The other day, all the little kids got new socks and underwear. Abby was telling me about her new underwear. “They work,” she said.

Then she was telling Mom that she has her “out to town socks” and her “out to town underwear”. Mom said “I don’t think you need ‘out to town underwear’, because nobody would see them!”
And she said “They’ll see them in the holes of my shoes!”
And Mom said “No, those are your socks!”

Also, evidently, Abby has an imaginary friend named Mayna, who whom she says is her twin. Beth said Abby’s Mayna voice is funny, so I was trying to get her to speak in it. “Have Mayna say hi,” I said. She just giggled. “Can Mayna come over?”
“She lives far away,” Abby said.
“Can’t you ask her to come?” I asked.
“Her mom always says no,” Abby said.

For her birthday dinner she had rice, alfredo sauce, and grilled chicken and shrimp. It was soooo good!

She’s pretty proud that she’s allowed in the kitchen and on the tile now that she’s four!

An ornamental knife Ben made for the fund raiser our friends are putting on to adopt the Filipino girl

Another view. The blade is made out of an old saw blade, the guard is a cross of copper, and the handle is a naturally-shaped antler. Uncomfortable to hold, but awesome to put on a shelf and look at!

Dad’s birthday was Sunday…this is him (Abby in the background) wearing his new “Jesus’ Slaves” t-shirt.

This is Joe looking…quite normal. *duck*

Elle Jane in her very cute Hawaiian shirt from Uncle David and Aunt Fran. She fits in it!! Isn’t she just adorable?!?

That’s all, folks!

Well, actually, not quite!

On Sundays we have Bible studies, and the boys are challenging us girls to read certain books of the Bible each week, and Rase has been reading as well, but from a Bible storybook. Dad was doubtful, he said “Is his ‘Bible’ bonafide?”
“I dunno,” I said, and made an unintentional pun: “but he reads it religiously.”

Also, in Rase’s storybook Bible, the years between when David was a young man and killed Goliath and when he had Solomon were missing, so Rase asked the obvious question: “Solomon is David’s son, but isn’t David too young to have kids?”

And here’s one definitely for your Grammoo’s book, Grammoo…just a few minutes ago, Tess came up to Mom and said, “I wish we had more kids, to play with!”

(If that link doesn’t work, try here.)

Folks, I’m sorry to bring you the sad news that Mom passed away at approximately 12:15pm today.

“Anne, could you take my blood pressure?” she asked.
“Ok.” I got up and went over to her to take her blood pressure. I put the cuff on her, adjusted it so it wasn’t over her elbow, put the thingy in my ears, straightened the tubes (they’re in a certain order), and proceeded to pump the cuff up. “That’s weird,” I said. “It went real fast from about 138 down, then around 60 went thump, thump, thump, slower.” It wasn’t quite like a heartbeat though.
So I let all the air out and pumped the cuff back up. Nothing…the pointer dropped past 130; 120; 100; nothing. Finally, down by 60, again I heard it, thump thump thump, but not quite like a heartbeat.
“Let me try,” Mom said. I gave her the ear thingy, and pumped the cuff back up. Mom listened, and got a weird look on her face like I did. “I heard it after 60, but it wasn’t like a heartbeat either!”

Mom was officially pronounced to be either dead or heartless at approximately 12:27pm. She is survived by her dear husband and her twelve children, all of whom will enjoy a wonderful birthday dinner (for Anne) and dessert tonight at 6pm. Y’all are invited.

In case you haven’t realized, it’s totally a joke that Mom died; however, it IS true that we couldn’t get a heartbeat from the bloodpressure cuff! I think she needs a new one because she is most definitely alive.

Pictures
There’s a few pictures here of Eric’s birthday, too.

First a picture of Beth with the deer she got this year!

Beth and the “loot shot”

Doesn’t she look pretty?

Eric and the traditional gift from Joe–pot. I mean pop!

My favorite picture of Eric

And last but certainly not least, Joe’s new pickup!

After-Dinner Entertainment
After a good dinner of awesome quesedillas (better than yours, Paul!) and guacamole, everyone was pretty much stuffed (except the ones who have self-control). Eric has this little custom, or…I’m not sure what…of doing jumping jacks when he’s stuffed. Not when he’s full; only when he’s stuffed. There’s a reason: to make everyone else sick! Well, tonight Eric sure enough started doing jumping jacks. Joe got up and to prove he could, started doing jumping jacks, too. Eric, by the way, had five or six quesedillas. Joe had three. Ben had six or seven. Dad had three or four.
“Ben, aren’t you going to prove yourself get up and do jumping jacks?” Dad asked.
“No, but I’ll prove myself another way–I’ll pick you up!” Ben said to Dad, then started taking a drink.
“No! You know what happens when you squeeze toothpaste tubes from the middle??” Dad asked. Everybody burst out laughing, and Ben about choked on his drink!

You know how when an apple rots it is mulch for the ground? Well, is it cannibalism if an apple tree is mulched by its own apples?

10:45 am At the gas station. Ben’s filling his tank and Dad’s filling the gas tanks for the generator. You know this time, only the eight of us are going. (Only. ha!) Mom, Tess, Rase, Jay, Abby, and Elle Jane are at home…that means Dad, Ben, Joe, Eric, Beth, Em, Kate, and I are going. Over half the family, thanks to the twins being two instead of one!
We will definitely get to camp sooner than last time!

12:45 pm Almost to the forest…hope nobody has our spot!

1:00 pm At what will be our camp…someone WAS at our spot! Gonna scout a bit around camp to see where to park the trailers.

1:43 pm Settin’ up camp! Just got the girls’ dorm all backed in. Us girls took a walk. Beth and Em kinda left, so Kate and I found marshmallow sticks. We went back to camp, then after Beth and Em came back, the twins and Beth went looking for sticks for Em and Beth, and I amused myself by picking sap from trees to put in the fire, when we have one. What got me going was when we were walking I found a chunk of sap.
This is a nice spot…a little harder to get the campers in and out of, but it’s further off the road and mostly shaded by trees.
My eyes are so tired.

2:25 pm The twins and I found sap for a while. They’re leveling the boys’ dorm now.
Earlier on our walk I got mud on my jeans cuz there was a marshy area, and we tried to step through it (most of us didn’t have our boots on yet, just our shoes) on the humps, but then some of the “humps” sunk! So we ran through frantically…and splashed mud everywhere!

It’s cold out there! Busy, too. There’s a pickup parked, and I saw two pickups drive by and two four-wheelers! We saw three four-wheelers pass earlier, too!

The people in “our” camping spot are in an RV, not a trailer. What I wonder is where are they going to put their deer when they get them?

Mmm, I smell chocolate, Beth’s in here (the van) eating candy. I want some too but I think I’ll wait a bit.

3:55 pm We were going to have hamburgers for dinner but evidently we forgot the hamburger patties!!! Darn!! So we’re having pancakes instead, which was Dad’s choice anyways. So Dad’s cooking pancakes. The boys started a fire, it’s nice. Joe got some logs for benches to put by it, and they chopped a little firewood too.

5:05 pm Playing go-fish. Done with dinner. Dad took a walk and hasn’t been back. Sap didn’t make the fire pop! :(

6:30 pm Playing Idiot’s Poker! Dad finally did come back and started the furnace and generator…warmth!! Waiting for the coffee to be done. Idiot’s Poker is fun!

7:49 pm I was winning at Idiot’s Poker but I quit…Dad’s reading a Pat McManus story. Yay! Wish there were cookies!! I’ve got Joe’s hat on, backwards, because originally I put my cards in my glasses, kind of like an eye patch, but Joe started videotaping so I quit! I didn’t want to do it again so Joe let me use his hat since he wasn’t playing.

8:40 pm Dad finished three our four Pat McManus stories, and a chapter or two of the Bible. Now we’re making beds. Tess isn’t there and Em sleeps on the floor so it’s just three of us on this bed.

8:53 pm Beds are made…lights out soon!

Sunday
5:33 am Morning comes too quickly!! The furnace went off in the night, and I almost put on my second blanket, but didn’t. Dad turned the generator on this morning. We’re gonna put the bed away so I’ll go for now.

6:46 am Shootin’ light in 9 minutes. I’m at my sit now; Ben just dropped me off. I’m just over the hill from our old camping spot, looking at the river. I forgot my notebook!!! I keep a pad and pen in my suit coat’s inside pocket though. Good idea, eh? I think I should keep an extra notebook in my backpack, too!
Well, I don’t think I’ll get cold anytime soon. I’ve got on three shirts (t-shirt, turtleneck, sweatshirt) and two coats, plus jeans, suit pants, a nice fluffy scarf, wool socks, nice boots, and of course my dorky hat. Before I left this morning, Dad said I looked so stylish he took a picture of me with his phone!

9:00 am I just got a deer. Gonna dress it out & go back to camp then explain.

12:00 pm At camp now. Got back to camp at about 10:30 or so. Let’s see if I can finish this before we go road-hunting.

At 8:15 Joe came up and said he saw three muley does. He doesn’t have his A tag anymore since he got a buck last time, so he couldn’t get them. (In the area we go, A tags are either species either sex, B tags are whitetail does only.) He also saw a whitetail buck, a spike, and thought about shooting it but didn’t know if the spikes were under 4″, so he didn’t risk it. He left his spot and walked to Eric’s (he was just up the road from Eric) and told Eric to walk along the top of the hill behind him. I was on the other side of the river from Eric, so Joe told me to walk along the edge of the Big Meadow. I didn’t really want to walk but I actually was getting kind of cold (it was warmer, then colder, then warmer again…the air, I mean) so I did get up. I was wearing way too much clothes for walking, so I rested sometimes so I wouldn’t get too hot. Then I finally decided to just take my junk off and carry it, so I just plopped down. I took off both coats and put the purple one (one Grammoo gave me a few years ago…like five years…bad thing about not growing is you wear the same stuff forever!) around my waist, tied, you know? Then before I put my suit coat on I felt the need for some chapstick, so I dug into the inside pocket of my suit coat, where my pad and pen were kept, and started putting some one. As soon as I started, I looked up…and saw deer! They didn’t see me (a mama and a baby) so I finished, put the chapstick away (hey, why stop in the middle?) and picked up my gun. They still didn’t see me, or even hear me! I sighted on the front shoulder of the mama, and yelled “Hey there!” to make her stop. She stopped for all of two seconds, totally too short, and started walking again. I yelled “Hey there! Stop!” They stopped and looked at me…and I shot. The doe I shot at dropped and started waving her legs in the air! The baby took off running. The doe quit kicking, then I saw one jump up and start running. At first I thought it was my doe, and I thought “OH no! I know I got her, and she just jumped up??” But I looked and did see the doe on the ground.

I left my stuff and went over to her. She wiggled her legs and head a bit so I thought she was alive still, so I got out my revolver and eared the hammer back (any Louis L’Amour aficionados knows that’s how it’s done–eared back, not pulled) and touched her eyeball with the muzzle of my rifle (yuck!). She didn’t blink, so I knew she was dead. I spun the cylinder on my revolver (Jack Robinson, remember) until the hammer was on an empty chamber. I went and fetched my things, then laid out what I needed (I’m very methodical about this): knife, black tape, gloves, and dragger thingy (a length of parachute cord with a stick on each end). I had just finished tagging her when I saw Joe coming down the road towards me. I waved at him, then attacked the doe with my knife. Well…not quite! Oh, I forgot, I also put my gloves on, before “attacking” the deer. Mom had bought these fakey latex gloves for us.
Joe came when I’d cut all the skin down. Buck is a good knife, let me tell you! Joe videoed me telling my story and helped by cutting the ribs and holding her up to drain the blood when I was done. The gloves worked fairly well, only the middle finger of my left hand was bloody! I guess the glove leaked.

We saw Dad and a twin wayyyyyy far away, at the edge of the meadow. Joe waved, then waved his suit. I turned my radio on, and Dad asked, “Does anybody have their radio on?”
I said I did, and I got one, so he said he’d go back to camp and get the van. Joe started dragging the deer to the road, and I was getting our junk when I saw Ben’s pickup, he was early! (It was 9:40 by now.) He drove up, and Joe and he put the deer into the back of the pickup. We loaded our stuff and got in. I started telling my story and had just gotten to the part about the chapstick, when the van came up. We stopped side by side on the road, and told all our stories. I re-told mine, and they thought the part about putting on chapstick was really funny!

We were there for a while, and got back to camp at 10:30, took a picture of me and my deer, then had lunch.

1:45 pm Just got back from making a round around the Loop. Joe and Dad are walking to a meadow Joe found (he didn’t go with us, Joe didn’t) and Ben and Eric went on a walk in the mountains, so it’s just us girls here right now. We were told to make ourselves at home!

2:50 pm Ben and Eric just got back, gonna go out and talk to them.

3:10 pm Joe and Dad came back…talkin’ to them!

Dad said I looked like the Flying Nun, and kept taking pictures of me!

4:21 pm All at our evening sits. Most of us are on the Big Meadow near where we camped last time (our camp now is at the opposite end of the meadow). Beth is at one end, our current camp end; I’m in the middle at the fence, and Dad and the twins are between us. Joe went to the meadow he discovered earlier. Eric went up on the hill behind his Spot, and Ben went somewhere over there too, I think. Probly 10 minutes ago I heard a shot from one of them. Hope they got something!
My eyes are SO tired! I was going to take a nap, but when I’d finished writing earlier and laid down, Dad and Joe came! Kinda hope we get an early bedtime! Dark is at 4:40 so we can’t shoot after 5:10.

5:56 pm Camp; just finished dinner (raviolis). I saw nothing. Nobody but Ben and Eric saw any. The ones Eric saw were being chased by dogs and a jogger lady was yelling at them to stop! (They were her dogs, obviously!) The one Ben saw was a little one–and he got it! We’re teasing him so much about getting two little deer in one year!

Warming our feet by the fire!

8:15 pm I’m SO tired, I think I did fall asleep a couple times when Dad was reading Pat McManus! Soon as Beth comes back in (she’s helping Ben get his backstraps, I think) we’ll make the bed. Oh, I guess she just came in.

Monday
6:03 am Everybody’s eating breakfast except me. I like taking my breakfast (usually Egg McMuffins) with me! It’s COLD! Talk about fine and pleasant miseries…the furnace quit so Dad was trying to get the temp UP to 50º, which was the lowest temp on the thermometer! (“Fine and pleasant miseries” are from a Pat McManus story.) I put my second blanket on, but it was sideways, so it didn’t do too much good! Well we’ll go out soon…I’m not forgetting my notebook this time!

7:00 am Shootin’ light was three minutes ago but it’s so foggy I can hardly see a thing! Usually two things get cold on me first: rear end and hands. Dad suggested I get these hand warmer things we have and put one in each back pocket. If I get cold enough, I will!

11:30 am About to have lunch here…they’re all making their hamburgers (we did find the hamburgers…but we forgot the chicken patties!!!). At 10 we were picked up by the van.
At 9:30, Eric almost passed me on the road, but I yelled to him and he came up the hill and sat with me for a few minutes. It was so foggy we could hardly see the road!

My doe and Ben’s “bambi” in the tree. Foggy out, ain’t it? Mine is the one on the left; Ben’s is the one on the right. When he went to take it down to tie it on the “stringer” after he got his doe (he’d just hooked the hock over a bit of tree limb sticking out), the little one was stiff like that, with one leg out! Ben set it up on the one hoof and took the front hooves in his hands, and stuck his leg out like the other back leg…like ballet! Joe took a picture, but Joe’s film hasn’t been developed yet.

We started back for camp, a LONG ways away (relatively short, as the crow flies). Where Beth was, we sat with her for a bit, then walked again with her. We saw a tall figure coming from the fog. I thought it looked like Ben, but Ben was supposed to be up in the mountains! So I thought it was Joe, but it really didn’t look like him. When he got up to us, though, it was Ben! He’d walked around up in the mountains and ended up in the meadows down here! We walked–Ben and Eric are speed walkers; Beth walks faster than me too but she was nice and kept me company! Then the van with everybody came, and we went up road-hunting, to Ben’s pickup. Ben and Eric went in there and the rest of us continued in the van (they road-hunted in the opposite direction as us).
It’s snowing a little.

The furnace in here still doesn’t work unless the generator is on, and of course it hasn’t been on all day! I can see my breath in here!

2:25 pm Snowin’ awful hard, won’t write much. After lunch Dad read more Pat McManus then we did a trip around the Loop. At our evening sit now.

Beth, around the time it started to snow

6:37 pm All back at camp. Telling stories. At 4:15 Beth and I started back. I’d seen a deer go across the field almost out of sight, running, so we walked to maybe see it in the valley where it went. It is COLD! We’re deciding how to sleep…in here or in the boys’ hut (as Dad nicknamed it)!

8:45 pm Gonna make beds in a sec…yay! TIRED!

Tuesday
7:10 am On our morning sits. YOU SHOULD SEE THIS SNOW! It’s tremendous, and it’s still snowing! My poor notebook is so wrinkled from snow falling on it! My pen freezes sometimes and has snow on the tip. We actually weren’t cold last night at all! Em slept on the bed with us, as the floor was too cold. Dad left two burners on all night (yes, we had a window cracked–a few of ‘em, actually). Beneath the counter-level, it was pretty cold, but above was warm!

No, the snow isn’t really to Joe’s waist…he was on his knees!

Me with my coffee and notebook in an unposed picture, along with the snow and the deer tree. Dad said I looked like a glamour girl…but that isn’t a purse on my arm, it’s a waterbottle!

Ben’s snowy pickup

The snowy van!

The pretty snowy river

9:23 am I guess I forgot to say how deep the snow is! It’s up to my knees; up to my waist in drifts. I think it’s the most snow I’ve ever seen in one place! Talk about fine and pleasant miseries! I felt like I was in a snow globe cuz it is snowing, I don’t think it’s stopped since it started yesterday!

10:35 am On our way to Red Lodge…gonna refill the propane tanks and I’m not sure what else. Going down the driveway, the van fishtailed a bunch but we did get out! My pen is a bit thawed so it’s writing better. Boys are gettin’ in, I’ll leave off for now.

11:04 am Just in Red Lodge now…stopped to help an old lady…she was going to shovel her whole driveway of the mid calf-deep snow! Ben’s shoveling in front of her mailbox, where the snowplow made the snow deeper. Joe and Eric just put the chains on the van so we can run over her driveway a bunch to get it packed.

1:25 pm Almost back to the forest; the boys are hanging chains. We got some rolls and donuts for lunch in Red Lodge. While Dad and the boys filled the propane tanks, I called Mom.
It’s still snowing up here! Not very hard, but still–!
When we (Dad, the big boys, and I) came out of the store, Dad said “Where’s your cute hat?” (He meant my dorky hat!) He’s been taking a lot of pictures of me, don’t worry.
After we finished helping the lady, Dad had us girls come out to meet her. When we left, she said “I hope you get a thouuuuuusand deer!”

Another Flying Nun pic!

2:15 pm Back at camp, been here for a bit. Gonna go to our sits sometime soon, I imagine. Quit snowing, I think.

5:57 pm Joe says: “Joe just walked in, he filled the pitcher and coffeepot. His little toe is about thawed. Um, and Joe can’t wait for dinner. Joe says he seen two deer 10 feet away from him but he couldn’t shoot one cuz it was a buck.” (The only part he saw of the other one was a flag.)

Back at camp, raviolis are warming for dinner. I had a comfy spot in a snowbank, only my extremities (including my derrière which might qualify as an extremity) were about frozen. I think the reason I didn’t see any deer was because my stomach was growling so loud!
I have to tell you about these raviolis. As I said before, it’s absolutely freezing (literally!) in here. Well, Dad opened the cans of raviolis and put them in the pot and started them warming. After a bit they began to steam, so Dad tasted one, thinking it was warm. It was still cold! Only the raviolis in their can was warmer than the air, so it steamed! When we ate, steam was just rolling off the food…it looked like a bar! So Dad took a pic. Of course, they had to add to the steamy look by blowing air from their mouths!

Left to right: Em, Ben (with the cool blue hat with real rabbit fur…I want one of those, but in orange!), Kate (holding the fork up to her mouth), Eric (with the yellow), Beth, and just a tiny bit of Joe.

8:00 pm All done with dinner; Dad read a few Pat McManus stories. Dinner was raviolis, and very good!
It was COLD out there!! Dad lost his sunglasses!! :(

Wednesday
5:43 am Last full day. We’ll leave after the morning sit tomorrow. Dad (a good temperature-guesser) says it’s probably 10º or lower. Yikes! I think somewhere around 10 is the coldest we’ve been hunting.
Em’s still sleeping on our bed. She’s a bed-hog!

We had interesting camper decorations last night. The air above counter-level was warm; beneath was freezing, as I said before. My socks were kind of damp, my FRESH socks, so I put them through the handle loops of the cupboards. Em hung her suit from the handle thingy for the TV dish or whatever (like we use a TV in here!) and I hung my suit pants from there, too…the cuffs were kind of wet.

6:15 am Eric’s finally in here. Dad jokingly calls him “Sleeping Beauty”!

6:24 am It’s snowing again. Dad said “It can stop now!”
Ben said “You did wish for it!”
“Yeah, but I didn’t wish for it hard!”
“Good thing!”

11:27 am The girls, Dad, and I are in the van, watching the Meadow from the warmth. It’s comfy. We’ve been here for a while. Ben and Eric are gonna go around the Loop the other way. Joe was gonna go down to his spot, not too far from camp.
Ben got one earlier…not a little one this time! (He’s happy!) A doe, a tad smaller than mine. It was just past the beginning of shooting light; he was parked at the fence reading the ads on his can of better-than-WD-40! A bit after he got it he came down to my spot, dropped me off at the fence, then went to the old camp to dress his deer. When he came back by he took me to camp…I had “bidness” and it’s too cold outside. Then I walked back to the fence (from camp to the fence is about half a mile, Joe thinks) and waited until Ben came back by. Then we went to camp and hung out for a bit. Then we came here and the boys went their way.
Dad found his sunglasses!!!!

Ben and his doe!

Hangin’ at camp. That’s the Girls’ Dorm; from where the picture is taken, the boys’ hut is to the left, Ben’s pickup parked behind, and the van was to the right.

The view opposite the last picture! This is from the pallet that served as the Girls’ Dorm step. Left to right: Beth in the chair; Ben; Joe with Kate in front of him; Em, and Eric. The yellow and grayish-white camper is the boys’ dorm.

2:29 pm On the meadow again, in the van, but by the fence where Ben was this morning. All of us are here, except Ben and Eric; they’re doing the Loop; Eric hunting, Ben hunting squirrels. Actually. I think Ben’s going to drop Eric off at his Spot sometime, too. Earlier when we were hangin’ at camp we watched a black-capped chickadee eat fat or something from the hanging deer. It was so cute! (The chickadee, not the fat or the deer!) Quite an active little guy, too! Then we had lunch, and talked a bit.

Oh, while we were on the sits earlier, we watched some weird people who were parked a ways from us. Evidently, the kids had come back to the pickup, but had to wait for the dad who had the key!
Dad’s gonna shoot the does, if we see any…well, just one he’ll shoot! and I’ll shoot any bucks. The twins’ll get one at home, if they can. Beth, too. Joe and Beth are in here to warm up. They’ll go to their stands soon.

5:37 pm Back at camp. Dad’s gonna make the backstrap and potato “victory” dinner.
For the last 45 minutes or so of shooting light we watched a little deer come to probly 50 yards away from us in the van. It pawed the ground with its hooves to get to the stuff to eat. It was cute! Dad debated whether or not to shoot it, but he didn’t shoot it.

6:16 pm Been figuring up how many deer we’ve shot. Dad has 13 so far; me 7; Ben 10; Joe 8; Eric 4; Beth 1.

6:50 pm Dinner was very good! Mayonnaise (for lack of say, Ranch Dressing) is good on cubed herbed potatoes and meat!

8:45 pm Making beds. I fell asleep a couple times when Dad was reading Pat McManus!

Thursday
5:10 am Last day! I misses my people…and my cat! Putting beds away right now.

5:55 am Eating breakfast. We got up early…have an hour and 10 minutes until shooting light.

9:12 am The twins and I are in the van now…with the heaters on! woot!
This morning when we left, this was the plan: Joe and Beth would stay at camp until closer to shooting light, then they’d got to Joe’s stand. Ben was gonna drop Eric off (it’s his birthday today!) at his Spot and do the Loop a few times with the twins .Dad and I were gonna be here in the van, where we sat last night. When Dad tried to pull in, bad things happened. He blew three crosslinks on the chains (truck chains, by the way) and got stuck in the ditch! Ben (and Dad) yanked the van out of the ditch, and found out the left front tire was flat as well! So they yanked it into the ditch parallel to the road so it was out of the way, and Ben and the twins left. Dad and I sat for a long time. He mentioned fixing the chains with wire coat hangers, and I didn’t know if we had any, so I suggested parachute cord. So he fixed the chains with that!
Ben went around the loop once, and came back and told Dad he saw elk sign. He went around again, then dropped the twins off and took Dad to look for elk. I hope they get one or two!!

11:04 am Dad and Ben are back (they picked Erick up, too); they took long cuz they helped a guy–stuck in a ditch and with a flat tire!–get unstuck. The guy said “How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” Dad said. “Ben here’d probably PAY you to let him winch you out!”
Now they’re changing the tire of the van.

1:21 pm Camp is broke; they’re arguing about how to get the Girl’s Dorm out. Then they’ll come back to get the boy’s hut. It’ll be hard; the snow is still deep and Dad has to be careful of his chains so the parachute cord doesn’t break! Ben’s gonna help tow the van.

1:44 pm We’re dropped off at the edge of the forest; Dad and the boys went to get the boys’ hut out.

2:24 pm And we’re off! The girls were trying to decide if they should go in the Girl’s Dorm to get sandwich makings; they were kinda hungry. Kate had just gotten in the camper when the boys drove up! So she jumped down and got back in the van.
The chains on the van worked just great! And it sounds like they didn’t have too much trouble getting the boys’ hut out!

We’re gonna pass through Luther (which has the population of about approximately 100, I think–the other day when we went to Red Lodge it was recess at the school, and there was only about 12 kids!), then get on the highway, go through Red Lodge and go home!

4:57 pm Home!! Eric got one in the backyard…story later. At the top of the driveway now waiting for Joe and Eric to come back. Story later!!

Alright! Story! Thursday ended up being the most exciting day. Or at least the most eventful! When we were passing through Laurel, Mom called and said there was a 3×4 buck in the backyard! The deer had been eating out of the garden! Well, when we were just on our road, Dad called Mom again and asked if the deer were still there; she said yeah. Since it was Eric’s birthday, we decided he got to shoot the buck! So when we got to the top of the driveway, we all stopped. Joe and Eric went down the driveway slowly (Joe to video, Eric to shoot). Dad and I could see the buck from the road, a little bit down the gully, but Eric didn’t see him yet. Finally he did! And he shot. We saw the buck drop. I’m not sure what Eric was thinking…there was also a doe, and maybe he thought he’d missed the buck and it walked away, cuz he took a shot at the doe! (Hit it in the guts, too…yuck!!) The doe walked away and bedded down.
Eric and Joe went and saw that indeed he had gotten the buck, with the first shot! I called Eric’s phone and he told us he’d gotten it. Dad had me tell him to come up, so we could take the homecoming video! Afterwards Eric could go get it. So they came up, and Joe videoed us saying hi and babbling and stuff with the home folks.
Dad had brought my rifle in (I’d kept it in the front seat with me), cuz there was that doe out there still! We could see it from the deck! So we all trooped outside; Joe stayed on the deck to video.
We went over to the edge of the house; I went on to the garden. Dad told me to steady on a fencepost and shoot her in the neck, but the wind was blowing too hard, I wasn’t steady enough. The doe wasn’t moving, so I walked further, knelt, and shot. I forgot to shoot her in the neck, too, I aimed at the front shoulder like normal. I think I missed–Joe said in the video he saw a puff of snow so I guess it went over her back or something–but she got up and started walking around weird…backwards, no less! I went forward more, and knelt again, resting my muzzle on the chicken wire (makes a dandy rest!). I shot her in the front shoulder. She dropped. Everybody came trooping up; Ben handed me my revolver.
“I picked this up for you,” he said.
I thanked him, and we went up to the doe. We thought she was dead…but when Dad touched her eyeball she blinked!! So I took out my handy-dandy revolver, and eared the hammer back.
“Right behind the head,” Ben said.
“Right here?”
“Yeah.”
I squeezed the trigger (you never pull triggers, you squeeze them…as Dad says, probly from Louis L’Amour, “Squeeze a trigger like you’d squeeze a girl’s hand”…in other words, gently!). Click. What a dud! I forgot I’d left the safety on! Repeat the hammer process, repeat the “here?”, this time it shot. And she was dead.

Joe and Ben dragged her closer to the house, then Joe dragged her to the telephone pole near the driveway, and I went to town while Ben and Eric worked on getting Eric’s buck out of the gully. (They ended up winching him out!) Then Eric dragged it over by me; I was about done when he was starting. Oh yeah, I’ve gotta give Joe the credit for holding the flashlight for me!

When I was done Ben dragged my deer under the yard light then pointed his pickup’s headlights at it so Dad could get a picture. When Eric was done, his buck was dragged under the light to get a picture, too!

Me, my doe, and my purple coat

Eric and his Birthday Buck!

The end!

P.S. Pi missed me, too! Mom said they hardly saw her while I was gone. Pi slept with me in my bed, and hardly stopped purring all night, she was so happy to have me back! Don’tcha wish you had a cat like that?

This post was brought to you by the awesomely coolest computer George Bonswah Beethoven, who is VERY glad Anne came back before he died of boredom.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13:11

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