk became rarer and finally disappeared entirely.

Elk are well camouflaged and my eyesight is going so even though Tobie stood on the driveway and pointed them out to me I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at first: but then some of them saw us or caught our scent and started pronking up the slope, so that their motion was undeniable even to my eyes. I saw four of them and there were probably more. Welcome back! Ironic since just lately I’ve seen a small gang of cattle back in the general area.

Then this morning I found small hoofprints that could pretty much only have been made by a mule deer, which I also haven’t seen around here in a few years.

The native ungulates don’t seem to like sharing space with cattle, for reasons I don’t understand. Hard to imagine that the cattle would bother them, with the possible exception of the breed bulls. When they’re around they’re not shy about using the cattle’s waterer, but never when the cattle are around.