May 29th

11C Cloudy
I believe the weather will improve as the day wears on - well I hope so.
Just a repeat for the benefit of new viewers that because each day the current day is first (on top) that to read a story sequentially you must scroll down to the beginning then work your way back. I could resolev this by posting each story in its entirety but the idea of making a mini serial suits me better.

Here is the next part of COW-INCIDENCE.

Now for the cow-incidence.

In 1971 my family and I moved to the town of Quesnel just before Christmas.

The following summer I decided to take the boys on a camping and fishing trip south west of town. I had found this little creek in my work travels and thought it would be a great stream for small trout.

I loaded up our car with the necessary gear and away we went.

Andy had just turned sixteen, Steve was fourteen, Jim twelve and Alan four. Our destination was about thirty miles out of town and was situated near a stand of poplars and a range land area of grass and scattered dead trees. The local ranchers burned it off every couple of years. The small creek exited out of the poplar grove and one of the ranchers had made a small log dam to create a bit of a reservoir for the cows as the summer progressed. The fish in this case were mainly above the dam, but further down the creek were pools every few hundred yards and trout up to twelve inches could be found.

We caught a few right off the bat, but as this was supposed to be a learning expedition as well as a fun thing, we quit early and set up the tent a dozen yards from the dam. The Cariboo area in the summer can be really bad for biting insects, so we gathered a few boughs from some of the spruce growing under the poplars then much to the kid’s amazement I got them gathering dried cow dung. “You’ll see.” I said. “When the sun goes down we’ll have mosquitoes and no-see-ums and the smoke will help keep them away.”

Sure enough after a wiener roast and marshmallow supper the bugs started to arrive. The smoky smell of the spruce  needles and dung was actually quite pleasant and it did help keep the bugs at bay. When we finally crawled into our sleeping bags it was still fairly light out but in short order all five of us were a sleep.

I woke up around midnight, first to the bawling of cattle, then to our tent half collapsing as some of the ropes were torn from their wooden pegs. The kids started yelling and I jumped out of bed and rushed outside. Milling around us was a herd of about twenty range cattle that had come to water up. These cattle unlike barnyard cows, spooked easily, and in short order I had driven them off. I stoked up the fire with some dry wood so there was more flames than smoke, I sat out and watched for a bit then went back to bed. The kids were already back to sleep. I remember as I was dozing off that somehow the experience was familiar, a déjà vu thing, but at the moment I didn’t make a connection with anything else. That came a long time later.

Any way that’s my cow-incidence, two separate instances some thirty-two years apart, but so much alike. I wonder if the happening of the first somehow influenced the happening of the second or was it simply coincidence?