It was a busy day yesterday, up early to get the donuts for donut day, bowled in am and pm, then Canada day dinner with all the Canadian visitors ( well many of them), there was a hundred and five of us. bC was the best represented. We watched a movie when we got home.
The weather is warmer, didn't have to have heat on over night.
When I get on the laptop Ill see if I can find a story to start reposting.

an hour later: On the lap top. I was hoping I had my distannt ancestor's story about pioneering in the 1880's stored on here but no - so I will reproduce in serial format my story "Eagles Tail". I suppose in a way that it could be in the same classification as my beaver legend. Here's the start.

AN EAGLE’S TALE

 

 

Prologue – This tale, this history starts in the not so distant past, in human terms about the year 1100.  The location is on  a part of the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island.

The shoreline was much different than it is today, the rock which now from land has a good likeness to that of a turtle was not a separate small island but was connected by a bridge of stone and sand to the main shore.   The slope of the mountain behind extended to the very edge of the water and supported a thick canopy of west coast forest, similar to the first growth stands that Europeans first saw as they arrived some 600 years later.

But something happened in that earlier time, the mountain shivered, shifted and the surface was contorted and moved as a giant slide of earth, stone and trees moved down and over the subsurface of the mountain and out into the waters of the sound.  The once wide channel that separated the steep shoreline from the small islands was filled with earth and mud and clay all mixed with tons and tons of the giant trees that only a day before had stood with their roots in the same earth, mud and clay.

The steep slope from the shoreline was gone, the rock that resembled a turtle was no longer visible, and the once deep channel was filled and clogged with debris.  Days, weeks, months passed, the tides still rose and fell, sea breezes and wind storms came and went and gradually many trees came to the surface and washed away, much of the soil was also carried away and deposited across the bottom of the entire sound.  The shoreline was reshaped, beaches slowly emerged where no beach had been, the Turtle re-emerged but now with a tiny channel between it and the main shore at high tide.  The months became a year and alder trees, willows and salmon berry bush, the “nurse” crop, began to appear over what had appeared to be barren land. These would provide the soil and nutrients for the spruce, cedar, fir, hemlock and other species that soon would follow.

 

Chapter 1.

 

My name is Hon’ga and this is the tale of the land beneath my ancestor’s wings.  It is our story, it tells what we have seen and what has happened to this place that we have made our home for 700 years.

In the beginning, as young adults, searching for a home, my many time’s great grandparents came over the waters from the east and discovered this shoreline and the forest upon it.  It was here that a giant spruce grew among lesser giants and these ancestors of mine realized that this giant would be their home and the home of all future generations of their strongest fledgling.  They constructed a nest high in this forest giant. Not so high as to be threatened by the storms that blew from the west, the south and the east, but high enough to be above the tops of those trees towards the ocean and to be protected from the direction of the fiercest winds that came from the west.  We are eaters of fish; our vantage point must allow us the expanse of ocean, which provides us our harvest.  And so it was.

The years passed, my ancestors observed other harvesters of many sorts, some were scavengers, some were hunters, some were feathered cousins others were animals denied the freedom of flight but enjoyed the ability to swim as the fish swam.   Others were doomed to rely on canoes for mobility and nets and spears for talons and to compete with lesser animals for prey that could not flee or fight back.  Eagles do not have a name for these animals, but you call them man.

But there was harmony, each cousin, each specie went about their days, hunting and obtaining food in the ways they could do it best.

As time passed my ancestral family grew larger, more nests were built and a colony was formed along our shores, however, in time there was not enough space and food to support all. Later generations moved on to new localities, only to return in the fall to gather at the rivers where the salmon gathered and in the spring to the shore areas where the herring spawned.

These first ancestors eventually died and the occupation of our aerie was passed on. And the years passed.