Saturday Stories. #20

Hello everyone and Happy Saturday! It is a beautiful day, wonderful, clear blue sky so the sun can shine unhindered. Sunny days like this are few and far between this year, therefore it is exciting when we do get such a day. It was a day like this, years ago, that a young woman, Cathy, from the southern part of our province, was up here camping in one of our campgrounds.

She had called me ahead of time to make sure we could spend some time together. She was here the year before and spent time with me looking for owls. She would like to do that again, plus hopefully find some other birds that she has not seen before. Bird watching was a serious hobby for her, as it was for me. We both liked to participate in bird studies and as a result, we both would end up doing crazy things sometimes to find birds we had not seen before.

Her goal was to see as many different species of birds within our province of Ontario as she could. Which is why she came to the northern part of the province to find birds they don’t have down south. I had picked out a spot where we should be able to find most of the birds on her list and maybe even all of them. It will require hiking in to a certain spot which will take up a few hours of time, then we would stay a couple of days and hike back out on day 4.

So we would be gone 4 days and 3 nights. We did our food shopping the day before we left. She provided the tent and some other items. I didn’t have much in the way of camping supplies at that time since I had basically given up camping by then since no one I knew at the time liked camping. Very strange really. She took over packing things into our backpacks, something she was amazingly good at, making sure that both weighed approximately the same.

I offered to carry more weight in mine but she said that would not be fair. “I keep myself in good shape,” she said. “I can’t deny that,” I replied. She laughed. “That is not what I meant,” she said. I was going to bring my tent too, but she said no to that. “That is just unnecessary stuff,” she informed me, “you never carry unnecessary items when hiking or camping. Besides, my tent is plenty big enough for 2 people.”

I learned quickly not to argue with her about certain things, I would lose anyway, so there was no point. Off we went to a place where I could safely park my car, then we began our hike. Our destination would be a nice lake away from people, something that is good if we want to see a lot of wildlife. And we certainly did see, and hear, a lot. The hike in to this lake was easy going, mostly across nice granite rock and under tall pines.

There were no mosquitoes on the way in, but there certainly were a lot of deer flies. They are very pesty critters that aim for the back of the head and neck where it is harder to get at them. They seemed to bother me more than Cathy. As we were nearing the lake we spotted a doe and her twin fawns. Cathy was overjoyed to see them so close to us. Soon, after 6 hours, we were at our destination.

There was a beautiful, soft sandy beach on the other side of the lake, so we decided that would be a nicer place to camp. And it was a great spot too. I cleared out a nice spot where we could have a bonfire later, then went and gathered wood for it. Cathy set up the tent while I was doing that. After our campsite was ready we went out to look around the area a bit…

Well, I will stop there for now, but more to this story is coming our way in part 2. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2024 Steve McLeod.