Or at least that is the story she tells.
Louise kicked off today's mushroom-hunting adventure by telling us of her dream last night: while we were out hunting mushrooms (and eating miniature-sized pineapples), she found a chipmunk who she attempted to befriend and name. Instead, she was savaged by said chipmunk.
The joke of the day quickly became anything and everything chipmunk related. Any strange sound, odd track, or random occurrence was the chipmunk's doing. Naturally, the chipmunk quickly developed a rabies affliction.
In the first location that we stopped to go a'huntin', we were all within visual range of one another for most of the time, but then suddenly, the Baroness was simply gone. She was nowhere in sight and stopped responding to vocal calls. Louise and I were turning up nothing in the way of fungus except for the lovely poisonous mushrooms. Louise was rather bang-on at finding skulls as well; she chalked up two deer and an elk. Finally we decided it was Beer:30 and trekked back to the car. Mind you, the Baroness is still missing at this point. We wandered the woods near the car, calling for the Baroness, looking for mushrooms, and finding nothing more interesting than an abundance of young fiddlehead fern tops (yummy!). We even took to periodically honking the horn, all to no avail. Ultimately we decided that it was time to continue on to our destination a bit further down the trail, so we laid a huge arrow made of tree trunks in the parking clearing and inscribed the Baroness's name in the dirt above it. There was no missing that map.
Unless the chipmunk decided to rearrange things.
No more than 50 yards down the "road", twenty feet into the woods, what do my little eyes spy, but the Baroness. She was in quite a state, running with sweat, scratched, dirty, her shoe laces untied and wrapped around her ankles a few times, clutching to her knife and her punctured bag, containing six lonely morels. The explanation, of course, was that she had been attacked by a chipmunk. She claims not to have heard any of our attention-attracting noises, but did say that at one point she heard someone yell, "Whiskey," and replied, "Water!" That, too, was attributed to the chipmunk.
At our second hunting location we finally hit the morel jackpot.
Lovely, happy clumps of morels - hidden from the campers who couldn't be bothered to step three feet off the service road into the scary woods.
Once we exhausted our mushroom hunting mojo, we parked ourselves on a cliff edge and threw rocks for Chai, who was madly swimming along in the river. She swam for a steady hour before she decided that it was time to come back to shore. The only bit of excitement there came when the Baroness reached a bit too far over the cliff for a rock and nearly went ass over elbow down the sheer face and into the river. Fortunately Louise grabbed the Baroness's bra strap, I grabbed her belt, and we hauled her back for all we were worth.
During the excitement, the chipmunk ran around and dropped bits of nature into our beers.
Louise and I couldn't decide which fate was worse: returning to the Wayside missing the Baroness because a) she wandered off in the woods, or b) she toppled over a cliff into the river. There just wouldn't be a way to explain either situation. Louise kept remembering how her family use to put a goat bell on her deaf grandmother when they went out picking huckleberries.
Unfortunately, the chipmunk was hoarding all of the available goat bells today.
No comments:
Post a Comment