13C Sun
The dry weather continues even though the days are cooler. Bowled in the morning yesterday, then bottled wine and then a quick trip into Victoria.
I feel that I should make a comment on how sudden acts of generosity can be overwhelming but when one becomes overwhelmed it is difficult to express what you feel. So you end up in a bit of a conundrum.  Then the other side of giving is that the act of giving/sharing is perhaps the most important and when one realizes that the emotion is even more overwhelming.
Few people will understand the paragraph above, that's okay because it  not meant to be understood by everyone.

He grinned, ‘I bet it’s the Liard, it has to be it’s too big to be anything else.’

  He sat, his feet dangling over the edge and stared down into the mist rising from the cascading water.  He looked off to his right to the west, in the distance he could see the water spewing out of a walled canyon, roaring its triumph as it escaped from the restricting walls.  He sat there; the first time in days that he felt inclined to enjoy the sight of one of nature’s offerings.  Looking down then across, he said, “Well Nat my boy, you sure won’t be crossing here, makes the decision easy.”  He wiggled back from the edge, got to his feet and started walking east and parallel to the river below.

  He had only gone a few hundred yards when he heard the first peel of thunder.  It was barely discernible over the roar coming from below, ‘good it’s still some distance away, but I bet it’s coming this way.’

  He found he was following a game trail, ‘Whitey or his friends I wonder?’  He was only half joking.

  The bank he was on stayed well above the river so consequently the trail stayed fairly level, thunder kept rolling across the sky and when he stopped and looked back he could see flashes of lightning in the distance.

  There was no sun so he couldn’t estimate the time of day, he didn’t think he had been walking more than two or three hours since he had eaten.  Shrugging to himself he thought, ‘doesn’t matter how far, I’m sure that’s the Liard and what I have to do is get down of this hump and find some place to set up for the night, it’s sure as hell’s going to rain’.

  The terrain changed again and started sloping in the direction he was going, in a relatively short time he found himself only a few feet above the river bed, and on flat ground once more.  Cottonwood and spruce intermingled, several times he scared up grouse, both willow and spruce; rabbit runs were plentiful.  He stayed close to the bank still following the game trail although others joined or left it every so often.  The trees got larger and larger and before long he was wending his way past spruce trees two hundred feet tall and over two feet in diameter.  The cottonwoods although shorter were even larger in diameter.  The clouds got thicker and as the sky got darker a threatening gloom settled around him.  The trail suddenly angled closer to the edge of the bank and as Nat looked out and over the bank he almost walked by where two of the large spruce had at sometime fallen together.  Their trunks were elevated from the ground, held up by the mass of roots, a snug looking shelter was readymade.  He unloaded his pack and pulled out the square of plastic and using rope and snare wire quickly improved the shelter so that it would be relatively dry.  As he was arranging everything for the evening and night, he stopped ‘the matches, I have to protect them!’  He opened the roll of oilcloth around the flares and wrapped the matches in with the flares.

  There was a bright flash just up the hill behind him followed immediately by a deafening crack of thunder.  ‘Just in time’ he thought. 

  He scrambled out from under the shelter and started gathering any dry wood he could find.  The fallen trees provided an abundance of dead limbs and he soon had a sizeable stack piled just under the edge of his shelter.  He then scraped pitch from the trunks of the two windfalls and carefully piled it on his pack.  Then taking the quart can and staying on the moose trail followed along picking cranberries.  They were more abundant than anywhere he had been and very soon the can was full.  Twice more he scared up small flocks of grouse.

  He returned to his shelter as another flash of lightning and boom of thunder assailed his eyes and ears.  Once underneath he gathered the globs of pitch and taking out his knife shaved off thin pieces of kindling wood from one of the branches.  Just out side of the edge of the shelter he arranged the wood shavings, sprinkled on some pitch and as before sprinkled on some kerosene.  He repeated the process of the night before with the third of his matches and was once again rewarded by a spark and an instant flare of fire.  He carefully fed the fire slowly until he was satisfied it would continue to burn as long as it was provided with fuel.

  He took out his snares from the day before and reset them a short distance away from his shelter.  Then gathering more fuel, weaved a wavering circle back to his camp and the fire.  He stretched out on the bed he had prepared and settled down to eat more cold rabbit and berries.  Before long he started sinking into sleep, so forced himself to rise and stoke up the fire then settled back again.  He still had a few of the small mushrooms, but now realizing that they  were something more than a sleeping aid decided against eating any that night and very soon fell into a dreamless sleep.