Would you like some cheese with that whine?

After saying farewell to James for the week, I hopped on my ATV to ride to the North Rim blind. My hours in the blind were not the most pleasant ever. It was cramped and cold; there weren’t enough hooks on which to hang things, and the floor was viscous mud that seemed intent to drag me feet-first into its depths; the chair sat too low relative to the scope, so I had to remain perched on the edge, back arched, to view the proceedings of the day. Unlike the blind at Hopper, this one was not insulated against the wind or the rain. By the time I left, my toes felt like a block of ice and I couldn’t move my fingers. I had to push on the ATV’s accelerator with my wrist because I couldn’t make my thumb work.

When I miraculously made it back to the house, I had such a cup of hot chocolate.

I left the house once more just after it had started raining to check in with the flight pen birds. I spent the rest of that afternoon slightly less cold in the blind there.

Later:

I started a crappy movie that was left at the house. I was just finishing dinner when Geoff called and told me I should go change the water in the flight pen. Ok. I’ve done this. Granted, I haven’t done this alone, but that shouldn’t be a problem.

This task couldn’t have gone worse unless the birds had actually escaped.

Let’s see: I couldn’t get the tap on the Water Buffalo to turn on, I couldn’t get the bolt on the flight pen door to budge for a good five minutes, I forgot to collect the old carcasses littering the bottom of the enclosure, and then, horror of horrors, I couldn’t get the door to close again. That was the worst, not only because I COULDN’T GET THE DOOR TO CLOSE but there was a powerfully gusty wind blowing and I had visions of showing up in the morning to an empty flight pen, the door open and swinging in the breeze; visions of tendering my resignation—dismissed, rejected, publicly humiliated. It was more than I could bear, and at one point I totally lost my cool (what cool I ever had to begin with). I scraped my finger, popped the bones in my thumb, pulled a muscle in my side trying anything to get that goddamn bolt into its socket. When I finally decided it was good enough, it was a good fifteen minutes later, and I’d worked up a sweat in spite of the cool and blustery night air. I went to bed that night, still unsure what I would (or wouldn’t) find in the morning.

*

That night, riding the four-wheeler through the dark on my way to the flight pen, I caught a ghostly flash of the downy white underbelly and wings of a barn owl. David Bowie, is that you?