Photo Phriday: Commensal

She hops up onto the back deck -- three steps up -- nearly every night, and stations herself by the glass door. There she picks off the bugs that hit the window and drop. I leave a light on in the kitchen for her, and try to remember to close the door so that she has maximum dinner-collection area, and also so I don't step in toad shit in the kitchen.

I bring her stinkbugs and Junebugs -- but never fireflies -- and she now hops towards me when she sees me coming out.

She's the only being I've ever seen who will eat a second stink bug.

The dogs have been lounging on the deck late nights in the heat. They politely give her a couple feet of space near the door, and she pays them no mind.

Everyone should have a porch toad.

Photo Good Phriday: Eoster Greetings

This weekend we will search the farm for hidden nests of eggs, and the leporaria for more nests of new rabbits.

We will eat flesh and candy and drink wine.

There will be fire.

There will likely be some new additions to our herds and flocks.

The pear tree will burst into flower.

Nothing to see here. No Goddess arising. Move along, return to your churches, have a cracker, and feel sorry for all the sins you've done while all around you Nature is flowering, fucking, hatching, kindling, kidding and generally bursting forth without apologies, restraint, or any sense of decency. Remind yourself relentlessly that it's a Very Solemn Father and Son thing. No Girls Allowed.

I feel compassion around now for browbeaten "Christians" who work so hard to avoid being Pagan that they forbid themselves to be Human.

But She is there for you, anyway.

Rural Gods III: The Empire of Bubbahotep

The Emperor Bubba-Hotep

His historic empire* stretched from Maryland to Missouri. Some say it still does.

He and his sons and brothers and nephew-sons and cousin-daughters took to their legions of gravesites and sacred groves an assortment and volume of grave goods and offerings seen nowhere else.

Any attempt to sink a fence post, trench an asparagus bed, bury an ex-sheep, cut firewood, clear brush or delve an ancient manure pile becomes an archaeological investigation nearly guaranteed to be stopped dead by Bubba-Hotep's barely-submerged treasures. Every ravine of Appalachia is replete with his sacred tithes, the mystical middens into which sacrifices were tipped in the conviction that they'd "go away" if dumped "down the crick."

His artifacts are glass shards, bedsprings, steel roofing, mysterious and shapeless chunks of corroded sheet metal, ominous and rusted steel drums, bricks, shingles, angle-iron and machine parts, whole implements, rotting timbers, blasted fragments of clay pigeons, cat skeletons, tractor tires, broken cinder blocks, the occasional near-complete vehicle, and wire.

Fence wire -- smooth, barbed, woven, welded -- was the signature medium of his court craftsmen. Embedded in tree trunks, sagging from tree to post to ground, stretched at tripwire height through the woods, heaped and tangled amid the brambles and vines at the edge of pastures waiting to ensnare any mower deck or horse's hoof that dares profane the sacred site.

Our farm woodlot is privileged to host an especially hallowed monument, the Convertible of Bubba-Hotep's Favorite Nephew.

Teams make new discoveries every day; most recently, a wire hoard that rivals the Sutton Hoo treasure.

Being the third in a series of revelations concerning the powerful deities who govern rural life. Iconography by the inimitable Kelly Bahmer-Brouse.

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* Many thanks to Friend o' the Blog Linda Kaim for introducing us to the Empire of Bubba-Hotep and its artifacts.

Eclipse

I had thought that I'd be posting amateur photographs of the solstice eclipse yesterday.

Skies were winter-clarified and bright, and the news was abuzz about the blood-red moon that we could expect. I researched photography sites for hints on using my modest digital camera, got out the tripod, and played with the controls. Had some normally verboten dinnertime caffeine, and stayed up.

At midnight the moon burned cold and high, sharp-edged and brilliant. The landscape glowed back. I could read by the light.

By two, the shroud of clouds was so thick that I could not find the moon at all -- premature eclipsulation.

Sunday night I'd been possessed by the urgent thought that it was time for the last of the excess cockerels to convert -- convert from hen-harassing freeloading loud-mouthed date-rapists into coq a vin and mole. I'd caged them up then, and spent Monday afternoon killing, plucking, and butchering them. I am prone to procrastinate those chores that require me to kill someone, and this task goes faster if PC is here to help, so this positive urgency was curious. It just seemed as if it needed to get done now.

Much like the wood-splitting that calls me out back nearly every day while the light fades. As the stacked cordwood piles up, I feel a little less nervous urgency in my bowels.

I was not born a medieval peasant or stone-age pastoralist; winter has not meant especial hunger and risk for me. But somewhere in the last 10,000 years of re-twisting DNA, there must be a gene that, triggered in the proper context, tells me: Cold out, meat will keep, you can't afford to feed that guy all winter, now is the time.

So at Yule we celebrate with fire and flesh.

Barn chores kept me busy yesterday, and it was coming on 6:30 when I remembered the bowl of rooster heads and innards chilling on the porch.

The dogs get the necks, gizzards, feet, hearts, lungs, enormous testicles, and livers. But the heads and guts are the portion of the other canids, the family of red fox who den in the hollow log at the far east end of our south pasture.

The fox stump is a perhaps fifty feet from their favorite lookout spot. Because generations of lazy farmers have nailed their fence wire to the trunks of trees, any tree that expires near the pasture edges must be cut at least chest-high, leaving a tall stump. The fox stump is too tall for my dogs to steal the foxes' tithe. As the tree's formerly living layers rot away, nails and staples and bits of wire appear on the pasture-facing side, as if exposed by rain on stone.

I've been bringing the slaughter remnants and the occasional naturally-expired bird to the stump since we got our poultry. I've never lost a bird to a fox. It's a contract enforced by Moe's diligent patrols and the block walls of the barn. But still, the foxes have been good neighbors. Polite. Deferential. Their tracks in the snow take a hard turn when they encounter the tracks that record Moe's perimeter -- the canids have an ongoing and subtle conversation, though I doubt they have often seen one another. For a dog or fox, scent is thought and intention distilled in time. Moe's perimeter, and Rosie and Cole's profane late-night call-and-response sessions, are no doubt what keeps the local coyotes at arm's length -- and whatever pushes the coyotes away is good for the foxes.

So the dogs and I walked out to the end of the pasture and left an offering feast on the fox stump at just about the moment of the solstice. We had the moon and sky back; I had not even brought a headlamp, whose beam shuts out the world. As we neared the house and barn, warm lights making embers of each window, I felt the great horned owl.

One never hears an owl, unless the owl intends.

I turned just as she landed on the top of the big hemlock that guards the outside curve of the lane. The dogs felt her too; they rushed the tree -- but silently -- and must have been circling its trunk under the dark cave of its branches.

The owl said nothing, just made a silhouette. I watched her for several minutes. But goats were yelling in their stalls about dinner.

When I came out of the barn ten minutes later, she had silently dissolved.

In the small hours this morning, Rosie stood at the bedroom window and growled profane threats under her breath.

This happens from time to time; usually I can make out nothing in the darkness. I believe her, but in winter, with all our creatures locked in after dark, the night belongs to the wild things.

This time, moon blazing once again and snowy world glowing, I could see the owl, posted on top of a defunct utility pole a hundred feet from the front door. She was scanning the garden, hayfield, and stone retaining wall for prospects of her own Yule meat feast.

Uncommon brightness illuminated the solitary life of a night creature on this, the darkest day of the year.

Sacrifice

Our own Perfesser Chaos takes a reporter from The Allegheny Front on a tour of of the graves of our old hunting grounds.

We cavers have a grim category of stomping ground known as the "sacrifice cave."

A sacrifice cave is easily-accessible, near a road. It does not require an extended hike to reach the entrance, and the cave itself is non-technical in nature, requiring no special equipment or technique. It generally has a long history of local exploitation and "recreational" visits, often going back for centuries.

And it has already been trashed.

Any speleothems have been long-ago broken off by klutzes or thieves. Delicate habitat for troglobitic and troglophilic creatures is often beyond memory. There is trash. Graffiti. Miles of string. Party refuse. The remains of "campfires" lit by geniuses unclear on the concept of the chimney. And don't drink the water.

When someone new wants to try caving, we take him to a sacrifice cave. Ditto for kids -- cavers' kids, our nieces, troops of scouts whose leaders want to take them on an adventure.

When we train our SAR dogs for underground search, we almost always use sacrifice caves.

On the one hand, if the new guest turns out to be a klutz or a cretin, there is little harm that he can do that hasn't already been done. He won't be invited on a trip to a more remote, protected, hazardous and unspoiled cave.

On the other hand, the condition of the sacrifice cave becomes an object lesson and an inspiration for the sincere wannabe caver. Here's where treasure hunters took sledgehammers to the stalactite that took millenia to form. There were the delicate soda straws swept away by the leaden head of some galoot crawling around with a $3 flashlight in his teeth. Over there is the elfin corpse of a bat knocked from the ceiling last Saturday by a drunken frat boy. See what we have lost?



Later, when the initiate wriggles down a secret hole after a long hike along a remote limestone ridge, rappels two eighty foot drops, and traverses an exposed cleft to finally find herself gaping among grinning friends in a sparkling vaulted gallery of pristine speleothems, she will remember all those mud-smeared, battered and spray-painted sacrifice caves where she learned her skills and earned her invitation. And fiercely swear not here -- not ever.

Otherwise, it was no sacrifice, just another pointless atrocity.

Snapshot Sunday: Bones on Blue

None of the photos I got can do it justice.

The crown of this ancient sycamore against the deep blue sky pulled a gasp from me today.

Mingo Creek County Park, in Washington County, PA. Maybe the best park in Western PA.